Maps Mania

Blowing Up the World Becomes More Fun

2026-09-15T04:02:55.831-05:00

Blowing up the world has now become even more fun.

We have all had a lot of fun nuking cities around the world with existing nuclear bomb simulators like NUKEMAP, Outrider - Bomb Blast and Ground Zero. But what has been missing to truly satisfy our sadistic, mass-murdering instincts is a really satisfying level of realism.

Thankfully, that has all changed with the 'launch' of the 3D Nuclear Blast Simulator. This new map-based nuke simulation not only lets you choose any location around the world to assess the likely number of human casualties from dropping a nuclear bomb on the area, but also simulates the explosion with a satisfyingly new degree of realism.

I have to admit that the realistic animated nuclear explosions used by 3D Nuclear Blast Simulator do make this new map more 'fun' to use. And, if you are prepared to become a paid subscriber, you can make the experience look even more realistic by viewing the explosions superimposed on Google's 3D photorealistic map tiles of cities around the world.

Via: webcurios

GeoGuessr Gets an Antipodean Time Machine

2026-09-14T02:14:28.460-05:00

Continuing my quest to catalog every GeoGuessr spinoff in existence, today's menu features two fresh location-guessing challenges: TimePin and Oppocity.

TimePin is a GeoGuessr-style game with a historical twist. Your task is to guess not only where a character is from, but also when they lived.

Each round presents you with environmental photos and a character you can question about their life and surroundings. You have 12 questions available, but can only ask five, so you'll need to choose carefully. The clues might help you narrow down both the location and the historical era.

Once you've made your deductions, drop a pin on the interactive map and use the time slider to select your date. The closer you get to the correct place and time, the more points you earn.

At the end of each round, the character's portrait is revealed, along with links to articles, videos and podcasts where you can learn more about their culture and era.

Oppocity turns GeoGuessr on its head. Instead of trying to identify a named city, your task is to find the location on the exact opposite side of the world.

Each round gives you a city and a map showing its location. You then need to work out where its antipode is and place your marker on the map. Once you've made your guess, the map transforms into a globe, revealing the true antipode and how close you managed to get.

It's a simple idea, but one that makes for a surprisingly tricky geography challenge. Knowing that the opposite of New York is somewhere in the Indian Ocean is one thing. Working out exactly where to drop your pin is another.

PIxel City Maps Are Here

2026-09-13T04:07:44.222-05:00

Isometric NYC has definitely started a new trend for developing pixelated interactive city maps. In the last few weeks it has inspired Isopolis in San Francisco and London, drawn in London. Now a new project is taking the idea to Brazil - and suggests that we could soon be seeing a lot more of these pixelated cities.

EARTH TO PIXELS

earthToPixels has now transformed aerial imagery of João Pessoa, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil, into a sprawling, SimCity-style isometric pixel-art map.

Like the earlier maps, the pixelated map of João Pessoa is a joy to explore. Buildings, roads, parks and coastline are transformed into a giant isometric pixel-art landscape that you can pan and zoom through, revealing more detail as you explore.

What makes earthToPixels particularly interesting, however, is that João Pessoa is not a one-off. The developers have built a pipeline that takes aerial map tiles, renders them, stylizes them and stitches the results together into a deep-zoom map. In theory, it could do this for any city in the world. For now João Pessoa is the only city the team has taken all the way through to completion. But it doesn't look like it will be the last (and another pixelated map of San Francisco seems to be already in the pipeline).

Mapping the Song Every City is Listening To

2026-09-11T02:14:21.691-05:00

What is the world listening to today? Rotation's Music Map offers a wonderfully simple way to explore that question, with a globe showing the songs currently charting in 166 countries and 174 cities.

Each place on the globe highlights a record that the rest of the world isn't playing. Click on a country or city and the record starts playing, turning the map into a kind of interactive global jukebox. You can also switch between different chart sources, including Spotify, Apple Music and Shazam, to see how the picture changes.

One of my favourite features is the Shuffle option. Rather than simply choosing a random country, it works like a loaded die: it picks a record, then a place, and explains why that particular combination has been selected. It is a nice way of discovering music from places you might otherwise never think to explore.

The map itself is beautifully presented. It uses a hand-drawn orthographic globe rendered on a 2D canvas, with the dark side of the Earth illuminated by NASA's Black Marble city lights. A small information strip above the globe displays the local time, weather, distance and time until the next sunrise, giving the whole thing the feel of a futuristic seatback display.

Also See

Radio Garden - discover and listen to radio stations from around the world

Radiooooo - to listen to music from anywhere in the world and from any decade going back to 1900.

New York's 1.67 Million Buildings Colored by Age

2026-09-10T01:36:51.524-05:00

The craze for ;building age maps seems to have faded in recent years, which is a shame because I think they can reveal a surprising amount about how a city has grown and changed over time. When you map the age of every building, patterns of development, expansion and redevelopment can suddenly become much easier to see in a way that is hard to grasp from standard historical records.

