Maps Mania

The Never-Ending Coastline

2026-11-14T09:42:58.555-05:00

Today's 30DayMapChallenge task is Borgesian Map – a map so detailed it becomes the territory. The challenge takes its inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges' short story On Exactitude in Science, in which cartographers create a map so accurate and detailed that it eventually becomes the same size as the empire it represents.

For my contribution, I've created The Never-Ending Coastline, an interactive map exploring one of cartography's most intriguing curiosities: the coastline paradox.

How long is a coastline? It sounds like a straightforward geographical question, but the answer depends entirely on how closely you look.

My map illustrates this using three different versions of the same stretch of coastline. At the first level, we trace the broad outline, smoothing over small bays, inlets and headlands. Zoom in and we capture more of the shoreline's twists and turns. Zoom in again and we discover yet more detail, producing an even longer coastline.

As you scroll through the map, each successive level reveals a more detailed version of the same shore. The map zooms in as the resolution increases, while the measured coastline grows longer. At each stage, the polyline can be gradually straightened out horizontally, preserving its measured length and making it easy to compare the different results.

The fascinating thing is that all three lines represent exactly the same physical stretch of coastline, with identical starting and ending points. Yet simply by measuring it at different resolutions, we get three different lengths.

This is the coastline paradox. The smaller the measuring stick, the more coastal detail we capture, and the longer our measurement becomes. In an ideal mathematical fractal, this process can continue indefinitely: the coastline has no finite perimeter, even though it encloses a finite area.

And that brings us back to Borges. His fictional cartographers created a map that eventually became as large as the territory itself. My coastline map explores a similar idea: the closer we try to make our representation match the real world, the more detail we have to include – and the longer our map becomes.

This isn't the first time I've mapped this subject. In fact you may even prefer The Coastline Paradox map.

Explore Britain's Hidden Archaeology

2026-11-14T06:19:34.544-05:00

This is a LiDAR view of Stonehenge. The image also shows the extensive Normanton Down Barrow Cemetery, where dozens of Bronze Age burial mounds are scattered across the surrounding landscape. Look closely and you can also make out the Avenue, a prehistoric earthwork consisting of parallel banks and ditches that once provided a formal approach to Stonehenge.

This is just one example of the extraordinary archaeological detail revealed by LiDAR Lens - Great Britain. The interactive map uses high-resolution LiDAR elevation data to expose subtle features in the landscape that are often invisible in conventional maps and aerial photographs. Using a circular lens, you can explore the terrain through different visualisation techniques, including hillshade, slope, local relief and sky-view factor. These reveal everything from ancient burial mounds and earthworks to abandoned field systems and historic landscape features.

To get started with LiDAR Lens you can explore these interesting locations:

Each offers a different landscape to investigate, and switching between the visualisation options can reveal details you might otherwise never notice. You aren't limited to these locations, of course. LiDAR Lens also includes a search function that lets you find other places by name, postcode or grid reference. Try searching for your own local area to see what hidden landscape features that you can uncover.

Via: Webcurios

How to Make Interactive Maps for Free

2026-11-13T03:00:00.000-05:00

You don't need an expensive subscription to Google Maps, Mapbox or Esri to create your own interactive web maps. There is a growing collection of free, open-source tools that allow you to build sophisticated, customised maps that can be published online without paying for mapping software or map tiles.

My own mapping projects are built almost entirely using a lightweight toolkit of open-source and browser-based tools. This allows me to find geographical data, edit and refine it, design custom map styles and turn everything into interactive maps using JavaScript.

Here is how you can get started building your own interactive map for free.

1. MapLibre and Leaflet – Create Your Interactive Map

MapLibre is an excellent open-source alternative to commercial mapping platforms such as Mapbox, the Google Maps API and Esri.

MapLibre GL JS is a JavaScript library that allows you to display interactive maps on your website. You can add markers, draw lines and polygons, display geographical datasets, create 3D visualisations and build all sorts of custom map-based applications. It is particularly powerful when working with vector tiles and custom map styles.

Another excellent option is Leaflet.js, a lightweight open-source JavaScript library for creating interactive maps. Leaflet is particularly easy to get started with and is ideal for maps featuring markers, popups, lines and polygons. It has a large collection of plugins that allow you to extend its functionality.

The main difference is that Leaflet is often the easier starting point for straightforward interactive maps, whereas MapLibre offers more advanced capabilities for custom vector maps, 3D buildings, terrain and sophisticated map visualisations.

You could also investigate OpenLayers, another powerful open-source mapping library. It supports a wide range of geographical data formats and mapping services, making it particularly useful for more complex GIS applications.

If you want to go further and create 3D globes and virtual representations of the Earth, CesiumJS is another interesting free option.

All these libraries provide the software for displaying and interacting with maps. They don't necessarily provide the underlying map data or tiles, which brings us to the next step.

2. OpenFreeMap and VersaTiles – Get Free Map Tiles

MapLibre and Leaflet provide the software to display your map, but you'll also need a source of underlying map tiles.

OpenFreeMap is a particularly useful option. It provides free global map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data, which you can use with MapLibre.

This makes it an excellent alternative to subscription-based map tile providers such as Mapbox. You can use its hosted map styles without having to pay for a monthly subscription or worry about usage-based mapping charges.

Another project worth exploring is VersaTiles, a completely free and open-source software (FLOSS) stack for generating, distributing and using map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data.

VersaTiles offers two ways to use its mapping infrastructure. You can host your own map tile server, giving you complete control over your mapping infrastructure, or use its free hosted tile server at tiles.versatiles.org.

The hosted service provides OpenStreetMap vector tiles and ready-made map styles that can be used directly with MapLibre. You don't need an API key or subscription, making it particularly easy to get started.

