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@opencage@en.osm.townTime for another #geoweirdness 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.
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. 
12/ Bonus #geoweirdness toot, thanks to @atlefren we learned the UTM grid (Universal Transverse Mercator) is uniform worldwide - except over Norway .
"Zone 32 has been widened to 9° (at the expense of zone 31) between latitudes 56° and 64° to accommodate southwest Norway. Similarly, between 72° and 84°, zones 33 and 35 have been widened to 12° to accommodate Svalbard. To compensate for these 12° wide zones, zones 31 and 37 are widened to 9° and zones 32, 34, and 36 are eliminated."
13/ some more background on UTM (though no explanation of the Norway anomaly) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_coordinate_system
Our geocoding API returns MGRS values (an extension of the UTM system). Here an example for coordinates in Trondheim.
@opencage Something rare if not unique about Svalbard is that by treaty, nobody needs a visa to visit and live in this territory. But unless you get there by boat during summer and if the Arctic isn't frozen, one probably does need a visa because the only regular flights come from mainland Norway.
@opencage You forgot to credit Slartibartfast for his award-winning design:
“Did you ever go to a place… I think it was called #Norway?”
“No,” said Arthur, “no, I didn’t.”
“Pity,” said Slartibartfast, “that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.”
— ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’ by #DouglasAdams
@mjgardner @opencage
Came here to say that 
@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
@opencage Yes, but there is opposition to adding additional data sources like hard-coded label positions. And it inhibits uses such as with other datasets where Norway may not exist (e.g. OpenGeoFiction or OpenHistoricalMap).
The solution I came up with works reasonably fast and improved the label placement for multiple countries.
If I were to hard-code label points, I would go all out and make them lines for countries like Norway, because a horizontal label works poorly there.
@opencage
Another one: Norway is only about 7km narrow at the end of Tysfjorden, but if you hike there to border with sweden you climb about 700m up.
But what a hike! Loved it.