New York in 1.67 Million Buildings is bucking the trend and is also a particularly impressive example of a building age map. The map colours New York's buildings according to the decade in which they were constructed, creating an extraordinary colorful patchwork of the city's architectural history. Zoom in and you can explore individual buildings; zoom out and whole neighbourhoods emerge as distinct bands of development.

The map also includes a timeline which allows you to watch New York grow over time. Pan through the years and buildings appear as they were constructed, providing a fascinating visual record of the city's expansion. You can also switch from building age to height to see the city transformed into a kind of 3D relief map, with Manhattan's skyscrapers rising above the surrounding buildings.

There is an important caveat to the historical animation, however. The map is primarily showing buildings that survive today. An existing building that was constructed in, say, 1900 will appear in the animation, but a building constructed in 1900 and demolished in 1950 will generally not. The map does include a separate historical layer containing more than 26,000 documented former buildings, but this is only a partial reconstruction of New York's lost buildings.

This means the animation shouldn't be interpreted as a complete history of construction in New York. A neighbourhood which appears to have developed slowly may in reality have seen several generations of buildings come and go. What the map does particularly well is show the age of New York's surviving building stock and reveal the remarkable patterns of development that remain visible in the city today.

Which Country is Bigger? The Map Decides

2026-09-09T01:29:18.222-05:00

Since the UN General Assembly voted to promote equal-area projections such as Equal Earth as an alternative to the familiar Mercator projection, there have been a number of interesting attempts to show just how much our perception of the relative size of countries changes when we switch between the two.

(my attempt was this animated tween between a Mercator vs Equal Earth projection)

Al Jazeera has come up with one of the most effective visualizations I've seen of the difference between Mercator and Equal Earth with its Can You Guess the Real Size of Each Country? quiz. You are presented with two countries as they appear on a Mercator map and asked to decide which is larger. Once you've made your choice, the map morphs into the Equal Earth projection, revealing the actual relative sizes of the two countries.

What makes this particularly effective is that it turns an abstract problem with map projections into something you can experience for yourself. Rather than simply showing how Mercator distorts the world, the quiz tests how much that distortion has influenced our own perception of country sizes. The results can be surprisingly difficult to predict, particularly when comparing countries at very different latitudes. It's a simple idea, but watching the countries change shape and size as the projection transforms provides a remarkably clear demonstration of why equal-area projections can give us a very different perspective on the world than the more common Mercator projection.

Via: Datawrapper's Data Viz Dispatch

Your Daily GeoGuessing Challenge!

2026-09-08T02:22:46.791-05:00

TripGeo Snaps is a new GeoGuessr type game with a difference. Instead of being dropped into a Street View panorama that you can explore, you are shown a static Street View snapshot. You can't pan around, follow the road or search for clues elsewhere. You have to identify the country purely from the visual clues contained in the image in front of you.

Every game presents you with five locations. Each image initially appears through a small spotlight, so you only get a limited glimpse of the scene. You then have three chances to identify the country from a list of eight possibilities.

This might sound hard but get it wrong and the game gives you a little more help. The image gets bigger, while the number of possible answers is reduced from 8 to 4, then 2. Guess correctly on your first attempt and you score 3 points; get it on your second attempt for 2 points, or settle for 1 point on your final guess.

The result is a fast-paced game of spotting visual clues. The road markings, architecture, signs and even the vegetation might give you some clues – and sometimes the smallest detail can be the difference between a confident three points and a very wrong guess.

There are 50 locations to find each day, giving you ten five-location games to work through. Can you identify all 50 countries?

Geography and Genetics

2026-09-07T01:01:50.895-05:00

How closely related are the world's populations?

The Genetic Distance Map offers a fascinating way to explore that question by putting genetic similarity onto a map. Click on this map and the surrounding areas are then colored according to genetic distance. The result is a visual landscape of genetic similarity, with similar colours indicating populations that are genetically closer to one another.

For most populations, the Genetic Distance Map displays smooth, concentric rings radiating outwards. In many locations, geographic distance mirrors genetic distance (e.g., clicking on central France highlights neighboring regions in Western Europe). As you might suspect populations that live close together are often genetically similar.

However, there are some interesting exceptions to this rule, where the map breaks this geographic pattern because of historical migrations or geographic isolation. One striking example can be seen by clicking on Afrikaner in South Africa, which lights up North-Western Europe (Dutch and German) while remaining genetically distant from the surrounding Indigenous Southern African populations.

There is another interesting example in Africa. North Africa, is genetically distinct from much of sub-Saharan Africa - revealing how the Sahara's has historically acted as a formidable geographic barrier to movement.

