It's also a great place to admire what I've dubbed the Great Spots of Foreshot—aka, the spots of water-looking water amidst a sea of Papa Smurf's aging, leathery skin.

I was actually halfway to opening up a Great Spots gift shop when someone pointed out that the spots aren't real—they're just on Google Maps because of how the fine folk at

Google choose to represent water.

Because yes, all the water in the Gulf of Mexico, IRL, does look like water—well, when it doesn't look like oil.

So, why does an app that shows us satellite images of land so detailed you can count these horses fake its water?

What are they hiding beneath that hypnotic blue expanse?

Let's start by looking at how the Google Maps map is actually made, and, more specifically, how and why you can zoom in on it.

Depending who you believe, the Earth is round, and because of that, this fully zoomed-out

Google Map—which is a flat square—is distorted in places.

On maps like this one, places on the equator are the least distorted, while Greenland looks enormous even though it's smaller than a new country I made called Fiji, Arabia.

Or, put another way, all these circles are about the same size, and if you're thinking, no they're not, well, exactly.

But if you zoom in on any given point on Google Maps, it gets less and less distorted as you go.

This is because the fully zoomed-out Google Map isn't one big picture that you look closer at as you zoom.

Zoom isn't a magnifying glass, it's more like a portal to better pictures.

You see, the map is actually a collection of tiles—a bunch of little images mosaiced together to make a big one—and as you zoom in, Google Maps stealthily transitions you from looking at one image, to a closer-up one, to an even closer-up one.

Google Maps has about 21 zoom levels in total.

In level 0, you're looking at one tile, 256 pixels by 256 pixels.

Every time you zoom in a level, a 256 by 256 pixel tile represents a quarter of the area of the previous tile, so the picture is four times as detailed.

So, while the whole world fits on one tile at zoom level 0, at zoom level 21, the world is 2 million tiles wide, and contains over 4 trillion tiles total.

At zoom 1, Everglades National Park fits on a pixel.

At zoom 20, a pixel barely covers two iPhones.

It's this tiling—this way of piecing the world together—that makes representing the ocean so dang hard.

Because it means that each individual image snapped of Earth and uploaded to Big Google's map-making machine has to be stitched to a bunch of other ones, so all these tiles look like part of one big continuous whole.

And how do they do that?

Well, I sent my outside correspondent Amy to go figure it out, and instead of building a satellite like I told her to, she chatted with these two guys from SkyFive—a marketplace that gives people access to real-time satellite images from a bunch of the little buggers whizzing about the sky.

So, let's look at some of the satellite images SkyFive sent us.

Right now, we're looking at land, and we know what land it is, for a few reasons.

One, we know where the satellite was and which direction it was pointing at the time the photo was taken.

But there are also distinguishing features like buildings, roads, and other hard lines that make it really easy for algorithms, such as one called SIFT, or another called Erosix, to match this image with others of the same place and use that info to pin this image on a map.

And it can do that with just a few patches of distinct, high-contrast pixels.

So now it knows we're looking at Port Fourchon, which is great, and even as we venture out onto the water, there are still a few distinct features SIFT can use to tell us exactly where we are.

But eventually, we've gone too far.

Look at this picture.

What in this picture could possibly pin this location down?

What collection of pixels is unique enough to this part of the Gulf of Mexico that you wouldn't just drop it in the Pacific and clock out?

A wave?

A glint of sunlight?

The shadow of a fish?

Of course not, all those things move.

Also, how would you possibly line this up with pictures of adjacent chunks of the Gulf of Mexico?

Unless they were all taken at the exact same moment, the water would look totally different, and even having distinct features won't save you.

Like, you could probably geolocate this based on this little island, but the water looks completely different from one day to the next.

I asked my editors to stitch together a few pics of water to make a big pic of water, and they did this before resigning en masse.

On land, the same distinct permanent features that you use to pin photos down also get used to stitch photos together.

Once an image has undergone atmospheric correction, which is to say, had water vapor and other atmospheric conditions edited out, and once it's been orthorectified, which is to say, accounted for the way changes in elevation might distort it, it gets stitched to its neighbors.

There are a few ways to mosaic two satellite images together.

One is lining them up as best as you can and saying, that's that, but it leaves some harsh transitions.

Another is feathering, or smudging them together and hoping for the best.

But the best, most common method these days is to cut photos together using something called seamlines.

This way, you don't line pictures up together along your image's borders—instead, you cut your images into funky shapes based on the starkest lines in them, and line them up that way to make the transitions less harsh.

Because it's weird if two halves of a building mismatch, but not so much if separate buildings on opposite sides of a road do.

So, back to the ocean.

What would your seamline look like here?

Again, I asked my editors to do it, but they just made me do this.

But the geolocating and stitching aren't even the only problems here.

Water is just straight up hard to photograph from above.

For starters, it's what's called a specular reflector, meaning that, sort of like a mirror, almost all the light that hits it bounces off in a dome shape going every which way.

The result?

Direct sunlight creates a weird ocean smudge in satellite images that makes the water look brighter than the land.

Do you want that in your Google Maps?

Of course not.

Then of course there's the fact that basically nobody with a commercial satellite wants to take pictures of the open ocean because basically nobody wants to buy those pictures, and they're not exactly free for satellite companies to take or transmit down to Earth.

I mean, we asked Skyfy for this pic of this patch of the Atlantic, but that's just because we're a bunch of sickos, and because I think I lost my AirPod there on one of my yachting trips with Brian Reel Engineering.

This is one month's imaging plan for one commercial satellite.

Notice anything?

And it makes sense.

Google Maps is showing you whether or not you're near a cheesecake factory, or how to get from apples to orange.

Why would Google waste valuable time and resources creating a zoomable satellite image of the whole ocean when you'd never use it, they can't get businesses to pay to show up in it, and half you losers keep maps in MapView instead of satellite anyway?

Have you no interest in seeing the bean from above?

In all, the Google Maps map is made up of billions of images from satellites, airplanes, and street-view cars, backpacks, and so on, that combine to give you two of the major accurate images of where stuff is.

In the ocean, you don't need that, because if you're here, sorry buddy, you're already dead.

So, what does Google do instead?

Well, they make the Expanse—the big blue mass we all know and love, which uses data from sources like the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, or Jebco, where the Jebs go, to kind of sort of estimate the topography of the ocean floor, you know, for texture—not that we actually know the topography of the ocean floor, it's mostly guesses and vibes based on the bumps and valleys of the surface, but you know, who cares.

It looks good enough in the app, and again, almost nobody looks at it.

Except us.

In honor of the good and too-often-unsung work of the Google employees behind the blue

Expanse, let's admire it for a moment over some smooth jazz.

Ah, lovely.

You know what else is lovely?

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