Maps Mania

A Fair Election Map for the Midterms

2026-10-24T05:21:17.604-05:00

Will there be fair elections on November 3rd? I can't promise that, but Karim Douieb can promise a fair election map.

His 2026 House Forecast Map replaces the standard geographical congressional district map with one where every district is equal in size. Click the "One seat, one cell" button, and the map morphs from a 'geographic map into one where each state is resized by its seats and every district gets the same area.'

Reading the Battlefield

The interactive map synthesizes data from the Cook Political Report, categorizing all 435 House seats according to race competitiveness ratings:

Solid / Likely / Lean Democrats: 214 seats
Solid / Likely / Lean Republicans: 200 seats
Toss-ups: 21 seats

With 218 needed for a majority, the battleground centers around those 21 toss-up seats - Democrats need just 4 to reach the threshold, while Republicans require 18. Users can order districts by Cook rating or toggle district labels and state outlines to track pivotal seats across the nation.

Land Doesn't Vote

Geographic election maps inherently distort electoral reporting because land doesn't vote, people do. On a standard geographic map, large rural congressional districts - like Alaska’s single district or expansive districts across Montana, Wyoming, and Texas - dominate the visual canvas. Conversely, densely populated urban districts in cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles shrink down to tiny, almost invisible slivers. Because rural areas lean heavily Republican and urban centers lean heavily Democratic, a standard geographic map paints the nation in overwhelming swathes of red, creating a visual illusion that one party holds a massive lead even when an election is virtually deadlocked.

The Cartogram Advantage

Karim Douieb’s map solves this visual bias by using a continuous equal-area cartogram algorithm. By scaling each state to its exact allocation of House seats and dividing them into equal Voronoi cells, every single district gets 1/435th of the visual footprint - exactly matching its weight in the House of Representatives. By animating the smooth transition from geographic shapes into equal-sized cells, the map helps viewers immediately grasp the true election battlefield, giving an accurate picture of the balance of power heading into November.

Have You Had Your Five a Day?

2026-10-23T03:20:13.767-05:00

Cartographers generally agree that there are significant benefits to viewing at least five maps or globes every day. Regular map consumption can help improve your geographical awareness, strengthen your navigational muscles and provide essential nourishment for your inner explorer.

The 5 A Day campaign is based on advice from the International Geographical Union, which recommends playing at least one map game every day to lower the risk of geographical ignorance, chronic misplacement and embarrassing incidents of getting lost.

Fortunately, you don't need to swallow an entire atlas to get your daily geographical intake. Here are three nutritious map games to add to your daily cartographic diet.

1. KnowWhere: World Cities

Think of KnowWhere as your daily serving of geographical greens. Each day, you're presented with five cities and challenged to locate them on an unlabeled map. Drop a pin where you think each city belongs, then answer three questions about each location. The closer your pin is to the correct city, the more points you earn, with a bonus for identifying the right country. Choose Easy or Hard depending on your geographical fitness, or practise with a fixed selection of cities whenever you need an extra helping. It's a healthy combination of map-reading and trivia, guaranteed to put your world knowledge through its paces.

2. MapMinute

For those who prefer their geography served with a generous helping of history, MapMinute offers five historical clues every day. Your task is to identify where each event happened by placing a pin on a satellite globe. Each answer is worth up to 200 points, depending on how close you get to the correct location, giving you a maximum daily intake of 1,000 points. There's no timer, so you can take your time digesting each clue before discovering the correct location and reading the story behind it. With historical discoveries and source material included, MapMinute provides a particularly wholesome blend of geography and history.

3. Licence to Locate

If your geographical diet could use a little international intrigue, Licence to Locate is shaken, not stirred. This unofficial atlas documents 401 James Bond filming locations, but its Daily Dossier is the real daily supplement. Each day, you must identify five locations from the Bond films by clicking their positions on a map. Points are awarded according to how close your guesses are to the actual filming locations. From familiar city streets to exotic beaches and far-flung hideaways, you'll discover whether your knowledge of 007's globe-trotting adventures is genuinely world-class or merely a case of geographical wishful thinking.

So, have you had your five a day? With three different ways to exercise your map-reading muscles, there's no excuse for a geographical deficiency. Consult your atlas, sharpen your pins and remember: a map game a day keeps the misplaced traveller at bay.

Need even more geographical nutrition? Then try 8 Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr.

The World's Most Notable Places.

2026-10-22T03:10:47.891-05:00

Do you remember the World's Most Notable People Map. On Monday, I decided I'd build a World's Most Notable Places Map, showing locations based on their Wikipedia QRank. I abandoned the project today after discovering the Wikipedia Importance Map.

Earlier this month, Wikimedia Enterprise released the Geospatial Wikidata Databset.. This is a large, open dataset that connects geographic features in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with information held in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.