The Genetic Distance Map is based on the Moriopoulos Collection 2025, a curated collection containing 6,020 population averages. There are, however, some important caveats to bear in mind. The map can only show what is present in this underlying dataset, which does not provide equally good coverage of every population. The collection itself is not peer-reviewed, and some of the present-day samples come from consumer genetic testing customers who have self-reported their ethnicity

The locations shown on the map should also be treated as approximate. Population labels were geolocated using a language model and a single point may represent a population that is actually dispersed across a large geographic area. This is particularly important for groups such as Ashkenazi Jews, whose genetic identity cannot meaningfully be reduced to a single geographic point.

Mercator vs Equal Earth

2026-09-05T12:02:06.501-05:00

The UN General Assembly has just endorsed a new position on world maps that aims to represent the relative size of the world's land masses more accurately, with the difference being particularly obvious when you compare Africa and Greenland. The resolution, backed by 164 countries, promotes the use of equal-area projections such as Equal Earth as an alternative to the familiar Mercator projection.

So, naturally, I made a map.

Mercator vs Equal Earth

Rather than simply putting the two projections side-by-side, this interactive map lets you watch one transform into the other. Click Mercator or Equal Earth to switch between them, or sit back and let the map automatically tween between the two.

And the transformation is quite revealing.

On the Mercator projection, the world's high latitudes are dramatically enlarged. Greenland is the obvious example: on the map it looks almost comparable in size to Africa. In reality, Africa is around 14 times larger than Greenland.

As the map morphs into Equal Earth, Greenland shrinks while Africa expands. Europe and North America also become noticeably smaller relative to the land masses around the equator.

This isn't because Equal Earth is somehow making Africa bigger. Africa was always that big. It is Mercator that makes it look disproportionately small in comparison with countries and continents at higher latitudes.

Also see this side-by-side comparison map.

Welcome to the New World Map

2026-09-05T01:30:20.665-05:00

Yesterday the UN General Assembly voted to replace its traditional world maps - based on Mercator - with a map that more accurately reflects the size of Africa - based on the 2018 Equal Earth map.

My Equal Earth vs Web Mercator map allows you to compare how these two maps depict the world side-by-side. Drag the handle in the middle of the map and you can switch between the two projections. You can also pan and zoom around the map and the two views will move together.

Equal Earth vs Mercator

The problem with Mercator isn't that it is a "bad" map. Quite the opposite: Gerardus Mercator's 1569 projection was designed for sea navigation, where preserving angles and directions is enormously useful. The problem is that it is a rather unfortunate choice when you want to compare the size of countries and continents.

Mercator increasingly exaggerates areas as you move away from the Equator. Greenland is the classic example. On a conventional Mercator world map it can look comparable in size to Africa, whereas Africa is actually about 14 times larger.

Equal Earth was designed to solve precisely this problem. Developed by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny and published in 2018, it is an equal-area projection. Countries and continents therefore retain their correct relative areas, although their shapes are inevitably changed in the process.

And that's the important distinction here: Equal Earth doesn't make everything "accurate". It makes area accurate. There is no flat world map that can preserve everything about the spherical Earth at once. Every projection involves compromises between properties such as area, shape, distance and direction.

Making Equal Earth vs Web Mercator Map

For the Equal Earth side of the map I used the rather ingenious web-mapping work of bbox.earth, which provides Natural Earth vector tiles projected using Equal Earth but arranged on a Web Mercator-style tile grid.

This is particularly useful because MapLibre (the map library used for my map comparison tool) is built around Web Mercator. Rather than trying to persuade MapLibre to suddenly become a completely different projection, the Equal Earth data is prepared so that it can be displayed using MapLibre's normal tile machinery. The bbox.earth example is remarkably simple: the map is essentially just a MapLibre map pointing at their Equal Earth Natural Earth style.

For the other half I used the OpenFreeMap Liberty style, which is a conventional Web Mercator web map.

I then put the two maps on top of one another and added a draggable vertical divider. The Equal Earth map is clipped at the position of the divider, revealing the normal Web Mercator map underneath. The two maps are also synchronised, so moving one moves the other.

There is one additional wrinkle. The bbox.earth Equal Earth tiles use a slightly smaller world extent than the corresponding Web Mercator grid and are displayed with a 1.162 scale factor. I compensate for that by applying the equivalent adjustment to the MapLibre zoom level when synchronising the two maps.

A Word of Caution

There is an important caveat to this experiment.

Don't treat the swipe as a precise, pixel-for-pixel comparison of the two projections.

The two maps are using different projections, so geographic features cannot simply be expected to occupy the same screen positions. We are synchronising their geographic centre and making a scale adjustment, but the mathematical transformation of latitude and longitude is fundamentally different in the two maps.

There's also a more fundamental difference between the two map layers. The Equal Earth side is using Natural Earth data supplied through bbox.earth, while the Mercator side is using OpenFreeMap. So although both maps depict the same world, they aren't literally using the same underlying vector data and styling.