There are a few caveats: the hosted server is provided as a demo service without guaranteed uptime, and its styles and libraries can change. It is therefore a great option for experimenting and smaller projects, while developers needing a more reliable production service can host their own VersaTiles server.

A third option is Protomaps, which offers another interesting approach to serving map tiles.

Protomaps uses PMTiles, a format that packages map tiles into a single file. Rather than running a conventional tile server, you can host this file on ordinary static file hosting or cloud storage and use it with MapLibre. This can be particularly useful if you want to host your own mapping data without maintaining a dedicated tile server.

Between hosted services such as OpenFreeMap and VersaTiles, and self-hosted solutions such as VersaTiles and Protomaps, there are plenty of ways to obtain map tiles without paying commercial subscription fees.

3. Maputnik – Design Your Own Map Style

If you want something more distinctive than a standard street map, Maputnik is a free, browser-based visual editor for designing custom map styles.

It works with MapLibre-compatible styles and allows you to customise almost every aspect of your basemap.

You can change the colours of roads, rivers, parks and buildings, adjust the appearance of labels, hide unwanted features and create entirely new visual styles.

Maputnik is particularly useful because you don't need to write the style code yourself. You can make changes visually and export the resulting style as a JSON file to use in your MapLibre project.

This means you can create a map that looks completely different from the standard street maps provided by OpenFreeMap.

4. Overpass Turbo – Find OpenStreetMap Data

Once you have your basemap, you'll probably want to add some of your own geographical information.

Overpass Turbo is a fantastic free tool for searching and extracting data from OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap contains an enormous amount of geographical information, including roads, buildings, rivers, parks, shops, landmarks and countless other features.

Overpass Turbo allows you to search this database using queries. For example, you could extract all the castles in England, every railway station in London or all the pubs within a particular area.

You can visualise your results directly on a map and export the data in GeoJSON format, which can then be loaded into MapLibre.

There are also other ways to obtain OpenStreetMap data, depending on what you need.

Geofabrik Downloads provides ready-made OpenStreetMap extracts organised by continent, country and region. This is particularly useful when you want a large dataset rather than extracting individual features with an Overpass query.

BBBike Extract Service offers another approach. It allows you to select a geographical area and download the OpenStreetMap data for that area in a variety of formats. This is particularly useful when you want data for a particular city or region.

In short, Overpass Turbo is great for extracting particular types of features, Geofabrik is useful for downloading entire regions, and BBBike is ideal for obtaining data for a custom geographical area.

5. geojson.io and QGIS – Draw and Edit Your Data

One of the most useful tools for working with geographical data is geojson.io.

This free online editor allows you to draw points, lines and polygons directly onto a map. You can also import existing GeoJSON files, edit their features and add descriptive information.

For example, you might use Overpass Turbo to download a collection of historical buildings, then open that dataset in geojson.io to add extra information or draw additional features.

You can export your finished work as a GeoJSON file, ready to use in MapLibre.

If you want to create interactive maps without writing any JavaScript, another useful option is uMap. It allows you to create and share maps using OpenStreetMap basemaps, adding markers, lines and polygons through a straightforward online interface.

For more substantial geographical editing, QGIS is an excellent free desktop GIS application. It can handle GeoJSON, shapefiles, raster datasets and many other formats. You can use it to create, edit, analyse and export geographical data.

QGIS is considerably more powerful than geojson.io, although it also has a steeper learning curve. If you want to work with more complicated geographical datasets without paying for commercial GIS software, it is well worth investigating.

6. Mapshaper and Turf.js – Refine and Analyse Your Data

Once you've obtained your geographical data, you may need to clean it up, simplify it or perform some geographical calculations.

Mapshaper is an excellent free browser-based tool for editing and refining geographical datasets.

It is particularly useful when working with large GeoJSON files that contain thousands of points or complicated boundaries.

You can use Mapshaper to simplify geometries, remove unwanted features, merge datasets, filter geographical information and convert between different spatial data formats.

For example, if you have downloaded a very detailed dataset of administrative boundaries, you can use Mapshaper to simplify those boundaries and reduce the file size. This can make a considerable difference to how quickly your data loads in a web map.

For more advanced geographical analysis, Turf.js is a free JavaScript library that allows you to perform spatial calculations directly in your browser.

Turf can calculate distances and areas, create buffers around geographical features, find intersections and determine whether points fall inside particular polygons.

For example, you could use Turf to identify which towns fall within a particular administrative boundary or calculate the distance between a collection of landmarks.

Mapshaper is particularly useful for preparing and simplifying geographical datasets, while Turf allows you to perform geographical calculations and transformations programmatically as part of your interactive map.

Putting It All Together

These tools provide almost everything you need to create your own interactive web maps without paying for commercial mapping software or subscription-based map tiles.

A typical workflow might look something like this:

MapLibre or Leaflet – Choose the JavaScript library that will display your interactive map.
OpenFreeMap or VersaTiles – Supply the underlying map tiles.
Maputnik – Design a custom style for your basemap.
Overpass Turbo, Geofabrik or BBBike – Find and extract geographical data from OpenStreetMap.
geojson.io or QGIS – Draw, inspect and edit your geographical features.
Mapshaper – Simplify and refine your data before adding it to your map.
Turf.js – Perform geographical calculations and spatial analysis within your application.
Protomaps – Consider hosting your own vector tiles using the PMTiles format.

You don't need to use every tool in this list. For a straightforward interactive map, Leaflet, OpenStreetMap data and geojson.io might be all you need. For more ambitious projects involving custom vector styles, large datasets and 3D visualisations, MapLibre and the other tools offer considerably more possibilities.

The beauty of this toolkit is that you can find geographical data, edit it, design your own basemap and publish a fully interactive map without needing an expensive GIS licence or commercial mapping subscription.

You will still need somewhere to host your finished map (GitHub Pages is one free option), and some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript will help. But the mapping tools themselves needn't cost you anything.

