Zooming in on cartopy map and adding the ocean feature changes the entire plot to blue?

Question

I have a plot of Europe however, for some reason, when I include the ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.OCEAN) it turns the entire plot blue. I am not sure how to fix this, any help is appreciated!

This only happened when I changed the extent to zoom in more on Europe.

plt.figure(figsize=(9, 9))
ax = plt.axes(projection=cartopy.crs.TransverseMercator(32))
ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.BORDERS, linestyle='-', alpha=1)
ax.coastlines(resolution='110m')
ax.gridlines()
ax.set_extent((-7.5, 50, 34, 55), cartopy.crs.PlateCarree())
ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.OCEAN)
plt.show()

Answer 1

cartopy.feature.OCEAN is a simple version of more complex NaturalEarthFeature function that is safer to use. Here is a few lines of code that you can use to replace the troublesome part.

Replace

ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.OCEAN)

with

choice = 1
if choice==1:
    # this solves the problem
    ocean110 = cartopy.feature.NaturalEarthFeature('physical', 'ocean', \
        scale='110m', edgecolor='none', facecolor=cartopy.feature.COLORS['water'])
    ax.add_feature(ocean110)
else:
    # this (sometimes) causes the ocean spill all over
    ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.OCEAN)

This allows you to set choice=1 or 0 and run to check the plot.

If choice=1, the output will be: