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Time for another thread. This week we consider the geographic oddities of Norway 🇧🇻

1/n

2/ The Kingdom of Norway 🇳🇴, to use the official name, is a Nordic Country (together with: 🇫🇮 🇮🇸 🇩🇰 🇸🇪) AND also part of Scandinavia, two groupings that are often confused.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_c

Norway is in Europe, but not part of the EU 🇪🇺.

So what does Norway have to offer us?

en.wikipedia.orgNordic countries - Wikipedia

3/ First up, Norway is one of 7 countries - 🇧🇻 🇦🇷 🇦🇺 🇨🇱 🇫🇷 🇳🇿 🇬🇧 - to make territorial claims to Antarctica. The legal situation of Antarctica is complex and worthy of its own thread

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territor

4/ But heading just a bit north from Antarctica, we find Norway’s South Atlantic territory: the uninhabited Bouvet Island

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_I

Norway is thus a multi-continent country, and was a surprising answer to our Feb 2021 contest

blog.opencagedata.com/post/geo

5/ Bouvet has its own ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code “BV”, which is a good reminder that for historical reasons ISO codes don’t always correspond to countries. Which is why our geocoding API returns both.

Norway actually has 3 ISO codes: "NO", "BV", and "SJ"

6/ The "SJ" ISO code is for Svalbard and Jan Mayen two Norwegian island groups in the far, far north.

7/ Svalbard (occasionally still referenced as Spitzbergen) has an odd and interesting history.

We can highly recommend season 2 of the Extremities podcast, which details life in such a remote place.

anchor.fm/extremities/episodes

8/ Svalbard 🇧🇻 is so remote and cold, it is the site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure repository of seeds of the world’s plants. 🌳 🥀 🌼 🌵 🌽 🌴

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard

en.wikipedia.orgSvalbard Global Seed Vault - Wikipedia

10/ Also geoweird is that the Norwegian capital city - Oslo - changed names almost 100 years ago, previously having been known as Christiania (or Kristiana).

11/ We hope you enjoyed our look at the of Norway 🇧🇻 . What did we miss?

We have more threads about border disputes, exclaves, geocoding, etc listed on our blog:
blog.opencagedata.com/geothrea

For now most of the links still point to twitter, but we'll move them to masto (and add new ones) over time.

If you enjoyed this and like please boost the start of the thread. 🙏

@opencage There is no decent projection that covers all of Norway. ST_BestSRID gives up and returns mercator. Polar projections would work for mainland + Svalbard, but Bouvetøya prevents that option. See github.com/gravitystorm/openst

GitHubBad label placement at high latitudes due to coordinate calculations in mercator projection · Issue #4241 · gravitystorm/openstreetmap-cartoBy swedneck

@pnorman surely many hours could be saved by just hard coding a solution for this case