Maps Mania

Preparing for the #30DayMapChallenge

2026-10-05T01:44:00.000-05:00

Are you ready for the 2026 #30DayMapChallenge? It begins on November 1st and this year's daily themes have just been announced.

If you’re new to it, the idea of the #30DayMapChallenge is simple: create a map every day for 30 days based on a different theme each day. You can use any data, tools, or styles you like. It’s a great way to experiment, learn new techniques, and connect with the global mapping community.

While many participants use traditional desktop GIS software or static graphics tools, my focus is almost entirely on building interactive, web-based maps. To keep a fast pace across the 30 days, I rely on a lightweight, open-source web stack that allows me to quickly source, inspect, transform, and render spatial data directly in the browser.

Here are the primary open-source tools I will be using this year:

🗺Maplibre - an open-source library for creating interactive web maps
🌍OpenFreeMap - free global map tiles powered by OpenStreetMap data
🎨Maputnik - a user-friendly visual editor for designing custom map styles
✏️geojson.io - an online tool for drawing, editing, and exporting GeoJSON files
🧩Mapshaper - a browser-based app for simplifying and editing geospatial vector data
🔍Overpass Turbo - a data mining & filtering tool to search, extract, & visualize map data from OSM

There are dozens of fantastic tools out there for cartography - ranging from desktop GIS suites like QGIS and ArcGIS to design tools like Felt, Figma, or Adobe Illustrator. These happen to be the core web-focused tools I'll be leaning on to bring my interactive entries to life this month.

A Year of Lightning

2026-10-03T03:24:13.367-05:00

This animated map shows a year's worth of lightning strikes across the United States. The animation reveals the clear seasonal patterns of lightning storms across the U.S. As you watch the animation, you can see the country's lightning season move northwards with the changing seasons.

During winter, lightning is largely confined to the Gulf Coast before activity spreads north in spring. By summer, thunderstorms are lighting up much of the country, with particularly intense activity across Florida and the Southwest, before the storms retreat south again in autumn.

The map is one of the latest visualizations from the ever impressive mapped.earth. I recently featured mapped.earth's stunning animated maps of lighthouses around the world and the site has plenty more fascinating global visualizations to explore. In A Year of Lightning, instead of lighthouses, mapped.earth turns its attention to electrical storms, showing how lightning moves across different parts of the world throughout the year.

Alongside this map of the United States, there are visualizations of lightning activity in Europe, Africa, Bolivia, Colombia, Korea, Mexico and Central America, Türkiye, Venezuela and the Greater Antilles. In total, that is an astounding 663 million lightning flashes mapped (with Africa accounting for the vast majority at 474.8 million flashes).

Map Pac-Man is Back!

2026-10-02T02:03:14.661-05:00

On April Fool’s Day 2015, a button was added to Google Maps which, when selected, turned the streets of the current map view into a fully functioning game of Pac-Man. Players could navigate the familiar streets, eating dots and avoiding ghosts just as they would in the classic arcade game.

Pac-Man on Map is a tribute to that much-missed April Fool’s Day feature. The game similarly transforms real-world streets into a playable Pac-Man maze, using road data to generate a layout wherever you choose to play.

To get started, simply move the map to your chosen location and click Generate Road Maze. Once the maze has been created, hit Play and use the arrow keys or WASD to guide Pac-Man around the streets, collecting pellets and power pellets while trying to avoid the ghosts. The game also includes scoring and lives, so this isn't just a map-based novelty - it is a fully playable Pac-Man game.

You can search for locations to create your maze and there are also optional preset addresses if you don't want to choose a location yourself. The game includes synthesized arcade-style sound effects that are generated directly in your browser.

OpenStreetMap road data is used to generate the mazes, with the data retrieved through the Overpass API. If the game attracts a large number of players, the Overpass API requests could potentially be throttled, so the game’s ability to generate new mazes may depend on how much traffic it receives.

Providing Global Relief

2026-10-01T03:37:30.773-05:00

Bert Spaan has taken Mapterhorn's global terrain data to create an interactive global Relief map. What is particularly interesting about this new map is that, unlike traditional topographic maps with a fixed colour-to-elevation scale, the map's colour spectrum adapts dynamically to the specific region or bounds currently in view.

