This is why it’s fun working with people who are smarter than me. Way, way smarter…

Less than 24 hours after I post about my issues with polar data, Crazy Map Lady Extraordinaire Sarah Battersby tears it up and produces this:

In her own words:

NOAA polar ice files come in using a Polar Stereographic projection. I (ahem) just modified the definition to make it think it was Web Mercator. I reprojected into WGS84 to make it think it was lat/lon (which then places Antarctica roughly over the equator). First step down – data is in Tableau, ready to be analyzed.

To get a bit of context, I used the same projection trick with some continent data that I had lying around – the data round tripped from WGS84 data -> Polar Stereographic -> tell the data that it’s in Web Mercator (but it is really in Polar Stereographic) -> WGS84

I threw the bastardized projection version of the continents into Mapbox to run off some quick tiles.  Added them to Tableau, and… see video.

On Tableau Public here.

So not worthy…