Time for another #geoweirdness thread. This week we consider the geographic oddities of Norway
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_countries
Norway is in Europe, but not part of the EU .
So what #geoweirness does Norway have to offer us?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_claims_in_Antarctica
4/ But heading just a bit north from Antarctica, we find Norway’s South Atlantic territory: the uninhabited Bouvet Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_Island
Norway is thus a multi-continent country, and was a surprising answer to our Feb 2021 #fridaygeotrivia contest
https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-feb2021-multicontinent-countries
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.
https://anchor.fm/extremities/episodes/Arrival-on-Svalbard-e5i7ma
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.
9/ “mainland” Norway also has some #geoweirdness. A few years ago there was a movement to give a mountain to neighbouring Finland
In the end the gift didn’t happen though.
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 #geoweirdness of Norway . What did we miss?
We have more threads about border disputes, exclaves, geocoding, etc listed on our blog:
https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads
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 #geoweirdness 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 https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4241#issuecomment-1179681216
@pnorman surely many hours could be saved by just hard coding a solution for this case