One important point: free software and free map data are not necessarily the same thing as unrestricted data. OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which includes attribution and other requirements. Always check the licence and attribution requirements of the data and tile provider you use.

If you're interested in making interactive maps, these are a great place to start.

GeoGuessr in Space

2026-11-12T03:34:17.543-05:00

I've spent too much time in my life playing GeoGuessr, trying to work out where in the world I am from little more than a road sign, a distant mountain or the architecture of a nearby building. But what if you took away the roads, the signs and pretty much everything else that makes Earth recognisable? What if, instead, you had to work out where you were somewhere in the Solar System?

That's the idea behind SpaceGuesser, a planetary guessing game that takes the familiar GeoGuessr formula and launches it into space.

The premise is simple. You're dropped into a panorama somewhere in the Solar System and have to work out where you are. Rather than exploring a Google Street View image, you're looking around landscapes captured on other planets and moons, or examining orbital imagery collected by spacecraft during planetary missions.

Around half of the rounds feature ground-level panoramas, drawn from a collection of more than 14,000 images. Many of these were captured by NASA's Mars rovers, including Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance.

The remaining rounds take you away from the planetary surface altogether. These use orbital views rendered using the SpaceMap project, allowing you to explore mapped worlds throughout the Solar System. This means that your next guessing challenge might involve recognising a Martian crater, identifying a landscape on one of Jupiter's moons or figuring out which distant world a spacecraft was photographing during a flyby.

SpaceGuesser currently offers several ways to play. You can start with a tutorial to get accustomed to navigating the imagery and making your guesses, try the daily challenge to compare your score with other players, or jump straight into a quick game. There's also a multiplayer mode where you can create a lobby and invite friends simply by sharing a game code.

SpaceGuesser is the latest addition to a growing collection of games inspired by GeoGuessr. If you'd like to explore some more geographical guessing games, take a look at my earlier round-up of Eight Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr.

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music

2026-11-11T04:29:25.566-05:00

Inspired by The Pudding's lo-pi radio, which turns the digits of pi into an endless stream of lo-fi music, I decided to see if I could create something similar for landscapes. The result is The Sound of Music: an experimental map that turns the shape of the land into a musical composition, where the hills really are alive with the sound of music.

The map lets you explore locations around the world and listen to the music generated by their terrain. As the landscape is drawn, notes are played to create a musical interpretation of the contours. You can watch the terrain take shape while listening to the melody it produces. And because the music is generated from the elevation data, different landscapes produce different compositions.

The project began as an adaptation of yesterday's 30DayMapChallenge map. I wanted to take that original contour-map experiment a little further, so I switched the elevation data over to Mapterhorn. This means the map is no longer limited to the particular location and elevation data used in the original version. Mapterhorn makes it possible to generate terrain for locations anywhere in the world (just add a lat,lng to the end of the URL). I also decided to add another dimension to the experiment: sound.

So how does a landscape write its own tune? The map translates different characteristics of the terrain into musical instructions. Elevation helps determine the pitch of the notes, with higher ground generally producing higher sounds. The length and complexity of the contours influence the duration and intensity of the notes, while their position across the landscape can influence where the sound sits in the stereo field. The contours are effectively providing the musical score.

There is a little more to it than simply assigning a note to each contour. The geometry of the landscape is also used to determine the musical character of the composition, including its scale, chord progression and tempo. This gives each location its own musical fingerprint, with the aim of making a rugged mountain range sound quite different from a gentler landscape.

The result is a map that lets you listen to the landscape. Pick a mountain, explore its contours and hear the music that it makes.

Contoured Fuji

2026-11-10T10:09:09.573-05:00

Mount Fuji - Contours

Today's 30DayMapChallenge is - Prompting Only

Yesterday Andy Woodruff posted this animated contour map:

I liked the animated effect and so I decided to try and create something similar for today's 30DayMapChallenge. The challenge is:

'For this map, make AI work for its money and produce something from start to finish in a chat window or on the command line.'

My initial prompt for ChatGPT was

'Using only the contours in this geojson https://mapsmania.github.io/mapchallenge/contours.geojson, (downloaded from Axis Maps Contours) and three.js create a map of Mount Fuji. I want the map to be a top down view. I want the map to slowly animate into view. The highest elevation contour line should appear first, then the next highest etc. Use a color ramp for each elevation with the darkest color at the top.'

The result was (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) a map almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Andy's animation. But never mind I liked the results and decided to try a few more prompts in ChatGPT to develop the map further, by adding a 3D effect, rotating from a top down map to a side on effect and then reducing the vertical exaggeration. The final result can by viewed on my Mount Fuji - Contours map.

This is the second three.js map I've created using the same contours of Mount Fuji for this year's 30DayMapChallenge. You might also like this Neon Fuji map - made for the 10 Minute map challenge.

Has a Satellite Been Watching You?

2026-11-10T03:25:58.838-05:00

Have you ever wondered how many satellites have passed overhead while you've been going about your daily business? Probably quite a few. But how many of them were actually looking at you? Watched is an intriguing new interactive map which attempts to answer that question by revealing which satellites have passed over any location on Earth during the last seven days, and, more interestingly, which of them actually took a photograph.

Visit Watched and enter any location in the world. The map will then reconstruct the satellite activity above that spot over the previous week, identifying the satellite that passed within viewing range and searching public satellite imagery archives for photographs captured during those passes.

The result is a fascinating combination of satellite tracking, Earth observation imagery and a 3D globe. You can replay the satellite passes, watch their trajectories around the Earth and browse the photographs taken during each encounter. The globe even includes the positions of thousands of other tracked objects orbiting our planet, illuminated by the real position of the Sun.

