The GeoGraphics tools in Mathematica are extremely useful. I use them daily. They incorporate cartographic graphics into a powerful programming tool, and with a little effort, the resulting maps can generally be made to look quite good.

One component of Mathematica’s maps that is difficult to clean up is a GeoScaleBar. One of the most common misconceptions assumed when designing cartographic tools is that although a map scale bar is important, it should fade into the background and gather little attention. That’s often true in the casual use of maps. But for some scientific maps, scale bars are an essential part of the display and should be prominent. As an example, in a map of a seismic array, the array aperture and the seismometer spacing are essential information defining the array resolution and thus the components of the seismic wavefield that you can analyze with the data from the array.

Unfortunately, Wolfram has not had the time to give the GeoScaleBar option the styling flexibility it needs. I would rather not write a completely custom function only to have Wolfram produce something much better later. But while I wait for that flexibility, I constructed the workaround described below. This is not a complete fix for styling a GeoScaleBar in Mathematica – it’s only a simple edit that I use to get around the most egregious scale-bar problems, the weak and inflexible default style. I cannot guarantee that this will work for all cases, but it will work for some. I have used it to fix some of my own maps. Continue reading →