The idea behind the dataset is simple but powerful: OpenStreetMap tells you where things are and provides their geographic shapes, while Wikimedia projects can tell you what they are, why they matter and what is known about them. The dataset does the hard work of linking these sources together, making it easier to query this information without building your own complicated data-processing pipeline.

My bright idea was to use the Geospatial Wikidata Dataset to create A Map of the World's Most Notable Places, using Wikidata's QRank. QRank is a ranking signal for Wikidata entities, which correspond to subjects represented in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It measures their relative popularity across the whole Wikimedia ecosystem.

Which brings us to the Wikipedia Importance Map. The Wikipedia Importance Map maps geolocated Wikipedia articles around the world, with the size of each label reflecting the importance of the subject. The map combines two different measures of importance: PageRank, which analyses how Wikipedia articles link to one another across all language editions, and QRank, which uses pageviews to measure how popular articles are. The result is an interactive map that lets you explore the world through the subjects that attract the most attention on Wikipedia.

Even more interestingly, the map doesn't limit itself to articles with their own geographic coordinates. It also includes around 2.5 million subjects that can be associated with a place, such as people mapped to their birthplace, paintings to their museum, battles to where they were fought, and companies to their headquarters. These are displayed as colored dots, spread around the relevant town or city.

There is also a second map, the Wikivoyage Travel Map, which uses Wikivoyage data to map destinations and travel recommendations. It includes places to see, things to do, shopping, eating, drinking and sleeping, with their size determined by how often travellers read about them.

Exploring the places with the highest QRank in a particular area is an interesting way to discover its most prominent landmarks, people and historical events. It can help you identify places to visit, uncover local stories or simply find out what makes a particular town or city notable.

One caveat: a large label indicates importance according to the map's combined ranking signals, not necessarily historical significance or how worthwhile a place is to visit. It's a discovery tool, rather than a definitive guide to the world's most important places.

Pixelate the World

2026-10-21T03:11:24.015-05:00

One of the biggest trends in online mapping this year has definitely been pixelating the world.

Back in January, software engineer and artist Andy Coenen released his interactive, isometric pixel-art map of New York City: Isometric NYC. Since then, other developers have jumped on the bandwagon, and we now have:

Isopolis - isometric San Francisco
London, drawn - isometric London
earthtoPixels - isometric João Pessoa, Brasil

One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective. This is not really an oversight on the developer’s part, but rather a reflection of the sheer effort involved. To offer full 360-degree rotation, a creator would need to repeat the entire laborious pipeline - sourcing aerial map tiles, rendering them, applying pixel styling, and stitching the output into a deep-zoom map - four separate times, once for each compass direction (North, East, South, and West).

Perhaps that "laborious pipeline" could be shared.

London now boasts two interactive, isometric pixel-art maps. Tiny London is the second pixelated view of the capital I’ve seen, and it takes a completely different angle from London, drawn. Where London, drawn unexpectedly placed West at the top, Tiny London goes with the traditional North-facing orientation.

If the developers behind Tiny London and London, drawn were to collaborate, they would already be halfway toward creating a fully interactive, 360-degree isometric pixel-art map of London.

London is Bigger than Colorado

2026-10-20T03:09:31.777-05:00

London is twice as big as Colorado on the Actual Scale map.

Size comparison maps are nothing new. You’ve almost certainly used The True Size Of ... to drag the outlines of countries around a world map and compare their geographical sizes.

Actual Scale uses a similar drag-to-compare interface, but instead of geographical size, it compares population. Search for any city, state or country and drag its outline anywhere on the world map. The outline will grow or shrink to reflect the population density of the area it covers, while keeping the same total population.

In the image above, I’ve dragged London across the United States. Its boundary adjusts to encompass the same population wherever it lands. Drop London over New York, for example, and it suddenly looks a lot smaller!

Dragging places around on Actual Scale can be surprising. We tend to think of cities and countries in terms of their geographical footprint, but Actual Scale offers a different perspective, revealing just how unevenly people are distributed across the planet. It’s a clever new way to explore population size and compare the population density of different cities and countries.

There are 89,603 Dogs in New York City

2026-10-19T03:01:07.453-05:00

There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City.

Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog's name, breed and birth year, along with the owner's ZIP code.

Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city's dog population has changed over time.

Using the map you can search for a breed, a dog's name, or a neighborhood to discover where your pooch would fit in - and where they would stand out from the crowd. The map is colored by the most common dog breed in each neighborhood.

Labrador Retrievers (including crossbreeds) lead in 75 of the 197 neighborhoods, followed by Yorkshire Terriers in 58 and Shih Tzus in 39. You can also explore the breeds that are most distinctive to particular areas: those that appear disproportionately often compared with their citywide popularity.

There are plenty of other ways to dig into the data. You can filter the map by borough, highlight neighborhoods with above-average numbers of dogs per home, or hide the quarter of neighborhoods with the fewest dogs. And if you fancy a little canine cartographic mischief, you can even sink Staten Island.