Not every satellite that passes overhead is necessarily taking a photograph, however. Watched is careful to distinguish between different levels of observation. A satellite is labelled Watched when an actual image of your chosen location can be found in a public archive. Likely Watched means a satellite's camera covered the location, but no photograph has been published. Could Have Pointed Here identifies commercial satellites which were in a position to photograph the location but whose operators do not disclose where their cameras were pointing. Finally, Passed Overhead simply means that a satellite crossed your patch of sky.

There are some important limitations. Watched cannot track classified military and spy satellites, and commercial satellite operators do not generally reveal their imaging schedules. Nor does the application provide live surveillance: satellite photographs can take several hours or even days to appear in public archives. And before you start worrying about being photographed in your back garden, the imagery is not nearly that detailed. At best, a single pixel represents around 10 metres on the ground.

Blowing in the Wind

2026-11-09T03:53:25.543-05:00

There is something undeniably romantic about casting a message in a bottle into the ocean. After all, what could be more enchanting than surrendering a personal secret to the tides, with nothing but the hope that it might one day wash ashore and find its way into a stranger's hands?

Tell the Sky takes this idea to the skies. However with this interactive map, instead of throwing a bottle into the ocean, you write a message on a glowing virtual lantern and release it into the wind. Carried by real-world wind currents, your lantern drifts across the world until someone catches it, reads your message and adds one of their own before sending it on its way again.

The map visualizes global wind patterns with animated streams flowing around the planet. But these aren't just decorative weather conditions. They determine where your lantern travels. Launch a lantern and it will be carried along by the prevailing winds, potentially travelling across continents and oceans before another user has an opportunity to catch it.

When someone catches your lantern, they can read your original message, add a message of their own and release it back into the atmosphere. Your lantern then continues its journey, accumulating messages as it travels from person to person. You can follow its progress on the map and see the cities it passes through and the people who have helped it on its way.

If you prefer sending your post by bottle then you can use Unstoried: Send a Message in a Bottle instead. This WebGL map allows you to drop a virtual message into the ocean and discover what messages drift back to you from strangers around the world.

Utopian London

2026-11-08T03:56:22.476-05:00

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Utopia.

There have been lots of pixel-art maps appearing online recently. I covered several of these projects in my recent Pixelate the World post. For today's challenge I thought it might be interesting to create a pixelated map of London – not as it is, but as it might look in an ideal world.

Greater London covers approximately 1,591 square kilometres. If each zoomed-in map tile covers roughly 0.15 square kilometres, I would need in the region of 10,600 images to create enough tiles to cover the entire capital. That's a few too many for a simple map challenge, so I decided to create a much smaller map - using just one tile - of Trafalgar Square.

My Utopian London map reimagines Trafalgar Square as a greener, more cycle-friendly urban landscape. To create the map I started by feeding an aerial image of Trafalgar Square into Gemini and asking it to transform the scene into pixel art. I also asked it to grass over the roads, plant more trees and introduce dedicated cycle lanes.

The result is a more appealing alternative vision of central London. The traffic has disappeared, roads have become green spaces, and cyclists and pedestrians have been given more room to enjoy the city.

Turning an image into a map

Having created my Utopian London image, I wanted to see if I could turn it into an interactive map. For this I used MapLibre GL JS, but without using any conventional map tiles or basemap.

MapLibre has an image source type which allows you to use an ordinary JPEG or PNG as a map layer. All you need to do is specify the four geographical coordinates corresponding to the corners of the image. MapLibre then positions the image within its map canvas, allowing you to zoom and pan around it just as you would with a conventional online map.

Because my image isn't geographically referenced, I simply assigned it an arbitrary set of coordinates. I also preserved the original image's aspect ratio (1355 × 768 pixels) to ensure that the finished map wasn't stretched.

The result is a map made from a single image. There are no OpenStreetMap tiles, no satellite imagery and no external basemap. Just my AI-generated vision of a greener Trafalgar Square, displayed using MapLibre.

For now, this is just one small block of Utopia rather than an attempt to map the whole of Thomas More's imaginary island.

Axis Maps Contours

2026-11-07T04:10:01.763-05:00

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is 10 minute map.

My Mount Fuji map took 30 seconds.

Vibe-coding might be cheating (and perhaps even the end of civilisation as we know it), but it really can help developers create online maps very, very quickly. To create my map, I simply entered the following prompt into ChatGPT:

'I have downloaded a geojson of Mount Fuji. Can you give me the code for a three.js illuminated neon contour map. Add an animation to rotate around the center of the mountain. My geojson URL is https://mapsmania.github.io/mapchallenge/contours.geojson'

It then took me 30 seconds to download and run the resulting HTML file. Job done!

Admittedly, I had cheated a little by preparing a GeoJSON file of Mount Fuji's contours beforehand. This took another 30 seconds. I downloaded the file using Axis Maps' Contours, centering the map on Mount Fuji before downloading its contour data as GeoJSON.

So, from start to finish, my map took one minute to create.

Axis Maps Contours is a free, browser-based tool for creating customised topographic contour maps of almost anywhere in the world. Simply navigate to your chosen location and you can generate contour lines at regular elevation intervals, measured in either metres or feet. You can customise the contour intervals, line colours and weights, and choose between traditional contour lines and illuminated contours, which use shaded bands to give the impression of raised terrain. You can also add hillshading, roads and labels, or use hypsometric tints to colour the landscape according to elevation.

The resulting maps can be downloaded as PNG images, SVG vector graphics or GeoJSON files. This makes Contours useful for much more than producing conventional topographic maps. The SVG exports could be used to create printed maps, illustrations or even laser-cut terrain models, while the GeoJSON data can be imported into GIS software or used to create interactive mapping projects. As my Mount Fuji experiment demonstrates, you can also feed the exported contour data into Three.js to create animated 3D terrain visualisations.

