Improve terrain visualization in glacial regions

This article describes how to style contour lines that intersect glaciers in your map on MapTiler Cloud. You can use this tutorial to improve your topographic or outdoor maps, particularly in mountainous regions covered with glaciers.

To use the Contours tileset in your maps on MapTiler Cloud, you need to add it in the Customize tool's Layer tab with the "Plus" button. By default, contours and glacier contours are included in the Topo, Outdoor, and Winter map styles.

MapTiler Contours tileset

MapTiler Contours is a vector tileset containing contour lines with height in both meters and feet and additional information for index line and glacier styling. Contours are generated from zoom level 9. For more detailed information about Contours attributes, please check the Contours schema.

For cartographers, we recommend working with three main integer attributes:  

height

• the exact height in meters that the contour connects

nth_line (possible values: 1, 2, 5, 10)

• index of the line useful for labeling or highlighting for example every 10th contour

glacier (possible value: 1)

• attribute confirming if the contour crosses a glacier

Styling

To style the contours to show where they intersect the glaciers, you need to use the Customize tool (access via Customize a copy button under you map). Contours are already styled in our Topo, Outdoor, and Winter map styles. To see how to achieve the styling out of scratch, you can follow our example working with the Bright map style.

First, we need to add the contours and labels. Go to the Layer tab in Customize, click on the "Plus" button and choose adding a layer. Search for Contours and choose either contour or contour_ft layer. If you don't see anything on the map preview, please zoom in (contours are available from zoom 9). 

In the last dialogue window, select Line Visualization first and once you have the Contour lines added to your map, repeat the same but select Symbol Visualization. This way, you will have both lines and labels ready for styling.

Now go to the layer with Contour lines. You can first adjust the color or width and also move the layer in the vertical order that you need. The same can be done with Contour labels. For labels, change the Text Field to height in order to display the contours height values. Then you can adjust the font, size, color, outline and other properties. To have the labels directly on the contour line, add "symbol-placement": "line" code into the layout section in the JSON editor.

Now you have your contour layers ready. Duplicate both of them and choose a name. We will style these duplicates as contours intersecting glaciers. In both layers, switch to the Data panel and add a new Filter. Choose a filter by glacier attribute and then select Yes value only.

Now you can style the Glacier contour layers for example in shades of blue. To make the contours stand out even more, highlight every 10th or 5th contour. To achieve this, duplicate your contour line layers, switch to the Data panel and add a nth_line filter. Then adjust the color or width.

You can also play around with the color of Glacier polygon layers underneath or add mountain peaks. This way you can achieve a terrain visualization similar to the one below.

Conclusion

With the newly added glacier tag in the Contours tileset, you can easily highlight the contours intersecting glaciers and bring your cartography to the next level.

Useful links

Contours and mountain peaks in feet

MapTiler Contours | Schema