Twelve ways to show the shape of the land and the sea floor, from quiet context for data to full relief. Every map on this page is drawn on the GPU from one 1.2 MB elevation file, so a style is a setting rather than another download.
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The same 206 × 266 km of western Norway: the coast from Stavanger's islands to Sognefjorden, Folgefonna and Hardangerjøkulen, and the Norwegian Trench offshore. Land from the Copernicus DEM, the sea floor from Kartverket's 50 m model and EMODnet, glaciers from the Randolph Glacier Inventory.
A green lowland reads as "lush" even in the high Arctic or a desert. Cross-blended hypsometric tints (Patterson and Jenny, 2011) keep the height steps but change the lowland colours by climate: green where it is humid, sand where it is arid, lichen-grey on tundra. Here the steps below 1,000 m change with the Köppen–Geiger zone (Beck et al. 2023, 1 km); above 1,000 m all zones share one alpine ramp. Zone edges blend over a few kilometres so no border is drawn.
Arid tints are shown in the legend for completeness: Vestland has no arid land, but the same file format and shader carry them, so a Barents Sea or Middle East map would switch automatically.
Depth steps are finest near the coast, where most of the sea-floor shape is: 0–20, 20–50, 50–100, 100–200, 200–500, 500–1,000 m and deeper. Land uses its own, coarser steps: 0–50, 50–150, 150–300, 300–600, 600–1,000, 1,000–1,500 m and higher. Then the same steps with and without soft shading on the sea floor.
Relief combines sea-floor sources finest first: Kartverket 50 m in Norwegian waters, Denmark's 50 m model in Danish waters, EMODnet's 115 m across European seas, and GEBCO's 450 m anywhere else. Each finer source fades in over 1.5 km at its edge so seams never show as steps in the shading.
The precise grid stays as the record. For drawing, Relief keeps a second, visual contour layer: traced from the 50 m surface, then thinned and smoothed. Douglas–Peucker keeps the points that matter most; Visvalingam–Whyatt removes the least significant first; Chaikin cuts corners into a smooth curve inside the original; centripetal Catmull–Rom passes through every kept point without loops. 18 × 18 km near Bergen, depth contours at 20, 50, 100, 200 and 500 m, land at 50, 150, 300 and 600 m.
GEBCO's global grid is about 450 m. In European seas EMODnet resolves about 115 m, and Kartverket's open model for Norwegian waters 50 m. The same 36 × 36 km of skerries and sounds north-west of Bergen, drawn identically from each; land is the same in all three.
Every option is a shader setting on the same file. Move the sun, change the gradient, add contours or glaciers, and zoom to a detail.
What can be used freely for land and sea floor, at what resolution, and what this page uses now. Checked November 2026; read each licence before publishing.
| Country | Land | Sea floor | Coastline | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norway | Kartverket DTM 10 and the national height model (10 m, 1 m), CC BY 4.0; coverage service (WCS) available | Used: Kartverket sea-floor terrain model 50 m, CC BY 4.0, ordered by half-degree cell through Geonorge's download API. 5 m and 25 m grids inside 12 nautical miles are classified | Kartverket N50, N250, N1000, CC BY 4.0 | Glaciers: NVE inventory 2018–19 (Sentinel-2); RGI 6.0 used here. No mapped permanent snow line |
| Denmark | Danmarks Højdemodel (DHM) terrain, 0.4 m from airborne lidar, free via Dataforsyningen (free account) | Denmark's Depth Model, 50 m (2024 edition), free GeoTIFF or web service; credit "Danmarks Dybdemodel, 50 m opløsning" with retrieval date; not for navigation | GeoDanmark | Covers the Danish EEZ, so the Skagerrak and the Danish North Sea at 50 m |
| United Kingdom | OS Terrain 50 (50 m, 4 m vertical RMSE), OS OpenData; Environment Agency lidar for England | UKHO ADMIRALTY Marine Data Portal: over 4,000 survey surfaces, Open Government Licence with a no-navigation term and attribution; no single national grid | OS Boundary-Line, OS Open Zoomstack | Surfaces are survey footprints; EMODnet already composites many of them |
| Europe | Used: Copernicus DEM GLO-90 (GLO-30 where released), Copernicus licence | Used: EMODnet DTM 2024, about 115 m, WCS by box; source references per survey | EuroGeographics, Natural Earth | EMODnet fills gaps with GEBCO and IBCAO |
| Global | GEBCO, Copernicus DEM | GEBCO_2026, 15 arc-seconds (about 450 m), public domain | Natural Earth | Fallback north of EMODnet coverage |