Noah's Ark found on Vintage Maps

2026-11-06T11:55:52.704-05:00

For thousands of years, cartographers have been mapping more than just the known world. Medieval and early modern maps often mixed observed geography with religious beliefs, folklore and mythical stories, placing legendary cities, lost kingdoms and biblical locations alongside real-world places.

Mythical Tours is a fascinating narrated journey through this imaginary geography, using centuries of historical maps to track down the locations of places that many people today believe exist only in legend.

Among the mythical locations you can discover are the lost city of Atlantis, Hy-Brasil (the phantom island supposedly located off the west coast of Ireland), and even the legendary city of Merlin. The tour also ventures into biblical geography, exploring where historical cartographers believed they could locate the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark.

Despite the 'Maps Mania' credit on Mythical Tours, my involvement was limited to suggesting to TripGeo that mythical geography might make an interesting theme for one of their new TripGeo Tours. These narrated guided map tours currently include, alongside Mythical Tours, two amazing journeys into outer space: Solar Tour and Cosmic Trip, as well as the rather scary game Spooky Tours.

Collect Birds, Not Beers

2026-11-06T04:22:39.289-05:00

If your children are too young to enjoy Untappd, you could introduce them to Birds Around the World instead. With this map, rather than tracking all the beers they've drunk, they can collect all the different birds they've discovered! Get them started with binoculars and field guides rather than pints and beer goggles.

Birds Around the World is an interactive 3D globe that allows children to explore the world's birdlife. Hundreds of bird species are represented on the globe, with each dot marking where a particular species can be found. Click on a bird to discover a photograph, its conservation status, what it eats and, best of all, a recording of its actual bird call.

There is plenty more to discover beyond simply identifying birds. Children can test their knowledge with games that challenge them to identify birds by their calls or work out where different species live. There is also a Bird of the Day feature and a collection tracker for keeping tabs on all the birds they have spotted.

The globe is designed to make learning about wildlife fun and accessible, but there is some interesting science behind it too. The dietary information comes from the open-data EltonTraits database, conservation categories are drawn from the IUCN Red List via Wikidata, and the bird calls are recordings contributed by the Xeno-canto community. The map itself is based on Natural Earth data.

Birds Around the World is completely free, has no adverts and doesn't require an account. It is a lovely little educational globe that might encourage younger explorers to discover the extraordinary diversity of birds around the planet - and perhaps learn a few bird calls along the way.

Can You See the Fire Beacon?

2026-11-05T04:48:21.980-05:00

Before mobile phones, radio and even the telegraph, fire beacons were used as an early warning system designed to alert communities to the approach of hostile forces. The beacons were deliberately positioned on prominent high ground, allowing one fire to be seen from another. When an enemy was spotted, a chain of burning beacons could then relay the warning across the landscape.

The system was particularly important during the threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588. Beacons could take various forms, from simple bonfires to barrels of pitch or iron fire baskets mounted on tall wooden poles. Some were substantial enough to have permanent structures.

My Hampshire Fire Beacons map explores how this historic warning network might have worked. It plots known and suspected beacon locations across Hampshire and allows you to investigate which sites could potentially have been visible to one another. It also uses elevation data to allow you to search for possible locations for any fire beacons lost from the historical records.

Select a beacon and the map can calculate its lines of sight to all the other beacon locations. The analysis uses elevation data to establish whether the intervening terrain would have blocked the view. Visible connections are drawn in green, while obstructed routes are shown in red. You can also adjust the assumed height of the beacon above the ground to see how this changes the network.

There is another feature which makes the map particularly interesting. You can ask it to search the surrounding landscape for prominent hilltops which might have made suitable locations for additional beacons. These hypothetical sites are added to the map so that their potential lines of sight can be tested against the existing network.

The historical data comes primarily from Old Hampshire Mapped, which has painstakingly examined a succession of historic maps to identify possible beacon sites. These include maps by Christopher Saxton, John Norden, Wenceslaus Hollar, Joan Blaeu and others, dating from the late sixteenth century onwards. The website compares the symbols and place names used by different mapmakers and provides approximate locations for many of the sites.

There are, however, some significant problems with the accuracy of this data. Historic mapmakers did not all use the same symbols to represent beacons. Some show posts or flames on hilltops, others use different illustrations, while some simply label a place as a beacon. A symbol might be ambiguous, a location only approximately identifiable, or a name might have survived long after the original beacon had disappeared. Even Old Hampshire Mapped cautions that the absence of a beacon from a particular map is not evidence that one did not exist.

The locations plotted on my map should therefore be treated as historical leads rather than as a definitive inventory of beacon sites. The line-of-sight calculations are also approximations. They depend on the accuracy of the location data, the elevation model and the assumed height of each beacon. A green line does not prove that two historical beacons could communicate in practice, any more than a red line proves that they could not: vegetation, buildings, weather and the precise construction of the beacon could all have made a difference.

Nevertheless, I think the process is useful as a way of investigating the historic network. I think it shows that there are very few visible connections in the 'known' network. This might suggest that other beacons existed which have not yet been identified. The map's hypothetical hilltop locations provide possible candidates for further research. They are not discoveries in themselves, but places worth investigating in historic maps, documents, local histories and archaeological records.

In other words, my map does not claim to rediscover Hampshire's lost fire beacons. However it might suggest a possible method for searching for fire beacons 'lost' from the record.

The Alleyways of Britain

2026-11-04T05:00:17.024-05:00

In October, YouGov published a small-multiple visualisation showing the popularity of regional names for alleyways in the UK. The maps in What else do Britons call an alleyway? are based on survey data. YouGov asked 39,224 Britons which words they personally use to describe an alleyway. The resulting maps show the percentage of people in each county or region who use particular terms.

I thought it might be interesting to also map the different words for alleyways that actually appear in street names around the UK.

