Missing Land Geometry for Russia and Australia in division_area for BigQuery

[AdenForshaw]

Description: In the division_area table of the current release (queried from bigquery-public-data.overture_maps.division_area), the country-level land border records for Russia and Australia have a NULL geometry.

Affected IDs:

Russia (land): ac63467c-e698-452a-bce3-0729d2974a7e (or search name Россия)
Australia (land): 4420c9c8-f137-4466-9225-6d35a72a445c
Query to reproduce:

sql

SELECT id, names.primary, country, subtype, class, geometry IS NULL
FROM `bigquery-public-data.overture_maps.division_area`
WHERE subtype = 'country' AND geometry IS NULL

Note: These are the only two countries globally that return true for geometry IS NULL.

returns

id	primary	country	subtype	class	f0_
4420c9c8-f137-4466-9225-6d35a72a445c	Australia	AU	country	land	true
ac63467c-e698-452a-bce3-0729d2974a7e	Россия	RU	country	land	true

[danabauer]

Thanks Aden Forshaw (@AdenForshaw) for bringing this to our attention. I ran a query directly against the June release data in Overture's S3 bucket and it returned geometries for Russia and Australia.

┌──────────────────────┬───────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│          id          │  primary  │ country │ subtype │  class  │                               geometry                                │
│       varchar        │  varchar  │ varchar │ varchar │ varchar │                               geometry                                │
├──────────────────────┼───────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ ac63467c-e698-452a…  │ Россия    │ RU      │ country │ land    │ MULTIPOLYGON (((119.1714222 50.040625, 119.1713626 50.0411924, 119.…  │
│ 4420c9c8-f137-4466…  │ Australia │ AU      │ country │ land    │ MULTIPOLYGON (((158.8508335 -54.7177005, 158.8665515 -54.6873604, 1…  │
└──────────────────────┴───────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Our friends at CARTO maintain the mirror of Overture data on BigQuery. I recommend reaching out to them at support@carto.com about this issue.

[AdenForshaw]

Update: this appears to be a mirror conversion issue, not a data regression in the Overture release itself.

Thanks Dana Bauer (@danabauer) — we'll raise it with CARTO at support@carto.com and reference this issue. Sharing the evidence here so it's in one place:

1. Independent verification querying the same release directly from the S3 GeoParquet via Athena returns the Russia country land boundary complete and valid.
2. In the BigQuery mirror (bigquery-public-data.overture_maps.division_area), the same two records have geometry IS NULL — still reproducible today against the mirror of the 2026-06-17.0 release (tables last modified 2026-06-18). They remain the only two subtype = 'country' rows globally with NULL geometry.

So the source GeoParquet appears fine, and the NULL is introduced in the load into BigQuery. A plausible mechanism: these are the two largest/most complex country land polygons (Russia's maritime sibling has 165,675 points and crosses the antimeridian), which is exactly the profile that can fail WKB → BigQuery GEOGRAPHY conversion and get written as NULL.

Affected IDs for reference:

• Russia (land): ac63467c-e698-452a-bce3-0729d2974a7e
• Australia (land): 4420c9c8-f137-4466-9225-6d35a72a445c

Both records' maritime siblings (same division_id, class = 'maritime') convert fine, which also suggests a per-geometry conversion failure rather than a systematic load problem. Will report back here with anything we learn from CARTO.