As you pan and zoom across different landscapes, the colour grading shifts to highlight local topographic variations, producing a striking and constantly changing view of the world's mountains, valleys and plains. This works particularly well when switching between very different environments: the colour range changes to bring out the relief at the scale you're viewing, rather than leaving low-lying terrain looking uniformly flat.

A number of controls allow you to adjust how the elevation data is visualized. You can switch between absolute and visible elevation ranges, lock the current colour range, reverse the colours, animate the colours, and cycle through different ways of handling elevation outliers. You can also turn on hillshading, contours, labels and country borders, or switch to a 3D terrain view.

Relief also includes a Seafloor option, which extends the elevation map beneath the oceans using GEBCO bathymetry. The result is a continuous view of the Earth's topography, from the deepest ocean trenches to the highest mountain peaks.

At its core Relief is a WebGL-powered visualization of Mapterhorn's global elevation data that allows you to explore global topography at different resolutions and levels of detail. To see some of the most beautiful highlights of this data click on the 'Explore' button in the map's menu bar.

The El Niño Forcast Map

2026-09-30T03:10:52.515-05:00

Much has been written about how this year's El Niño is already breaking records. Climate Dashboard's new interactive map lets you explore how this unusually strong El Niño could affect climate conditions around the world, including what it might mean for the weather where you live.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in which unusually warm ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific disrupt atmospheric circulation, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns around the world. These effects can mean wetter conditions in some regions and drought in others.

The El Niño Impacts layer in the Climate Dashboard provides a way to explore what this year's unusually strong El Niño could actually mean around the world. The map shows the predicted rainfall effects for each three-month season, from the current October-December forecast through to seasons ending in May 2027.

Click anywhere around the world to see what the models forecast for that location, season by season, through to May 2027. You can also switch between individual models to see where they agree - and where they don't.

But this isn't just a forecast map. You can compare the predictions with what happened during the eight strongest El Niño events since 1951, from 1957-58 through to 2023-24. Select a past event and the map replays the rainfall impacts, showing whether each region experienced the change that the scientific literature would have expected.

The map therefore combines current forecasts with historical context, allowing you to see what the models expect to happen over the coming seasons and compare those predictions with what actually happened during previous strong El Niño events.

The Satellites of Mars

2026-09-29T02:32:37.962-05:00

There are lots of 3D maps that visualize the tens of thousands of human-made satellites orbiting the Earth, such as SatelliteeXplorer and James Darpinian's See a Satellite Tonight, which uses Google's Street View imagery to show you exactly where to look in the night sky if you want to watch a satellite passing overhead.

Perigee takes a rather broader view of humanity's presence in space. As well as visualizing thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, this impressive 3D viewer lets you explore spacecraft orbiting the Moon and Mars, and even track probes travelling through the wider Solar System.

On Earth you can explore around 16,600 active catalogued satellites, with the option to filter them by operator, country, constellation, orbit type or launch site. You can also search for individual satellites by name or NORAD number and click on them to see details such as their operator, launch date and orbit.

The same 3D interface can then be used to explore our planetary neighbours. Switch to the Moon to see active lunar orbiters such as LRO, Danuri, Chandrayaan-2 and CAPSTONE, along with more than 50 lunar landing and impact sites. On Mars you can explore the planet's orbiters, Phobos and Deimos, landing sites and even the latest positions of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.

Zoom out further and Perigee becomes a map of the wider Solar System, showing the planets, five dwarf planets and more than 20 spacecraft, including the Voyager probes, Juno, Parker Solar Probe, JUICE and Europa Clipper. You can speed up time by as much as 100,000 times or jump to a specific date to see how the positions of objects change.

Using AI to Annotate Vintage Maps

2026-09-28T03:35:05.684-05:00

Bosphore 1819 is an interactive version of a beautiful 1819 topographical map of the Bosphorus. The original Plan Topographique du Bosphore de Thrace ou Canal de Constantinople et de ses environs was surveyed by François Kauffer between 1776 and 1786, before being redrawn and expanded by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage and published in 1819.

The original map is wonderfully detailed, but navigating it isn't particularly easy - particularly if you can't speak or read French. Hundreds of villages, palaces, fortifications, streams, capes and other landmarks are labelled using French spellings of Ottoman Turkish names. Bosphore 1819 turns all those labels into a database that can be searched using the modern place-names of the region.