To do this, I downloaded the Ordnance Survey Open Names dataset, which contains millions of named places and geographical features across Great Britain. I searched the dataset for regional alleyway terms such as twitten, ginnel, jitty, vennel and chare, then plotted the locations of the matching records on two maps. Unlike the YouGov maps, which show where people say they use particular words, my maps shows where those words appear in recorded place names.

My Geography of Words map plots the locations of these different alleyway names across Great Britain. Each term is represented by a different colour, allowing you to see at a glance where particular words are concentrated. You can use the legend to switch individual terms on and off, or show all the names together to explore the geographical clusters. It is fascinating to see how some words cluster in particular parts of the country, while others appear much more widely.

A second map, Alleyway Name Clusters, presents the same data as a choropleth map, colouring each county according to the number of recorded street names containing the selected alleyway term. This makes it easier to compare the geographical distribution of the different words and, in particular, to set the Ordnance Survey data alongside the regional patterns revealed by YouGov's survey. Use the drop-down menu to switch between terms and see where each name is most commonly found.

YouGov's maps show the proportion of people who say they use a particular word, whereas my choropleth shows the number of recorded place names containing that word in each area. A high count on my map doesn't necessarily mean that the term is widely used in everyday conversation. It just means that this is where this term is used in actual alleyway place names across the UK.

U.S. Midterm Election Maps

2026-11-04T03:49:16.537-05:00

If you want to know what happened in yesterday's midterm elections, you should probably start with The Economist's Swing from 2024 map. The map is paywalled, but the screenshot above tells the story rather well: almost the entire USA (perhaps with the exception of South Dakota) swung towards the Democrats.

The Guardian has unpaywalled maps of both the Senate and House results. The House results map is a neat cartogram, in which each House seat is shown as 'the same size regardless of its geography'. It illustrates very clearly how the Republicans have relatively few seats along the West Coast (California, Oregon and Washington) and throughout the Northeast and New England. They have, however, managed to retain a number of seats across the South (Texas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina), as well as across the Central Plains, Great Plains and Mountain West (including Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas).

If you don't like cartograms and prefer your election maps to be as geographically accurate as possible, then you might prefer the New York Times. I'd argue, however, that this view rather obscures the real story of the midterm elections. The phrase 'people vote, not land' springs to mind. You can, though, switch to the Shift Map view to get a much better sense of the seismic swing towards the Democrats in this election.

How Poland Drifted to the West

2026-11-03T10:54:33.294-05:00

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Polygons.

At the risk of starting World War III, I've created a map of Poland's Historical Borders. The map uses polygons to show how Poland's borders have changed at different points in its history. The historical boundaries were downloaded from OpenHistoricalMap.

The map includes three snapshots: the semi-autonomous Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1815, the Second Polish Republic immediately before the German and Soviet invasions of 1939, and the post-war borders established in 1945. But rather than simply displaying these three historical boundaries, I thought it would be interesting to use turf.js to calculate how much territory Poland has gained and lost between these different periods.

Turf.js provides the spatial analysis behind three additional map layers. Using its polygon operations, I first calculate the area shared by all three historical boundaries, which I've called Common Ground. I then combine the 1815 and 1939 territories and subtract the 1945 polygon to identify Lost Territory. Finally, I subtract those earlier territories from the 1945 polygon to reveal Gained Territory. Turf.js also calculates the approximate area of each resulting polygon, allowing the map to show not just where the borders changed, but how much land is involved.

The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived

2026-11-03T04:02:04.451-05:00

It seems astonishing to me now that only a fortnight has passed since I climbed to the roof of Maps Mania Tower and proclaimed to the world that the Age of the Pixel Map had begun. And yet here I stand before you today, bearing the sad news of its demise and announcing, with no little ceremony, that The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived.

Two weeks ago, I observed that "One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective." My proposed solution was to create a pixel map offering four distinct viewpoints: North, South, East and West.

But I should have known that this limitation would ultimately prove to be the pixel map's fatal flaw. A pixel represents a two-dimensional square on a flat image. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that it would eventually fall to a successor born into a world of depth and volume. A voxel is essentially a pixel in three dimensions: a tiny cube occupying space rather than a square on a flat surface. Rather than being confined to a single viewpoint (or even four, as I had previously proposed), voxel maps can be rotated freely, allowing you to inspect the landscape from any angle.

The pixel map is dead. Long live the voxel map!

Warsaw in Voxels demonstrates the considerable advantages of this new cartographic order. Created by Piotr Migdał, this interactive, browser-based 3D map of central Warsaw combines OpenStreetMap data with a Minecraft and MagicaVoxel-inspired aesthetic. Built using Three.js, it transforms the Polish capital into a wonderfully detailed voxel landscape.

Essentially, what we have here is a real-world map borrowing techniques from the world of computer games. Alongside changing weather and daylight effects, the map features animated cars and pedestrians moving through the streets. You can even click on these animated figures to automatically switch to a first-person perspective, following their journey through the city as they move around its streets.

A Neon Matterhorn

2026-11-02T09:28:54.061-05:00

For Day 2 of the #30DayMapChallenge, the theme is Lines. For my contribution, I've created MapterGLOW, an interactive 3D terrain map that turns elevation data into glowing neon contour lines.

The map uses elevation tiles from Mapterhorn to build a three-dimensional model of the landscape, overlaid with luminous cyan contour lines at 50-metre intervals. You can rotate the terrain, tilt the camera and zoom in and out to explore the topography from different angles.

You aren't restricted to exploring the Matterhorn, either. The map accepts latitude and longitude coordinates in the URL hash, allowing you to load terrain from different parts of the world. For example, try Mont Blanc, the Eiger or the Jungfrau. You can also substitute your own coordinates to explore other mountain ranges and landscapes.

I built the map using Three.js, loading Mapterhorn's elevation tiles directly into the browser. The elevation data is decoded and resampled into a terrain mesh, which is then used to generate contour lines at regular height intervals. Finally, I added some neon lighting effects to give the contours their distinctive electric-blue glow.

