Stamen was invited to speak at the Jet Propulsion Lab for Data Visualization from Design to Discovery. We were thrilled to be onstage alongside Jeffrey Heer, Jer Thorp, Golan Levin, Fernanda Viega & Martin Wattenberg, and Anja-Silvia Goeing, all heroes of ours. Eric’s talk was on Communicating Science to the Public, which he later wrote a paper on for the Journal of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology.

As a small gesture of thanks to the scientists who are working hard to do science and communicate with the public, we put together a 3D contour map of the Martian surface, using data collected by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. You can take a look for yourself at maps.stamen.com, or learn more about how it was created.