GEOINT: Geolocation using topography

As everyone knows, the end-of-year festivities are inevitably followed by the new-year “getting back to work”. This year, the transition found me staring at my screen saver for maybe a bit too long when I decided to make the most of it by geolocating the beautiful picture it was showing. However I decided to do so without using reverse image search because that would be too easy. So here’s the challenge: geolocating my screen-saver (picture above) without reverse image search!

Now this shouldn’t be too difficult as my computer already gave me the country where the picture was taken: Iceland.

Hence I am looking for a flat-top mountain on the coast of Iceland, standing on a peninsula, with a road on its side and a city further along the coast.

This might be a long-shot but it’s worth the try: I will start by searching for “flat-top mountain Iceland” in Google Image.

The first result looks like it could match but upon further research I found that the mountain in the picture is landlocked, so it is not the mountain we’re looking for. The results that follow don’t seem to match either, so let’s try another method.

I will try to find the location using a topographic map and Google Earth.`

Because it is alone on its peninsula, the mountain should be easily recognizable on the topographic map. All I have to look for is a peninsula (they are not very common in general, although I don’t know much about Icelandic geography) with relatively high elevation. Once I find a specimen of the type, I can check on /Google Earth to see if it looks like the picture. If it does, I will confirm the match by finding the road on the side and a town further along the coast.

To visualize the landscape from above, I can make a diagram of the coast based on the picture. It will look something like that:

Now let’s look for this shape of shore on a topographic map. I used the first topographic map of Iceland I found and ended up on topographic-map.com. At first glance, I can already tell peninsulas actually are very common in Iceland. Oh well.

Judging from the size of the road compared to the mountain in the picture, I estimate that the peninsula will not be too big, so I can zoom in quite a bit.

Because I need to start somewhere, I decide to start by searching around the capital, Reykjavík and to continue searching toward the north because the south of the island doesn’t seem to have many peninsulas.

In this view, I can already identify a few peninsulas with elevation.

However if we compare these to the diagram, only the 2nd and maybe the 4th option look like they could match, so let’s start with checking the second one on Google Earth.

Within the red square we find all the elements of the picture: the road in yellow, the mountain on a peninsula and the city close by (Grundarfjörður). If it’s the right place, the picture should be taken from somewhere around the red point so let’s see the view from there.

In Google Earth (top picture) we can match the landscape to the screen- saver picture (middle picture) and the street view (bottom picture) shows that indeed, this is the same mountain.

In conclusion, I found that my screen saver is a picture of the Icelandic mountain called Kirkjufell, located right by the city Grundarfjörður, in a peninsula north of Reykjavík. The picture was taken from approximately the following coordinates: 64.555653, 23.21864. In the process, I also found where my next vacation will be.

If you like this type of articles you can have a look at our other GEOINT articles geolocating a video from Ukraine, or geolocating Baptiste, Predicta Lab’s co-founder. And for our next publications, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn and Medium.

All credits go to Alin Rusu for the picture.