It's a relatively simple experiment in 3D cartography, but I rather like how the glowing contours reveal the shape of the landscape.

Europe Divided by Driving Time

2026-11-02T03:37:22.223-05:00

What if every European capital sent out a car at exactly the same moment, with the aim of reaching every town and village in Europe before its rivals? Which capital would claim the most territory, and how far would its influence extend beyond its own national borders?

If Every European Capital Sent Out a Car at the Same Moment is an intriguing interactive map from Copilot Travel that attempts to answer these questions. It imagines 38 cars setting off simultaneously from 38 European capitals, with each car travelling outwards along the road network at typical driving speeds. Every location in Europe is then assigned to whichever capital's car can reach it first.

The resulting map divides Europe into 38 differently coloured territories, each representing the area that can be reached more quickly from one capital than from any of the others. The visualization is rather like a Voronoi diagram, in which a territory is divided according to the distance from a collection of starting points. However, instead of using straight-line distances to determine where one territory ends and another begins, this map uses travel time. In other words, it creates a kind of time-based Voronoi diagram using road-network isochrones.

You can watch the territories emerge in the animation. As the hours pass, coloured isochrones creep outwards from each capital, following the road network and expanding into neighbouring countries. Eventually, the different territories meet and the whole of Europe is covered by a patchwork of competing capital cities.

You can play or pause the race, drag the timeline to explore how the territories develop hour by hour, or select an individual capital to see the extent of its territory. You can also hover anywhere on the map to discover which capital would reach that location first, along with the arrival times of the next closest competitors. Alternatively, enter the name of a town to discover which capital wins the race there.

If you prefer to travel Europe by Train you can explore train travel times from every European capital (or anywhere else in Europe) using the excellent Chronotrains interactive map.

Via: WeeklyOSM

The #30DayMapChallenge Begins

2026-11-01T04:32:33.932-05:00

Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France.

My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain.

The map was created using Three.js, with elevation data from Mapterhorn, a service providing terrain elevation data for creating 3D maps of the Earth's surface. The elevation data was downloaded as a GeoTIFF, a georeferenced image format which stores geographic information alongside the elevation values for each pixel. This data was then converted into a 3D terrain model.

The walking route was plotted separately using geojson.io, an online tool for creating and editing GeoJSON geographic data. The resulting LineString was added to the 3D terrain and animated, with its height adjusted to follow the contours of the landscape.

My map is not a patch on the maps in 10 Years, 10 Adventures, but I'm happy with the results so far. With a little vibe-coding help from ChatGPT, the map only took 3-4 hours to develop. I probably won't take the project much further, as I suspect the map isn't of much interest to anybody else. However, there are plenty of ways I could improve it, including adding more photographs and points of interest, incorporating additional walking routes, and perhaps even adding narration to turn it into a more complete virtual tour of the peninsula.

How to Navigate the Roman Empire

2026-10-31T04:06:21.550-05:00

The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high.

The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its routes.

Unlike a modern geographical map, the Tabula Peutingeriana makes little attempt to represent the world to scale. Its extraordinary elongated shape, with the Mediterranean compressed into a narrow strip, reflects its real purpose: showing the connections between settlements and the routes linking them. Distances between places are marked in Roman miles, making it an important record of how people could travel across the Roman world.

You can explore this extraordinary document on the Tabula Peutingeriana interactive map. This website allows you to navigate the original map, search for ancient and modern place names, and explore the locations represented on it alongside a contemporary geographical map. I'd recommend starting with the narrated Demo, which provides a guided tour of the interactive map. This is a great introduction to both the original map and to the many features of the interactive version of map.

Another way to explore the Tabula Peutingeriana is through OmnesViae. Select the 'Tabula' option to view an interactive version of the Peutinger map, or choose 'Iter' to open the site's Roman route planner.

OmnesViae allows you to enter a starting point and destination and calculate a route between them using the ancient Roman road network. Rather than simply drawing a modern route between two locations, it reconstructs journeys using the settlements, road connections and distances recorded in the Tabula Peutingeriana. The planner calculates the shortest route using the distances given in the map, allowing you to discover how a journey might have been made in the Roman world.

Famous Place Pictures in Japanese Art

2026-10-30T04:56:47.627-05:00

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai ignited a golden age of Japanese landscape art with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Capturing the topography, seasons, and human activity around Japan's sacred peak, Hokusai’s masterpiece inspired his contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige, to create One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - a breathtaking visual survey of Japan’s bustling capital.

Both series belong to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), "pictures of the floating world," a genre of Edo-period woodblock prints. More specifically, they elevated the sub-genre of Meisho-e (名所絵), or "famous place pictures." Fueled by a 19th-century domestic travel boom, these prints served as both fine art and geographical guides, cataloging iconic landmarks and scenic views for a public eager to explore.

Before single-sheet landscape prints exploded in popularity, publisher-cartographers created Meisho Ki (名所記) - bound, woodblock-printed travel guides that paired pictorial maps of major routes like the Tokaido highway with illustrated sights. Hokusai and Hiroshige were directly drawing on this established cartographic publishing tradition.

Hiroshige's prints, in particular, were closely tied to spatial geography. Publishers often released index sheets - essentially pictorial table-of-contents maps - showing buyers where each view in a series was located along a route or across the city of Edo. This tradition of mapping Japanese Meisho-e (pictures of famous places) has continued into the digital age, with interactive maps now allowing us to explore the real-world landscapes behind these historic prints.

For example, you can explore the landscapes that inspired Hokusai's famous Mount Fuji prints with the Views of Mount Fuji interactive map. Created in ArcGIS Scene Viewer, the map overlays seven of Hokusai's prints onto the actual landscapes they depict. Among them are The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning (also known as South Wind, Clear Sky or Red Fuji), which is shown in the screenshot at the top of this post.