In other words, this is a visual demonstration rather than a rigorous cartographic comparison.

And that's probably fine. Dragging the divider across Greenland or Africa makes the central point rather effectively: the shapes and positions of countries change between projections, but the most striking change is how their relative areas are represented.

MapDraw: Take the Scenic Route

2026-09-04T02:35:35.744-05:00

MapDraw

I use Organic Maps every day. Currently, I'm using it to follow the London Loop, with the route loaded as a GPX track on the map.

I often get annoyed with the London Loop route - particularly when it takes me along a busy road when I can see what looks like a much more pleasant alternative just a few metres away. What I need is a simple tool that will allow me to draw my own alternative routes for the sections I don't like and save them as GPX files, which I can then add to Organic Maps.

Welcome to MapDraw. MapDraw is a browser-based map editor that allows you to import, draw and edit geographic data. So, if I decide that the official London Loop route has made a terrible mistake by sending me down a noisy main road, I can load the GPX file into MapDraw, redraw that section of the route and export my improved version.

Of course, MapDraw can do a lot more than simply help me correct the London Loop. You can use MapDraw to generate routes for driving, cycling or walking, and then save those generated routes as editable paths. You can view elevation profiles for your tracks, simplify overly complicated paths and areas, and search for points of interest using OpenStreetMap data. MapDraw even includes a built-in GeoJSON editor, allowing you to view and edit your map data directly as raw GeoJSON.

MapDraw also supports custom WMS and XYZ map layers, allowing you to add your own map overlays and rearrange them using drag-and-drop. You can connect a Strava account to view your activities and download your Strava GPX tracks. OpenStreetMap users can even sign in to leave map notes or add missing places directly from the application.

Under the hood, MapDraw uses Leaflet js and the Leaflet.draw plugin to provide its drawing and editing tools. Leaflet.draw adds the controls needed to draw, edit and delete points, lines and polygons on a Leaflet map, making it possible for MapDraw to turn the map itself into an interactive geographic editor.

Crawley – Welcome to Music Town, UK

2026-09-03T02:41:50.680-05:00

My home town of Crawley is apparently the undisputed heavyweight champion of British music.

At least, that is what you might conclude from the UK Music Cities Explorer. When the interactive map's results are normalized by population, Crawley appears as the largest circle on the map, giving it the highest Spotify-listener footprint per resident of any UK urban area in the explorer.

Not bad for a small town in the south of England.

The UK Music Cities Explorer is an interactive exploration of the geographical origins and global popularity of British bands. Using the map, you can search for individual bands or places, explore where artists were formed, compare Spotify monthly listeners and followers, and switch between raw totals and results normalized by the population of each urban area.

The population-normalized view is where things become particularly interesting. Simply counting Spotify listeners naturally gives the biggest cities a huge advantage. London has a lot more potential musicians than Crawley. But divide a city's musical reach by its population and suddenly smaller places can start punching far above their weight.

Which is how Crawley ends up looking like Britain's musical superpower.

Well ... sort of. Take away just one band - The Cure - and Crawley disappears from the list.

The fascinating thing about the UK Music Cities Explorer is that the answer to the question which British music city punches furthest above its weight? changes depending on exactly how you choose to ask the question - and, more importantly, which data you choose to use.

The developer's accompanying blog post, Which British Music City Punches Furthest Above Its Weight?, explores how dramatically the answer can change depending on how you define a city, which bands you include, how you measure popularity and whether you adjust for population.

The post provides a fascinating deep dive into a more carefully controlled ten-city comparison. In this analysis, each of the UK's ten largest urban areas is represented by the same number of selected bands. This time, the results conclude that Sheffield punches furthest above its weight, with the largest population-normalized Spotify reach of the ten cities studied.

Damn them Arctic Monkeys.

Movie Maps

2026-09-02T01:47:16.230-05:00

Have you ever watched a film and thought, “Wait, I know that street”? A new interactive mapping project makes it easy to find out which iconic movie scenes were filmed right around the corner from your house.

Movie Scene Map turns the globe into an open-air film set. It allows you to explore real-world locations from your favourite movies and TV shows, making it easy to track down specific filming locations - and maybe even visit them in person on your next walk or weekend getaway.

Using the map, you can search for films or TV shows that were shot near your current location. Alternatively, if you're a fan of a particular movie or show, you can use the map to research places you might want to visit. For example, fans of HBO's classic fantasy drama can discover some of the real-world settings used for King's Landing and Winterfell by searching for Game of Thrones.

Under the Hood: Structured Open Data

What sets Movie Scene Map apart from many other movie maps is its reliance on structured open datasets. By aggregating entities harvested from Wikipedia and Wikidata, the platform systematically links geographic coordinates with films and television shows.

The map itself allows users to filter locations by medium, search for specific titles, or simply drag and zoom around the world to discover what has been filmed nearby. And if you ever get bored of searching for scenes shot near your home, you can always play Movie Scene Map's take on GeoGuessr - FilmGuessr.

