Gulf of Mexico in Relief

thingiverse

The relief map portrays the Gulf of Mexico's bottom, sized approximately 83 mm wide by 125 mm long and 29 mm deep. With a scale of roughly 12 miles per millimeter horizontally and 1 mile per 5 millimeters vertically, the deepest points in the gulf reach about 2.5 miles, or approximately 13 mm on this map. This map was created using the Scripps copyright data set, SRTM30_PLUS V8.0 and DJ Moews's program "Globe". The command used to create a piece containing the Gulf of Mexico was: --output-piece 7 --map altitude data/srtm30plus 5400 2700 sbigendiandibyte --gridpoints 800 --map-scale 60 --cut-plane 0 1 -1.5 --cut-plane 0 1 -3 --cut-plane 4.5 -1 0 --cut-plane 4.5 1 0 --explode 100000 >gulf.stl, with the bottom portion discarded and the remainder of the file centered, scaled, and decimated to give gulf_of_mexico.stl. Both files are included. Printing gulf_of_mexico.stl on a Replicator with 2 shells and 2% infill takes approximately 4 hours, while gulf.stl, scaled to fit the build platform, takes about 3 hours. The pointed end of gulf.stl touches the center of the earth, indicating its scale, which comes from a globe 12 inches in diameter, while gulf_of_mexico.stl comes from a globe 24 inches in diameter. Scaled versions of gulf_of_mexico.stl will print, but take significantly longer due to the increased size.