Steven Feldman has now released an interactive map of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. This isn't the first interactive map I've come across featuring Hiroshige's prints. The Ukiyo-e Map, for example, maps not only his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, but also his Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces, Eight Views of Ōmi, and Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. It also includes Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Unfortunately, while the Ukiyo-e Map is perhaps the most comprehensive map of meisho-e (pictures of famous places), it is now missing its basemap. Perhaps Steven could take a sneak peek at the map's JavaScript, which contains the coordinates of all the woodblock prints featured, and use them to expand the scope of his own map.

Alternatively, if you'd like to get the Ukiyo-e Map working again, there's a workaround. Open your browser's developer tools while viewing the map, select the Console, and paste in the following JavaScript code. This will load the necessary libraries and add an OpenFreeMap Positron basemap to the existing Leaflet map.

'(async () => {

// Load required CSS

const css = [

'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.css'

];

css.forEach(url => {

const link = document.createElement('link');

link.rel = 'stylesheet';

link.href = url;

document.head.appendChild(link);

});

// Load JavaScript libraries

function loadScript(url) {

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

const script = document.createElement('script');

script.src = url;

script.onload = resolve;

script.onerror = reject;

document.head.appendChild(script);

});

}

await loadScript(

'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.js'

);

await loadScript(

'https://unpkg.com/@maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet@0.1.1/leaflet-maplibre-gl.js'

);

// Remove the unsuccessful raster layer

mymap.eachLayer(layer => {

if (layer._url?.includes('tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron')) {

mymap.removeLayer(layer);

}

});

// Add OpenFreeMap Positron

L.maplibreGL({

style: 'https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron'

}).addTo(mymap);

console.log('OpenFreeMap Positron added!');

})();'

Hat-tip: Map of the Week

To Infinity & Beyond

2026-10-29T04:23:18.683-05:00

Yesterday I visited the Night Maps exhibition at the Warburg Institute, which explores the history of celestial maps and globes, and how mapping the heavens has shaped our understanding of the world. Which might account for why I was so blown away by TripGeo Space - a brand new collection of space and sci-fi development projects.

Currently, TripGeo Space consists of two interstellar space tours:

I'm not sure how accurately either tour represents the cosmos, or even whether they strictly qualify as maps at all. However, both are really impressive interactive 3D tours - and perhaps the closest I'll ever get to fulfilling my dreams of space travel.

In Solar Trip, you're taken on “a hyper-fast cruise round the real Solar System aboard the luxury starliner Seraphine”. There are plenty of options to customise your voyage. You can choose from several themed trips, including tours of the giant planets, Jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings and the icy worlds beyond Neptune, or plan your own itinerary using the voyage planner.

You can also adjust your travel speed, choose where to begin aboard the ship, and switch between cinematic and relativistic drive effects. During the voyage, you can customise the visual detail, turn narration on or off, and explore the ship itself. My tip is to remember two particularly useful keyboard shortcuts: N skips to the next destination, while Tab opens the voyage planner. Both are handy if you want to get straight to the next stop or plot your own course through the Solar System.

After exploring our Solar System, you should be ready to travel to infinity and beyond with Cosmic Trip. Aboard the survey ship Lumen, you embark on a voyage through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and travelling through the formation of the first stars and galaxies, black holes, stellar nurseries and the many different lives and deaths of stars, before eventually returning home to our own Sun and Earth.

As with Solar Trip, you can explore the ship, customise your journey and adjust the speed of your voyage. Cosmic Trip also features a cosmic timeline, along with science consoles containing articles and infographics that explain the phenomena you encounter along the way.

How the World Draws the World

2026-10-28T04:32:26.581-05:00

I recently shared this map (above) showing the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people playing the Borderline country border game. This combined map brings together all the borders and coastlines drawn by players in Borderline and its companion game, Coastlines.

In Borderline, players attempt to draw the outlines of individual countries on a blank map from memory. The results can be surprisingly interesting, which is why, alongside the global map above, you can also explore How the crowd draws every country.

This multiple-map visualization animates between each country's actual borders and a composite outline created from all the players' attempts to draw it.

This animated map (above), for example, shows the difference between the crowd-drawn UK and its real borders.

Click on any of the individual country maps in How the Crowd Draws Every Country to compare the real country with the players' collective efforts. You can explore differences in area, the westernmost, easternmost, southernmost and northernmost points, and the overall shape of the borders.

You can also sort the multiple maps by most accurate, closest in area or closest in length - to see which countries players have managed to draw most successfully.

Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Manga Universe

2026-10-27T04:15:51.025-05:00

Lately, I’ve been wondering why there's been such a dearth of interesting map styles among all the new "vibe-coded" projects floating around. My guess is that AI toolchains encourage developers to churn out projects at breakneck speed, leaving little time to jump into Maputnik and craft a bespoke style that actually complements their app’s aesthetic.

But just as I was losing hope of ever seeing another genuinely inventive style - reminiscent of the golden age of Stamen's Water Color Map or the Hand Drawn Map of Toulouse, along comes Location Scout (known in Japanese as Dokodemo Rokehan / どこでもロケハン).

Location Scout is an impressive interactive 3D tool that transforms real-world spatial data into manga-style background line art. Enter your home coordinates into the search box, and you can explore your neighborhood rendered as if it were taken straight out of a Japanese comic. The app offers several visual rendering modes - including Color + Lines, Line Art, and a clean Clay (white model) look. It even includes sliders to fine-tune line weight and object outlines.

All this is true of any individual map style - but where Location Scout truly comes into its own is in its 3D view. Clicking the map or selecting the "eye level" perspective drops you directly into a 3D street-level environment. This effectively turns your local neighborhood into a manga environment, allowing you to stroll around your hometown as if walking through a Japanese inspired video game.

Via: Webcurios