Also See

StoryTerra - mapping movie, tv, and book locations

Historical Database - an interactive map of the settings in 'historical' movies

Film Map of the World - mapping the most Wikipedia'ed films in every country in the world

The Coffee Barista's Maps

2026-09-01T02:47:39.711-05:00

Aside from maps, I would say my next biggest obsession is coffee. For the last couple of months, my favourite bean, Finca La Bolsa, has been out of season and unavailable from my local roasters. I've therefore been using the opportunity to experiment with beans from different regions, different taste profiles and different processing methods.

For some reason, it has only just dawned on me that there might be some coffee maps I can use to help me discover new beans to add to my coffee repertoire.

Map of Coffee Origins & Flavors

Lightyear Coffee has produced a number of data visualizations based on data collected from coffee roasters. These include a Map of Coffee Origins & Flavors, which shows the dominant flavour notes associated with beans from different countries.

Using the map, you can select an individual country to explore the dominant tasting notes found in its coffee beans, or choose a particular flavour note to discover which countries produce coffees associated with that taste.

Multiple Origin

Multiple Origin is a personal project by Ahmad Merii that maps the information found on coffee bean packaging. The result is a world map of 318 specialty coffees from Merii's own collection, purchased and consumed between 2018 and 2026. The coffees are categorized by country and region of origin, variety, processing method, altitude, roast date, tasting notes and weight.

Using the map, you can search for and filter coffees by roaster, processing method, variety and altitude. You can also explore a gallery of scanned coffee bags, with additional details available for each coffee.

BeanMap

BeanMap is a free, open-source atlas of specialty coffee that starts with an interactive 3D globe. It currently maps 55 coffee origins across 41 countries, with each origin accompanied by information about its altitude, processing method, harvest season and flavour profile.

You can filter the map by region or flavour, or approach the data from the other direction using an interactive SCA flavour wheel. Click on a flavour such as jasmine or blackcurrant and the map filters down to coffees associated with that taste.

How Great is Great Britain?

2026-08-31T01:16:11.836-05:00

How long is the coastline of Great Britain?

Go on. Have a guess.

It sounds like the sort of question that should have a straightforward answer. Surely someone, at some point, has walked around Britain with a very long tape measure and worked it out.

Unfortunately, the coastline has other ideas.

The problem is that Britain's coast is full of bays, headlands, inlets and innumerable little squiggly bits. Measure it using a fairly large ruler and you'll skip over much of that detail. Use a smaller ruler and suddenly you're measuring around all those extra twists and turns - and Britain's coastline mysteriously gets longer.

This is the Coastline Paradox: the awkward fact that there isn't really one definitive answer to the question How long is the coastline of Great Britain?

In 1967, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot famously explored exactly this problem in his paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? His attempts to understand why coastlines reveal ever more complexity the more closely you examine them helped popularize the idea of fractals - shapes and patterns whose complexity can continue to emerge at different scales.

Coastal Paradox lets you explore this geographical and mathematical conundrum for yourself.

The interactive map starts by measuring Great Britain using just 50 measurement points. Draw straight lines between those points (using a very large ruler) and you get one approximation of the coastline. But then things start getting interesting.

As you scroll through the story, the number of measurement points increases - from 50 to 100, then 250, 500 and eventually into the thousands. The measuring line starts following more and more of Britain's coastal wiggles, and the measured coastline keeps growing.

The visualization is built from a GeoJSON outline of Great Britain. Turf js is used to generate evenly spaced measurement points along the coast and calculate the distances between them, while SVG draws the coastline and the increasingly detailed measuring lines.

There's also a free-play mode, where you can choose your own number of measurement points with a slider. Pick a resolution and see for yourself how much longer Britain becomes when you decide to measure it more carefully.

So, how long is the coastline of Great Britain?

How long is a length of string?

15 Minute Towns Animated

2026-08-29T04:00:04.086-05:00

The 15-Minute City has become one of the most influential ideas in contemporary urban planning. Popularised by urbanist Carlos Moreno, the concept is beautifully simple: cities should be designed so that people can reach the things they need for everyday life - shops, healthcare, schools, green spaces, culture and leisure - within around 15 minutes of where they live, ideally on foot or by bicycle.

The Essentials is an interactive map which asks exactly that question of New York City - and beautifully visualises the answer as an animated pathfinding map. Click anywhere on The Essentials and nine animated lines immediately shoot out from your chosen location, each searching for the nearest example of something that every neighbourhood needs. The map looks for the closest primary healthcare facility, subway station, food retailer, elementary school, park or green space, library, civic centre, sports facility and cultural venue.

