Unable to use `Basemap` and `bluemarble`

Question

The problem is exactly the same as the one reported here and using the same code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap

plt.figure(figsize=(8, 8))
m = Basemap(projection='ortho', resolution=None, lat_0=50, lon_0=-100)
m.bluemarble(scale=0.5)
plt.show()

This results in the same empty circle. I do get a warning:

Clipping input data to the valid range for imshow with RGB data ([0..1] for floats or [0..255] for integers).

which results from the input data to imshow() being all zero. If I run the code without the projection

m = Basemap(resolution=None, lat_0=50, lon_0=-100)

I get (rather badly drawn) map of the world, which suggests to me that all the libraries are installed.

I think the data gets zeroed out with the code here from mpl_toolkits\basemap\__init__.py but as I don't understand what it's doing it doesn't help me much:

self._bm_rgba_warped = \
ma.masked_array(self._bm_rgba_warped,mask=mask)
# make points outside projection limb transparent.
self._bm_rgba_warped = self._bm_rgba_warped.filled(0.)

Any suggestions as to how to proceed?

Answer 1

Had the same issue in google colab and did this:

!pip uninstall matplotlib
!pip install matplotlib==3.4.3

Then it worked. Found solution in comment here which had a link to here. Basically there's a bug in 3.5 and higher versions of matplot lib that causes the clipping.