Antarctica recreated in Minecraft

Martin O'Leary, a glaciologist at Swansea University, recreated Antarctica in Minecraft. Now the model, with a size of 1: 1000 from the real continent, contains more than 3 billion blocks. Martin decided on such a large-scale work after scientists began to appear in Minecraft who created various models, including 19th-century Manhattan .

And the glaciologist decided to carry out his own work, only more ambitious. It is clear that manually creating such a model would be very difficult, and Martin automated the process. He wrote a Python script using the Minecraft pymclevel map editing library . The script also used data from the Open Source Geospatial
Foundationplus information from Bedmap2 (it contains topographic data for Antarctica with a resolution of 1 km).

Each measuring point has become a block. By the way, Martin is engaged in the creation of numerical models of ice massifs most of his time - this is his work. And the scientist in each of his projects tries to take into account the smallest details, to make the model as accurate as possible. Minecraft was lucky with Minecraft: here ice is represented by an ice block, water is represented by a block of water, stone is a block of stone. At the top of Erebus there is even a lava block, which symbolizes a lava lake on top of a real volcano.



In this location, players start from the point from which most Antarctic expeditions set off - from Adelaide Island. Here is a UK research station. The station consists of a port, a runway and a number of small houses. Unfortunately, all this, as well as the animal kingdom of Antarctica, is too small to appear in Martin's model.



At the beginning of the project, O'Leary tried to load all geo-data on the Antarctic into memory, but there were too many of them. Therefore, Martin had to reduce the scale of the model. He ran the script and went to sleep. In the morning all the work was done - and now you can explore the continent .