There are 387 places mapped in total. Click on any label to see its name as it appears on the original map, its Ottoman Turkish name in both Latin and Arabic script, and the modern name. You can also search for a place using any of these three versions of its name and jump straight to its location on the map.

The map itself is worth exploring even if you aren't particularly interested in historical Istanbul. Zooming into the beautifully detailed engraving reveals a dense historical landscape of settlements, roads, waterways and landmarks. It also isn't oriented north-up: the Black Sea is on the left and the Sea of Marmara is towards the lower right.

Bosphore 1819 is a great example of how an old scanned map can be transformed into a fully modern interactive annotated experience. The most impressive part of the project may be how the map was transcribed. The 13 MB scan was split into 54 overlapping sections, which were then given to multiple Claude Opus 5.5 agents to read the densely engraved and often curved place names. Each agent recorded the original French spelling, Ottoman Turkish name, modern identification and location of each label, with uncertain readings explicitly flagged. The resulting data was then merged, checked for consistency and overlaid on the map, producing the 387 searchable entries used by the app.

The Source code and data for the map can be viewed on GitHub.

Also See

The Annotated Fra Mauro World Map - an annotated 1450 Venetian map of the world

Annotated Claudius Map - an annotated version of Matthew Paris' 13th Century map of Britain

Kingdom Conquest Games

2026-09-26T04:31:07.336-05:00

You would think that interactive mapping platforms are the perfect tool for building territory expansion games. However, I can think of very few good map conquest games.

There are a few popular 'Risk'-type games, such as War.app, that involve claiming and conquering territories on a map. There have also been a few 'Monopoly'-type games, such as Upland, that involve buying and selling virtual real estate on an interactive map tied directly to actual addresses in major global cities.

InkDom, however, may be the territory-grabbing game that we have all been waiting for. It turns the real world into a giant game board where you can draw a loop around your neighbourhood and claim everything inside it as your own. Even better, you also claim the people who live there.

The aim of the game is to expand your territory by drawing increasingly larger loops from your existing land. You can also draw over another player's territory to take it for yourself. But this isn't simply a game of claiming the most land: your score is based on the number of people living inside your territory. A small loop around a densely populated city centre can therefore be worth far more than a huge expanse of countryside.

Every month the map resets and the player with the most people at the end of the season wins. There are no bots, no ads and no pay-to-win mechanics - just a global map, real players and a whole lot of territory waiting to be claimed.

I stumbled upon the game yesterday, and the number of players seems to have grown significantly in the last 24 hours, suggesting that InkDom is already starting to connect with players. The game is also developing at a pretty rapid pace. Since yesterday, a population-based scoring system has been added, and at the time of writing the game features a little announcement saying, “We’re optimizing for the next few hours, and building a brand new Tax feature so you can gain tax from your population.” It certainly looks like new features are being added to the game at quite a pace.

Shine a Light

2026-09-25T02:48:49.179-05:00

There are plenty of maps that show you where the world's lighthouses are. Lighthouses, live does something much more interesting: it shows you how they actually work. Instead of just showing each lighthouse as a static point on a map this map gives you a sense of what its light signal actually looks like at sea.

Lighthouses, live plots charted coastal lights on a dark, night-time relief map and animates each one according to its real-world light characteristics. Some lights sweep continuously across the sea, while others flash in distinctive sequences, with the timing and colour of each beam taken from nautical charts. Impressively, terrain data is also used to block the light based on the surrounding topography, so you can actually see how each lighthouse's beam is constrained by the coastline and landscape.

You can explore the whole world or choose from 27 individual coastal maps covering countries and regions including England & Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Norway, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and New England. Each light on each map can be hovered to reveal its name, character and range.

Also Sea (sorry)

Lights (at sea)

Building Age Maps: From NYC to LA

2026-09-24T03:40:01.775-05:00

I recently featured New York in 1.67 Million Buildings - a building age map created by Block and Paper, who have developed similar animated timelines for 80 other US cities and lots of other cities around the world.

One of those other cities is Los Angeles. However, if you want an even wider perspective, Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County lets you view an animated construction history for the entire county. Their map visualizes nearly 3 million buildings constructed since 1880.