The map can calculate exactly how long it would take to reach each of these essential destinations from any point in NYC. And it does so using actual routes rather than simple distances. Walking journeys follow real streets at an assumed speed of 5 km/h, while public transport journeys use observed weekday subway running times and waiting times. Bus schedules are also adjusted using observed bus speeds.

The result is wonderfully intuitive. Click somewhere in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx and the map animates the fastest routes to all nine essentials. A panel then reveals the travel time for each destination and identifies how you would get there. The map tells you exactly how long it takes to reach all nine essentials - so, if you live in Manhattan, you might even discover that you live in a sub-10-Minute City.

The Essentials is just one of a number of tools provided by subway.fyi. These include:

60 Minutes - which uses the same reachability engine as The Essentials. Click anywhere in New York City and the map calculates everywhere you can reach within an hour, creating an interactive, time-based isochrone map based on measured subway travel times rather than simply relying on published schedules.

Live - providing a real-time view of the New York subway, animating every train along its actual track geometry.

Badness and Awfulness - these maps combine average waiting times, train bunching and, in the case of the Awfulness map, station ridership to identify the worst places to be stuck waiting for a subway.

Via: Webcurios

Rename Lake Ontario Now!

2026-08-28T01:26:44.359-05:00

You don't have to wait for Donald Trump to rename Lake Ontario. Thanks to MapQuest, you can now direct all your small dick energy into hitting Canada where it really hurts - by taking a Sharpie to Canada's geography yourself.

Canada's slow-witted response to the latest U.S. trade war has been to impose tariffs on a range of American imports, thereby increasing the cost of goods for American consumers. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has once again demonstrated why he is known as the "master of the deal" by halting trade talks with Canada and striking back where it really hurts - in the "feels" - with an announcement that he intends to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America."

Fortunately, there is no need to wait for Google Maps and Apple Maps to fall into line and implement Trump's latest diktat. MapQuest's Rename Lake Ontario interactive allows anyone to rename one of the Great Lakes, before downloading and sharing their newly named map.

This simple little interactive has already proved to be a piece of marketing genius for MapQuest. My social media timeline is full of people pointing out that, unlike certain other map providers, MapQuest has not renamed the Gulf of Mexico. Many of those same users are also claiming that they have redirected their map shortcuts to open MapQuest instead.

On the subject of the Gulf of Mexico - you might also like MapQuest's Name Your Own Gulf map.

The Real-Time Animated Transit Map

2026-08-27T03:14:41.904-05:00

On Monday I reviewed two animated maps that simulate one day's worth of train travel in countries across the world. Both of these simulations used conventional geographic maps, with the trains shown in their real-world geographical locations. But wouldn't it be cool to see this data animated on a proper schematic transit map?

I Love Trains does exactly that. It is a simulation of an entire day's train traffic (2026/07/13) in the Netherlands, visualized on top of the official NS network map (download here). The map itself is built as an SVG, with the Dutch railway network and surrounding geography drawn as scalable vector graphics. This makes it possible to create a highly stylized version of the official NS network map while retaining the crisp lines and labels of a conventional transit diagram. The simulation then brings this otherwise static map to life, animating every train as it travels across the network throughout the day.

If you'd like to see where trains are running in the Netherlands right now, Treinposities.nl provides a real-time animated map of Dutch trains. If that has not completely satisfied your thirst for live Dutch transport then you can also view live buses in real-time on Buspostities.nl.

(MAPS) Painting By Number

2026-08-26T02:16:56.019-05:00

Here's a little thing I discovered about Chicago: the higher a street's number, the further south it is from the city center.

You can see this very clearly on North America's Numbered Streets. This interactive map colors "all streets with a '#st', '#nd', '#rd', or '#th' in their name in North America, as drawn from OpenStreetMap."

Zoom in on a city on North America's Numbered Streets and, if it uses a numerical street-naming convention, you'll probably notice that the smallest numbered streets are near the center of the city, while the largest numbers stretch out into the suburbs. In most cities, however, the numbers don't radiate outwards from the center. This is because streets are generally numbered in one cardinal direction. As a result, the redder (higher-numbered) streets will start appearing predominantly in one direction as you move away from the center.

For example, Denver is the numerical opposite of Chicago: while Chicago's streets become increasingly red as you travel south, Denver's streets become redder as you move north.

North America's Numbered Streets is a simple map, but it makes an otherwise mundane feature of the urban landscape surprisingly visible. Zooming around the continent reveals that the humble numbered street can tell you quite a lot about how a city is laid out.

GTA - San Francisco

2026-08-25T02:06:03.478-05:00

Have you ever wanted to play GTA in San Francisco? In San Francisco - The Game, you can now drive cars, climb buildings or even hang-glide over the Bay Area - all in your browser.

What makes this game world particularly interesting from a mapping perspective is that this isn't a fictional city inspired by San Francisco. The game's 3D world is built from real-world photogrammetry and elevation data, extracted from Apple Maps 3D data and converted into a playable open-world environment.

