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Psst, hey, check your Mapbox account – notice any 135,000,000 km² of new imagery? That’s right. No, no, you deserve it. It’s been a hard year. Happy holidays. https://www.mapbox.com/blog/3d-satellite-maps-high-res-imagery
This is our largest single coverage update by an order of magnitude, and has to be just about tied for the industry-wide record, since it’s basically the whole thing.
A couple spots I was particularly happy to see in this update: Bisie and Dokfuma. Here’s a lunchbreak thread about them.
In ~2010, I was underemployed and directionless but I had a @multcolib card. I was interested in processes of communal healing, which led to reading about wars and their aftermaths. And the first war of liquid modernity was the Rwandan genocide.
And its aftermaths, of course, include not only things like gacaca courts but also the First and Second Congo Wars, which are some of the most important geopolitical events of my lifetime, but which I realized I knew nothing about.
(As an aside, when you mention the 2CW, you’re apparently obliged to note that it was the most deadly war since WWII. While I believe this claim, the single research project that gets cited for it deserves re-evaluation with modern methods. But that’s by the bye.)
If you’re reading about Eastern DRC in 2010, one of the things you’re reading about is the undocumented mining that was happening at a mind-boggling rate. That was the year of Dodd–Frank §1502, for example.
And there was this name that kept popping up: Bisie. It was a stupendously rich cassiterite mine somewhere way off in the deep forest. Supposedly. At times, something like 4% of the global tin supply was coming from it. Supposedly. It wasn’t on any map I could find.
I think the first time Bisie made the international news was during the 2008 fighting. As the CNDP approached Goma in late October, the price of tin on the London commodities exchange went wild: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLU661455
It seemed amazing (not surprising – just amazing) that a place so closely connected to the centers of power, producing the raw material of phones, planes, and electromagnets, wasn’t even on the map. So I made a little project of finding it.
I eventually got it from MODIS (! – not Landsat, because of the tropical clouds, and this was in the SLC-off days), clues in an exploitative video “documentary”, and a clumsy sketch map on a terrible article in a respected newspaper. I added a geotag to its Wikipedia page.
Very few places are as remote as outsiders who write about them would like you to think. I grew up in a very small town, not even a town really, and I can tell you that most portrayals of “the middle of nowhere” are just failures to notice local connections and contexts.
Most places are between other places. Bisie is kind of … not. Only science bases, hermitages, and other resource extraction towns do that, as a rule. And being the cash cow for a war meant there was an incentive to keep it tucked away.
So I’ve spent the last decade with a news alert for it, and I periodically check for new images of it. Not because I have any real personal connection to it, but almost in a way because I don’t.
The new images are sparse in time and usually low in quality. It’s just not a well covered area. And so what made the scale of this update feel real to me was checking Bisie, thinking “Well, let’s see if there’s anything at all.”
A decade ago, I wasn’t even sure that place was real.
I have to go make a noodle, so I’ll talk about Dokfuma another time.
I have to go make a noodle, so I’ll talk about Dokfuma another time.
Dokfuma time.
Years ago I was reading Tim Flannery’s book about highland New Guinea and he mentions this “patch of subalpine grassland known as Dokfuma”, in the Star Mountains beyond the Hindenburg Wall, at 3,200 m (10,000 ft), where the helicopter can only carry 160 kg.
Flannery, a biologist, calls it an alpine herbfield. I’ve never been above the treeline in the tropics, and it looks very odd to me: part tundra, part krummholz, part temperate rainforest, part chaparral. I don’t know from forbs.
Well, I’ll just quote Flannery here:
He goes on to describe seeing New Guinea singing dogs (NGSD) on Dokfuma. This was the first time I’d heard of them, although not too long after reading this I made a friend who has two domestic ones. (I’ll let them raise their hand if they like.)
NGSD are odd – imagine a dingo that’s also part cat and part whale. Their population genetics are still controversial. As far as I know, this is now the best research on them, and it leaves big questions: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/39/24369
When I tried to learn more about Dokfuma, I didn’t find much. It’s another one of these places where either you have specific business there or you don’t go. At 3,200 m, even people well adapted to elevation find it a little high.
But again, I wanted to be able at least to put it on a map. Not just because of the itch of a missing fact, but because of Tobler’s First Law and such. What it is has to do with where it is.
I found a reference to a 1965 expedition there organized by some Australians, but no good maps. In fact, in 2016, in the future of this story, one of them published a book: Tom Hayllar’s “The Star Mountains”.
So now in 2020, I know for example where the name Dokfuma comes from (because why would a place people rarely go and can’t see in the distance have a name?) – the Australians killed and ate an NGSD there, which appalled their guides:
“Our carriers never forgave us for this meal and sometimes in the coming days they would ask us with elaborate casualness who had eaten the tail or leg. Afterwards they called the plateau Dokfuma meaning ‘Where the Dog was Cooked’” (Hayllar, 2016).
There are other references to Dokfuma in the literature, for example from British spelunkers in the ’70s, but they are nether plentiful nor specific. (It’s always a shame when scientists fall into Peer Reviewed Voice instead of writing to be read well.)
The break in my semi-pointless vendetta against not knowing where Dokfuma was came when someone indexed this ornithology paper:
That’s the same Diamond who now publishes pop geography books that your geography professor loathes but says polite things about because they know they have to start gently instead of taking off their shoe and screaming “Rank! [slam] De [slam] ter [slam] min [slam] ism! [slam]”.
5° 01′ S, 141° 07′ E is pretty precise. (Remember, a minute of latitude is a nautical mile.) Almost too precise. Especially because you can’t trust biologists, most of them, with geographic data. It maddens them like wine.
I put that on OpenStreetMap, cautiously. But I couldn’t get clear photos of the place, and especially of a particularly handome frost hollow – a sinkhole crater where cold air pools – that Flannery and others described.
Flannery vividly describes the cloudy, chaotic weather over Dokfuma. In the entire Landsat archive there were only a few clean scenes of it – 15 m at best. But I did notice that @maxar had at least one clean frame. So I knew what to hope for.
And we got that frame. I don’t think there’s a substantially better orthoimage of the big Dokfuma doline anywhere, commerical or openly licensed. I’ve spent several minutes just doing this.
Now I’m going to go remove the volcano marker on that non-volcano. Anyway, enjoy this imagery.
