Akanovera · situation room

A real place, scanned.

Height, not pictures, drawn in our line style. Two sites so far: Peggy's Cove and its lighthouse on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, and Lake Kivu in the western branch of the East African Rift.

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The lighthouse

Peggys Point Lighthouse

East side of the entrance to St. Margarets Bay, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia

44°29′30.4″ N 63°55′07.2″ W
Fl R 5s · 22 m · 10 NM · tower 13.2 m

Granite
The point is bare granite, formed in the Devonian period more than 350 million years ago, and the boulders strewn across these barrens were left by the retreating ice of the last ice age. Storms reach it too: in 1954 Hurricane Edna damaged the first lighthouse here, and it was taken down.
Source: F. H. MacDonald, “Glacial Geology and Geochronology of Peggy's Cove Region”, Dalhousie University (2003); Wikipedia, “Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia” and “Peggys Point Lighthouse”; Lighthousefriends.com; Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society
1868
A light was first shown here in 1868, from the roof of a wooden keeper's house, to mark the eastern entrance to St. Margarets Bay.
Source: Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society, “Peggys Point Lighthouse”; Wikipedia, “Peggys Point Lighthouse”; Lighthousefriends.com, “Peggy's Point (Peggy's Cove) Lighthouse”
1915
The present tower went up and was first lit in 1915: a tapered octagon of reinforced concrete, a 30-foot shaft under an 8-foot lantern. Parks Canada lists it as a Classified Federal Heritage Building and calls it a relatively early use of reinforced concrete for a lighthouse.
Source: Parks Canada, Directory of Federal Heritage Designations, and FHBRO Heritage Character Statement 01-082 (2003); Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society; Lighthousefriends.com
1958
The light was automated in 1958; its last keeper had tended it since 1934.
Source: Wikipedia, “Peggys Point Lighthouse”; Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society; Lighthousefriends.com
1998
Near the cove, a memorial looks out over the water where Swissair Flight 111 went down on 2 September 1998, with the loss of all 229 people aboard.
Source: Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Aviation Investigation Report A98H0003; The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Swissair Flight 111”; Wikipedia, “Swissair Flight 111”
Today
A red flash every 5 seconds, 1.5 s of light and 3.5 s dark, 22 m above high water, with a nominal range of 10 nautical miles. It shows to seaward, between bearings 290° and 136°. The Coast Guard gives its height above the ground as 13.2 m.
Source: Canadian Coast Guard, List of Lights, Buoys and Fog Signals, Atlantic Coast (2026), No. 487

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Data note

Both sites come from the same open dataset: one measured height every arc-second. It is a surface model (rock, trees and roofs, not bare earth), true to within four metres nine times in ten.

Peggy's Cove keeps every sample, about 22 by 31 metres on the ground at this latitude. Anything at or below sea level is drawn as flat sea.

Peggys Point Lighthouse is drawn at its true size and place on ground drawn three times true height: 13.2 m from the ground to the top of the lantern, at 44°29′30.4″ N, 63°55′07.2″ W (Canadian Coast Guard), with a 30-foot tapered concrete shaft under an 8-foot lantern (Parks Canada). Its widths are estimated from photographs; no published figure was found. Published figures differ: the tower is 13.2 m in the Coast Guard's list and about 15 m (49 to 50 feet) in Wikipedia and the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society's list, which puts the light 67 feet above the water where the Coast Guard gives 22 m; Parks Canada dates the tower to 1915, Wikipedia to 1914. The Coast Guard's and Parks Canada's figures are the ones drawn.

Its light is drawn as the Coast Guard lists it: Fl R 5s, a red flash of 1.5 s every 5 s, shown to seaward between bearings 290° and 136°. It is drawn as a flash, not a sweeping beam. Sources differ on the light's recent history: the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society lists it as fixed red from 2009, Wikipedia dates the change to red to 2007, and the Coast Guard's current list gives the flash, which is what is drawn.

Lake Kivu averages each 12 × 12 block of those heights into one sample, about 370 metres a side, and draws the lake as the flat surface the dataset holds for it, at 1,461 metres; valley floors below that level keep their own height. The lake lies between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 1,460 metres above sea level. Published figures give its area as 2,370 to 2,700 km² and its greatest depth as 475 to 485 m; the open water in this data measures 2,413 km², without its islands. Beneath a lighter surface layer, its deep water is dense, salty and stratified, and holds dissolved carbon dioxide and methane. Since the end of 2015, methane drawn up from that deep water has been burned to make electricity.

Triangulation draws a TIN: Delaunay triangles over up to 6,000 of the samples, placed more densely where the ground curves and along the shore. Three nested sets, each about a quarter of the next, give way to one another with distance, the way Wire's grid does.

Lighthouse sources: Canadian Coast Guard, List of Lights, Buoys and Fog Signals, Atlantic Coast, 2026 edition, No. 487; Parks Canada, Directory of Federal Heritage Designations, and FHBRO Heritage Character Statement 01-082, Peggy's Cove Lighthouse (2003); Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society, "Peggys Point Lighthouse"; Lighthousefriends.com, "Peggy's Point (Peggy's Cove) Lighthouse"; F. H. MacDonald, "Glacial Geology and Geochronology of Peggy's Cove Region", Dalhousie University (2003); Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Aviation Investigation Report A98H0003; The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Swissair Flight 111"; Wikipedia, "Peggys Point Lighthouse", "Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia" and "Swissair Flight 111".

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Lake Kivu"; African Center for Aquatic Research and Education, "Lake Kivu"; Wikipedia, "Lake Kivu"; Time (2016), on the KivuWatt plant; Knowable Magazine (2020), on the lake's gas.

Rendered by Vaultrec from elevation values only. No imagery, no third-party maps.

Next: 1 m LiDAR from Canada's HRDEM for the cove.