The result is an extraordinary browser map that doubles as a game. San Francisco's famously steep hills, dense streets and distinctive buildings are all rendered as a detailed 3D landscape. You can explore the city on foot, clamber over buildings and rooftops, jump into one of the cars scattered around the streets, and even fly over the city strapped to a hang-glider.

The city is divided into 3D tiles which are streamed into your browser as you explore.

The game also makes surprisingly good use of its underlying geography. A minimap shows your position and heading, while a teleport feature allows you to immediately transport to any location in the city. There are even multiplayer features, allowing you to see and chat to other players exploring the same virtual San Francisco.

The game feels like a collision between Google Earth, GTA and a retro arcade game. But beneath the fun is an impressive demonstration of what is now possible when real-world 3D mapping data is combined with WebGL and game-engine technology.

Mapping 219,469 Rail Journeys

2026-08-24T01:59:06.450-05:00

One Day on Rails maps more than 70,000 train journeys across Europe during one single day this summer. It also maps 5,737 journeys across the USA, 34,206 journeys in Tokyo and 11,075 journeys in London.

One Day On Rails visualizes an entire day's railway activity on one single animated interactive map. Rather than showing trains at a single point in time, One Day on Rails uses real timetable data to animate thousands of services moving along their actual routes.

The main European visualization combines railway data from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and France. In total, it maps 70,427 scheduled journeys, with cross-border services carefully deduplicated so that the same train isn't counted twice when it appears in different national datasets.

There are also separate visualizations for Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, France and Berlin, as well as the USA, Tokyo, New York and London. The individual visualizations together account for 219,469 mapped train journeys.

One Day on Rails turns what would normally be an enormous and rather dry collection of timetable data into something surprisingly hypnotic: a whole day's worth of railway journeys brought to life on a map.

Inspired by One Day on Rails, Clock-face Schedule maps a single day across the Swiss rail network. What makes Clock-face Schedule so fascinating to watch is how this map feels less like chaotic traffic and more like a carefully calibrated timepiece.

This is because of the Swiss clock-face schedule.

Every half hour, you can watch trains converge simultaneously on major hubs across the country, pause as connections are made, and then radiate back out along regional lines. Rather than scheduling each railway line independently, Switzerland coordinates its network around major interchange stations such as Zurich, Bern and Basel. Trains from different directions arrive at these hubs shortly before the hour or half-hour, allowing passengers to make connections, before departing again a few minutes later.

The result is a remarkable choreography of trains: across the entire country, the railway network moves to the rhythm of the clock. The clock at the heart of the visualization is itself inspired by the iconic Swiss railway clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944. One of the clock's most distinctive features is its red second hand, which pauses briefly at 12 before jumping forward to mark the next minute. The reason for this is that in the 1940s, it was impossible to electronically synchronize individual clock motors across hundreds of stations.

To solve this, Hilfiker designed the second hand to run slightly fast - completing a rotation in 58 seconds - and then pause at the top of the hour. At precisely 60 seconds, an electrical impulse sent from a central master clock triggered the second hand to jump forward and start the next minute. This brief pause ensured that every railway clock throughout Switzerland struck the start of each new minute in absolute, perfect unison.

Bending Maps, Inception Style

2026-08-22T01:29:47.043-05:00

One of the most memorable scenes in Inception sees Leonardo DiCaprio's character walking through Paris as the city appears to fold in on itself, with entire streets rising from the ground and bending over the characters below. The surreal effect makes the city seem like a three-dimensional model that can be manipulated like a sheet of paper.

Orbify is exploring whether something inspired by this visual trick could have a practical use in car navigation. Orbify's patent-pending image-processing system takes a 3D map model and warps it onto a curved surface. Instead of having to choose between a conventional top-down map and a perspective view of the road ahead, both can be displayed simultaneously in a single image.

Close to the vehicle, the map retains a normal perspective view, showing the roads and buildings around you in three dimensions. Further away, the map gradually bends upwards until it becomes an overhead view, providing a wider view of the route ahead. The result is an unusual hybrid between a street-level navigation view and a conventional aerial map.

You can currently experience the idea in Orbify's demo. This is a preloaded production scene rather than a complete navigation application, and Orbify notes that the large splats used in the scene may take a moment to decode on your GPU. There are no routes to plan or destinations to enter; the demo is primarily a showcase for the unusual map-rendering technique.

However if you do want to explore your town using an Inception inspired map view you are in luck ...

Inception Map by William Davis uses satellite imagery to create a bendy map of Manhattan in the style of some of the famous folding city scenes in Inception. The map uses a number of separate Mapbox maps, each with a different map pitch view, seamlessly stitched together to recreate the folding city views seen in Inception.

Because the Inception Map was created in Observable you can actually adapt this map to show a different folding city view. To do this you will need to change the latitude and longitudes defined in the mapCenter array.

