The National Weather Service (NWS) announced that it is in the process of updating maps to reflect President Donald Trump’s order on “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness,” implementing the name “Gulf of America.”
Following the NWS’s statement, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced it was doing the same.
“To accelerate adoption of the new name, the USGS has updated the USGS topoBuilder application to ensure that the public can rapidly generate paper maps with the new name,” the USGS said in a statement. “The USGS has also invested additional funding to speed up topoBuilder’s responsiveness in anticipation of high demand. In addition, the new name is featured in popular USGS applications like the National Map Viewer, Lidar Explorer, and the Geographic Names Information System Search Tool.”
“A name change of this magnitude has multiple facets and requires the efforts of many. Adoption of the new name has also been seen across the nation in commercial applications like Google Maps and Apple Maps,” the announcement read.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also moved to implement the name change.
Both Google Maps and Apple Maps have similarly implemented the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. “We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google said in a statement. “For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated.”
“When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called for Google to reverse its decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico for U.S. users, warning that Mexico may pursue legal action against Google if the name is not changed.