Parcelscope uses the exact same animated building age code as Block and Paper, but applies it across the broader region of LA County. Obviously, a lot of code has been replicated by either Block and Paper or Parcelscope, so presumably that underlying mapping code has been open-sourced somewhere. If anyone has a link to the open-sourced code that would be very useful for developers who would like to create their own building age maps for other cities.

If Block and Paper doesn't cover your city across its 200+ maps, check out the building age tag here on Maps Mania to discover interactive timelines for dozens of other towns and cities.

The World Drawn by 3,000 People

2026-09-23T03:03:44.868-05:00

These are the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people on the Borderline country border game.

The object of Borderline is very simple. You are shown a map without borders and asked to draw the outline of a named country. You are then scored on the accuracy of your drawn border. The scoring appears to be based on two measures of accuracy. The game calculates how far the real border is, on average, from your drawn line. The game also compares the length of your line with the actual length of the country's land border (drawing substantially more line than the real border can therefore hurt your score).

The game has a number of different difficulty levels. Easy shows roads, rivers and city names to help you find your way around the map, while Hard removes the roads and place names. Ultimate takes things further by presenting a completely blank world map, leaving you to find the country entirely from memory. Mayhem uses the Hard mode but randomly rotates the map, making the task even more challenging.

The map at the top of this post is from The Drawn World, This is a combined map showing all the borders and coastlines players have drawn on the Borderline game and the companion Coastlines game.

If you enjoy playing Borderline then you might also enjoy my own game Mapped, Drawn and Bordered. This is a similar border drawing game that requires you to draw the borders of the US states.

The US Deportation Map

2026-09-22T03:26:38.841-05:00

Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported 'include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.'

The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration's global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have been deported there alongside a breakdown of the nationalities of those who have been deported.

The map is part of The Deportation Project, an international investigation involving 24 media organizations and 72 journalists. It tracks deportations from the US between January 2025 and August 2026, identifying at least 25,447 people who were sent to countries other than their country of origin. At least 28 countries are known to have received third-country nationals during this period.

Because most of these deportations were not publicly announced, the project has had to piece together the movements of deportees using flight tracking, NGO investigations, FOIA requests, lawyers, local reporting and journalists on the ground.

The 540 Million Year History of the USA

2026-09-21T02:34:17.989-05:00

This animated map shows the movement of the land that now makes up the United States (outlined in red) over the course of 540 million years. It was recorded from the Pangea Map, a new interactive map that “lets you explore 540 million years of continental drift, from the Cambrian explosion all the way to the present day”.

Maps such as Esri's Dance of the Continents, GPlates and Ancient Earth Globe already allow you to explore how the Earth has changed over time through shifting plate tectonics and continental drift.

The Pangea Map includes a couple of neat features that make this new map also worth exploring. First, it offers three different views of Earth's 540-million-year history: a Mercator projection, a Natural Earth projection and a 3D globe.

Another feature allows you to visualise the geological history of any country in the world. Enter a country name into the search bar and it is highlighted in red on the map, allowing you to see where its landmass was located at any point in Earth's history. This makes it possible to follow how the land that now makes up a country has moved around the planet over hundreds of millions of years.

GeoWhisperer - See How the World Has Changed

2026-09-19T02:41:15.468-05:00

Since 2012, the London Legacy Development Corporation has gradually transformed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from an essential local green space into a high-density residential hub driven by foreign investment. The before-and-after aerial imagery above provides a striking illustration of how the landscape of the Olympic 'park' is being built over.

This before and after image was created in a matter of seconds by GeoWhisperer. GeoWhisperer is a new tool from Henk van Ess that attempts to take some of the guesswork out of comparing satellite imagery. Designed for OSINT researchers, journalists and visual mappers, it automatically searches historical satellite imagery and uses AI to identify physical changes between different dates.

Enter a location using coordinates, a place name or a map link and GeoWhisperer searches Esri's World Imagery Wayback archive for suitable aerial imagery. You can also upload your own recent geotagged photograph (with the image being processed locally in your browser).

GeoWhisperer then uses AI to identify what has changed between the different dates. It divides the area into a 3x3 grid and examines each section separately, looking for changes in physical features while accounting for distractions such as parked cars, shadows, seasonal variations and differences in image quality. The AI is restricted to reporting changes that can actually be seen in the imagery rather than speculating about what caused them (as I have done in my intro above).

Each identified change is accompanied by an evidence card and links to other mapping and research resources. The results can then be exported as a side-by-side image (as in this post), as a short video comparison or as a one-page PDF report.