The Tangram Bendy Map also allows you to view this interesting Inception inspired perspective on an interactive map. The screenshot above shows Manhattan but in the Tangram Bendy Map you can pan and zoom to a folded city view of any location in the world.

The 3D Underground Map

2026-08-21T01:16:39.405-05:00

DrillerDB Underground is very different from a conventional map, which presents the Earth's surface as a flat 2D view from directly above. Instead, it offers a striking oblique 3D view where the surface of the earth has been sliced open like a layer cake. Rising above the horizon is standard aerial imagery draped over USGS 3DEP elevation data, but the real star of this map lies directly underneath: a volumetric 3D cross-section revealing the actual geological strata layered beneath the surface.

Turning 13 Million Well Logs into 3D Geology

This stunning subterranean visualization relies on broad regional interpolation models, DrillerDB has standardized 13 million historical well logs from state and county records across North America. Using these drillers' handwritten notes - scanned directly off decades of paper reports - DrillerDB has managed to map the data to standard USGS lithologic classifications.

The resulting Underground Viewer renders these records as color-coded, vertical lithology blocks. In these 3D cross sections you can see distinct beds of clay, sand, gravel, shale, and limestone stacked continuously under the ground. Where local well logs offer direct physical evidence, the model draws the geological faces as solid colors. Where data thins out or evidence runs dry, the cross-section fades to black rather than inventing speculative layers.

Users can pan, tilt, and zoom through the 3D block cut, hover over specific depth intervals to inspect the underlying lithology types, and toggle a vertical exaggeration slider to stretch thin strata for easier reading. It's an impressive example of taking what was unstructured historical record archives and creating an intuitive spatial exploration tool for that data.

Surfing the Jet Stream

2026-08-20T02:12:28.103-05:00

Anyone who has ever flown from America to Europe has probably noticed that the outward flight usually takes considerably less time than the return journey. The reason is the jet stream - fast-moving winds high in the atmosphere that generally blow from west to east. Flying east, aircraft can get a significant push from these winds, while flying west means battling against them.

The same phenomenon affects flights to Hawaii, and Flight Map from HawaiiTravelers lets you explore exactly how much extra time the winds appear to add to the journey.

Flight Map uses an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on Honolulu to plot straight-line flight paths from Hawaii's capital to 68 other airports. This means that distances from Honolulu are preserved, while the direction from Honolulu to each airport is also maintained. The result is less like a conventional world map and more like a giant compass centred on Hawaii, with the routes radiating outwards in their true directions.

Select any airport on the map and you can compare the two journeys. The map shows the median flight time for flights in each direction, based on flight data collected between January 1 and June 30, 2026. This lets you see how much longer a typical flight to Honolulu takes than the return journey. So you can immediately see not only which routes are longest, but where the difference between flying out and flying back is greatest.

The results confirm that the jet stream affects flights to Hawaii in much the same way as it affects transatlantic flights. The difference is that Hawaii lies to the west of the continental US, so the effect is reversed. Instead of getting a tailwind on the outward journey, flights from the US to Hawaii are generally flying against the prevailing west-to-east winds and therefore take longer. On the return journey, aircraft can take advantage of those winds, making the flight home a lot quicker.

The 2026 Fall Foliage Map Has Landed

2026-08-19T02:51:01.921-05:00

SmokyMountains.com has been producing its fall foliage maps for more than a decade. The Smoky Mountains 2026 Fall Foliage Prediction Map has now been released to visualize this year's expected progression of fall foliage across the contiguous US.

Rather than simply highlighting where autumn is happening now, the interactive map lets you travel through the season week by week to see when different parts of the country are expected to change colour. The map divides the US into counties, with each county coloured according to its predicted foliage stage. The legend ranges from No Change and Minimal through Patchy, Partial, Near Peak, Peak and Past Peak. This makes it particularly easy to see the gradual movement of autumn across the country.

If you're planning a trip to see the spectacular colours of autumn in the USA, the Fall Foliage Map 2026 is another useful guide to knowing where and when to go. This interactive map covers the Lower 48 states and lets you track the changing foliage through the season, from the first hints of colour in September through to the final displays in November and December.

The map includes a timeline running through the autumn months. Drag the date slider and the map updates to show the estimated state of the foliage on that date. Areas are coloured according to their predicted foliage stage, making it easy to see the gradual progression of autumn from the northern states and higher elevations towards the south.

There are two particularly useful ways to explore the data. Color Report shows the estimated foliage conditions for a particular date, while Peak Timing switches the map to show when different areas are expected to reach peak colour. The latter is especially useful if you're trying to work out when to visit a particular region rather than simply wondering where autumn has arrived.

You can search for a city, national park or other destination using the map's search bar. This zooms the map to the location and provides a link to a more detailed local forecast. You can also turn local foliage reports on and off, allowing you to compare the modelled estimates with reports from people actually seeing the leaves on the ground.