Antarctica recreated in Minecraft

Martin O'Leary, a glaciologist at Swansea University, recreated Minecraft in Antarctica. 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 conduct his own work, only more ambitious. It is clear that manually creating such a model would be very difficult, and Martin would automate the process. He wrote a script in Python, using the Minecraft pymclevel map editing library. The script also used Open Source Geospatial data.
Foundation plus information from Bedmap2 (this contains Antarctic topographic data 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 for 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. With Minecraft, Martin was lucky: here ice is represented by an ice block, water by a block of water, stone by a block of stone. At the top of Erebus there is even a lava block, which symbolizes the lava lake at the top of a real volcano.
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In this location, players start from the point from which most Antarctic expeditions depart, from Adelaide Island . Here is the UK research station. The station consists of a port, a runway and a number of small houses. Unfortunately, all of this, as well as the animal world of Antarctica, is too small to appear in Martin's model.



At the beginning of the project, O'Leary tried to load all the geo-data on the Antarctic into memory, but there were too many of them. Therefore, Martin had to scale down 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 .