Via: Webcurios

Mapping the Last Ice Age

2026-09-18T02:41:20.754-05:00

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the European landscape looked radically unrecognizable compared to today. Enormous ice sheets flattened Northern Europe, global sea levels dropped dramatically, and the sheer weight of the ice compressed Earth's crust downward by hundreds of meters.

Europe Under the Ice is an impressive interactive mapped visualization that tracks these massive geophysical changes step-by-step from 24,100 BC all the way to the present day. Press play on the map and you can watch the ice sheets spread and retreat across Northern Europe over the millennia.

The map makes these changes particularly fascinating because it shows not just the changing extent of the ice, but also how the underlying terrain of Europe has changed over the ages. You can watch ancient coastlines disappear and the modern shape of Europe emerge from the retreating ice. One of the most striking examples of this is Doggerland, the landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe. As sea levels rose, Doggerland was gradually submerged, transforming the geography of northern Europe.

The map uses a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection covering roughly 4,500 × 5,250 km. It combines modern terrain with modelled crustal differences, so the mountains shown are today's mountains at their Ice Age elevations, rather than a reconstruction of the actual landscape of 24,000 years ago. It is also important to note that this visualization focuses on the large-scale ice sheets and their effects on the Earth's crust rather than attempting to show every glacier and patch of mountain snow. Contemporary glaciers and mountain snow are therefore not visualized on the map.

Also See

IceMap - another animated map of the last Eurasian Ice Age.

Where’s the Perfect Weather?

2026-09-17T02:01:02.394-05:00

Maps such as Pack Lightly's Best Time to Travel and Find the Best Time to Travel translate complex historical weather data into interactive heatmaps. By taking the guesswork out of trip timing, they make it easy to either match a destination with its optimal season or discover which parts of the world offer ideal weather for your travel dates.

For travelers who want deeper control over their planning, SeasonMap takes climate-based travel visualization a step further. Rather than relying on simple, static temperature averages, SeasonMap converts multi-source climate data into dynamic, activity-specific comfort scores (0–100) mapped globally for every month.

What makes SeasonMap particularly interesting is the amount of data that goes into its comfort scores. The map doesn't just look at temperature and rainfall. Its methodology combines eight different factors, including feels-like temperature, humidity, rain, sunshine, daylight, wind, snow reliability and air quality.

Using the map you can choose what kind of trip you're planning. Select City Walking, Beach, Hiking, Running, or Ski & Snow, and the map recalculates to show you where and when the conditions are most suitable for your chosen activity. The result is a global heatmap of travel possibilities. Want to know where to go hiking in October? Or which parts of the world offer the best beach weather in February? SeasonMap makes it easy to explore your options.

170,000 Movies - One Interactive Map

2026-09-16T03:25:17.996-05:00

I recently reviewed the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find which iconic movie scenes were filmed right around the corner from your house.

However, the fact that a film was shot near you doesn't necessarily mean that the movie is set in your neighborhood. In many cases, filmmakers use one location to stand in for another, either because it's cheaper, more convenient, or simply looks the part.

For example, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, while set almost entirely in the moody, nocturnal streets of Greenwich Village and Manhattan, was shot almost entirely in London. Even more astonishingly, London was also used to create some of the iconic, sweat-soaked Vietnam jungle scenes in Full Metal Jacket.

Which is why if you want to discover which movies are actually set in your town you need the World Cinema Atlas.

World Cinema Atlas is an interactive globe featuring 170,000 films and TV series, each placed on the map according to where their stories take place. Zoom in on the globe and the lights turn into movie posters, revealing the films and series set in the locations you are exploring.

You can search the map by location to discover which movies are set in your hometown, or browse the world to find cinematic stories set in far-flung destinations. The atlas also allows you to filter the map by format, including films, series and documentaries, and by the era in which a story takes place. If you're in the mood for a particular genre, you can also filter by categories such as sci-fi, romance and more.

What makes the atlas particularly interesting is that it isn't restricted to stories set on Earth. There are also views for films and series set on real worlds beyond our planet, as well as entirely fictional worlds. So, alongside exploring the movies set in London, you can also discover stories set on Mars or venture into the fictional universes created by authors and filmmakers (such as Tolkien's Middle-earth).

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.