Photo: Inside the biennial survey of Mont Blanc
The geospatial industry does some of its most important work in the world’s most inhospitable places. The potential danger is high in active war zones, collapsing glaciers, earthquake rubble, underground mines, and remote mountain peaks. Geo Week News has had the privilege of hearing case studies and talking with the incredible people racing to map what might otherwise be lost. Below is a collection of stories that explain just how hard mapping can be and highlight the people that do this important work.
When the Ground Itself Is the Enemy: Mapping Through War and Landmines
When Russia invaded Ukraine, it didn’t just devastate cities and infrastructure. It seeded the landscape with an estimated 36,000 landmines across thousands of square kilometers and turned productive farmland and roads into terrain where a single misstep is fatal. Clearing them is as much a mapping problem as an engineering one. Drones now fly over suspected minefields, capturing high-resolution imagery that AI algorithms analyze to identify potential explosive hazards before human teams ever set foot on the ground. The process is safer, faster, and more systematic than anything that came before, but it’s still dangerous, painstaking work driven by people willing to go first.
The same conflict has also put Ukraine’s irreplaceable cultural heritage in the crosshairs. In a striking example of democratized laser scanning, local preservationists are using increasingly affordable and portable scanners to document historic churches, monuments, and buildings with millimeter-precise 3D models. The technology that once required well-funded international teams is now in the hands of the people who live next to these structures—capturing them digitally so that even if the physical buildings are destroyed, their digital twins survive. It is mapping not to build, but to remember and preserve.
Meanwhile, UAV-mounted lidar is reaching conflict zones in Ukraine that were previously impossible to map. High-performance systems from RIEGL are pushing the boundaries of point-cloud density and pulse rates, meaning more data from fewer flights in environments where GPS may be degraded or denied entirely. Drones, in short, are enabling lidar to go further than anyone thought possible, into places no one wants to be.
The Ice Is Leaving: Mapping What’s Disappearing
If war zones represent the urgency of human conflict, glacial mapping represents the urgency of climate change. These are expeditions to places that are literally vanishing, and the mappers know their work may outlast the terrain they’re measuring.
Every two years, a team led by surveyor Farouk Kadded undertakes the biennial survey of Mont Blanc, Western Europe’s highest peak. It is a grueling high-altitude expedition combining traditional surveying techniques with modern GNSS equipment to measure the summit elevation with extraordinary precision. The data tells a story that goes beyond topography, that Mont Blanc is shrinking. The biennial measurements track how climate change is reshaping the Alps not in theory, but in real numbers, year after year.
In the Pyrenees, the Arcouzan Glacier presented a different kind of challenge. Scientists knew the glacier was behaving unusually by retreating in an unusual pattern, but the remote and difficult-to-reach location made detailed study nearly impossible. It took a combination of UAV surveys, photogrammetry, and precise geodetic measurements to finally solve the mystery, giving researchers the data they needed to understand what was happening and why.
Halfway around the world, on Puncak Jaya in Papua, Indonesia, another expedition faced an even more extreme challenge: creating the first centimeter-accurate 3D model of one of the world’s most rapidly disappearing tropical glaciers. Reaching the site required helicopters, jungle traverses, and extreme altitude work, all to document ice fields that may not exist in another decade. Trimble technology made the centimeter accuracy possible. The resulting model is both a scientific achievement and an archival record of something the next generation won’t be able to see.
These expeditions, alongside Dr. Kim Calders’ forest scanning work and a Kentucky aerial-survey program, were featured in a roundup of how surveying is teaching us about our natural environment. The broader takeaway: the surveyor’s role has shifted. It’s no longer just about property lines and construction staking. It’s about documenting a planet in flux.
When the Earth Moves: Disaster and Emergency Response
When disaster strikes, the maps need to change instantly. The geospatial industry has become an indispensable first responder by arriving not with boots and shovels, but with data, dashboards, and drones.
Earthquake response demands near-real-time geospatial intelligence. Damage assessment from satellite imagery, displacement tracking, infrastructure mapping, and route planning for rescue teams all depend on systems that can process and visualize enormous amounts of spatial data within hours or minutes of an event. The technology spans the full disaster lifecycle: GIS and geospatial tools help predict where disasters are likely to strike, support precision response during the event, and enable detailed post-event analysis to build better preparedness for the next one. Geospatial technology is no longer a support tool in disasters. It’s a core operational capability, woven into every phase of emergency management from prediction through recovery.
The Clock Is Ticking: Search and Rescue
In search and rescue operations, time and geography are the two enemies—and geospatial technology is how teams fight both.
Esri’s ArcGIS has become a backbone for collaboration in SAR missions. Teams from different agencies can share real-time situational maps, coordinate search grids, and track resources across vast and often rugged terrain on a single, shared interface. The ability to see the entire operation live can be the difference between finding someone alive and finding them too late.
Police Scotland modernized its search operations with Esri GIS, replacing what had been a fragmented, paper-based process with a digital system that deploys maps to field teams instantly. For an agency covering some of the most remote and challenging terrain in Europe—the Scottish Highlands, islands, and vast rural stretches—the geospatial upgrade fundamentally changed how searches are organized and executed.
In Austin, Texas, firefighter Braniff Davis described how GIS is transforming firefighting from 3D building models used for pre-incident planning to real-time wildfire spread prediction and post-incident analysis. The fire service, once reliant on institutional knowledge and paper maps, is increasingly a geospatial profession.
Into the Dark: Difficult and Remote Terrain
Not all difficult mapping is tied to a single event. Some of the most challenging geospatial work happens in environments that are persistently hostile to instrumentation: underground mines, subterranean tunnels, dense forests, and spaces where GPS simply cannot reach.
Hexagon’s industry trends for 2024 identified underground and subterranean mapping as a growth frontier—environments where conventional surveying methods fail and safety risks are extreme. The solutions involve mobile mapping systems, inertial navigation, and increasingly autonomous platforms that can operate where humans can barely go.
AI is now playing a growing role directly inside the capture process. Rather than simply processing data after the fact, AI is being embedded into reality capture workflows in real time by identifying features, optimizing scan paths, and making decisions about what data to prioritize in GPS-denied environments like mines and tunnels. It’s not just about collecting more data; it’s about collecting the right data, faster, in places where every minute carries risk.
New UAV solutions from RIEGL have pushed lidar performance and point-cloud density to new levels, enabling scans in environments that would have been unreachable just a few years ago. As reality capture tools become more accessible and affordable, the barrier to entry lowers. More people in more places can map what matters to them, even when no one else wants to go there.
The People Behind the Pixels
What unites all of these stories is not the technology, remarkable as it is; it’s the people. Farouk Kadded climbs Mont Blanc every two years. Ukrainian heritage workers scanning churches while bombs fall. Mine-clearance teams deploying drones before risking their own lives. Firefighters learning GIS between shifts. Surveyors helicoptering into Papua to document ice that’s melting under their feet.
Mapping has always been about going where others won’t. What’s changed is that the tools have finally caught up to the ambition, and the stakes have never been higher. The people doing this work aren’t just charting territory. They’re documenting what’s disappearing, saving what’s threatened, and finding what’s lost. And they’re doing it in the places no one else wants to go.