The map sidebar includes links to some intriguing trends in the city's dog population. For example the huge 25% jump in dogs born in 2020 and the end of New York's French Bulldog boom in 2016.

Via: Webcurios

What is Your Walk Score?

2026-10-17T02:51:02.091-05:00

Walk Score provides address-level walkability scores, neighborhood maps, transit reports, and bike scores for virtually every city, town, and neighborhood in the U.S. and Canada. Integrated into real estate platforms such as Redfin, it is well-known and widely used across North American real estate markets. Unfortunately, its coverage outside North America is patchy.

This is why Raian Pollock decided to create Walkably.

Walkably maps walkability across 31 European countries, giving every street a score from 0 to 100. The scores are calculated from two factors: Reach (60% of the score) and Street Quality (40%).

Reach measures how far you have to walk along actual streets to reach eight everyday amenities: groceries, food and drink, shops, healthcare, schools, parks, cultural venues and public transport. The closer these amenities are, the higher the score. The availability of multiple nearby destinations also matters, so a street with several grocery stores within walking distance scores better than one with just a single option.

Street Quality assesses how pleasant the surrounding streets are for walking, taking into account traffic, noise, summer shade, nearby busy roads and slope. The shade estimates combine building-height data with tree maps, while noise data is included where city noise maps are available. Walkably also prevents locations with poor street quality from achieving the very highest scores, even if they are close to amenities.

You can search for an address or click any cell on the map to explore its score and see how it was calculated. Walkably identifies the nearest destinations in each of the eight categories, gives estimated walking times, and highlights the best and weakest streets nearby. It also compares walking times with places across Europe, allowing you to see whether your local amenities are closer or further away than they are for most Europeans.

What America Looks Like After 700 Meters of Sea Level Rise

2026-10-16T02:01:07.863-05:00

Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters?

The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters - meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment.

If you’re looking to explore actual, science-backed climate projections rather than wild cartographic extremes, Climate Central's Coastal Risk Finder is probably a better sea level rise map. However, Sliding Shores does offer a more dynamic, global perspective by rendering the entire planet as a 3D interactive globe rather than as a flat 2D map.

Rather than sticking strictly to realistic sea level forecasts, the map features 16 pre-set, extreme planetary scenarios - ranging from catastrophic rises like total ice sheet melt (+70m) or drowning Mt. Everest (+8,849m), down to dramatic ocean drop-offs like the Last Ice Age coastline (-120m) or draining the oceans entirely (-11,000m).

Travel Blogging & Mapping

2026-10-15T03:27:42.154-05:00

There are travel blogs and then there is Three Steps Off the Coast.

For the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey (now accompanied by their son Victor and pet dog) have been documenting their travels and sharing their photos, stories, itineraries, and budgets with the world on their popular travel blog. Now, to celebrate their ten-year anniversary of travel blogging, they have brought to life their 10 most memorable trips as immersive 3D travel maps.

10 Years, 10 Adventures is a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements, and trip narration. Instead of relying on standard mapping libraries like Mapbox or Google Maps SDKs, the project uses a bespoke WebGL rendering engine paired with custom heightmap and route data.

Each trip features an interactive playback that acts as a media player. Users can "Start the trip" to follow an automated 3D camera flight synchronized with custom audio narration and an interactive elevation profile. You can quickly pan and zoom to featured locations on the route using the links in the map sidebar or by dragging the elevation timeline.

In the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey have visited some stunning locations around the world. From the volcanic shores of Martinique and the dramatic peaks of Iceland to the misty Isle of Skye and the towering Canadian Rockies, 10 Years, 10 Adventures now offers some breathtaking tours of their personal highlights. Take the controls and explore all ten stunning 3D maps on the Trois Pas de Côté anniversary site.

The New Age of Building Age Maps Has Begun

2026-10-14T03:09:34.457-05:00

The new era of building age maps has begun. Block and Paper have been busy recently creating animated building-age maps of cities around the world, showing urban development unfold over time. The style has since been emulated by others, including Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County.

Now Alexander Bogachev has imported the idea to France, creating an animated building-age map of Paris that shows when each of the French capital's 122,435 buildings was constructed.

Paris, Building by Building provides an animated timeline of the construction of Paris since the year 900. One of the most surprising findings of this chronology is how much of Paris was built after the famous Haussmann period. According to the map, only one building in fifteen dates from 1851 to 1870, the era associated with Baron Haussmann's transformation of the city. Six times as many buildings were actually constructed during the Belle Époque, between 1871 and 1914.

Paris, Building by Building, offers more than an animated journey through the architectural history of Paris. Bogachev has introduced two features that make this building age map particularly interesting to explore.

The first allows you to isolate any street in Paris and view its buildings side by side. Selecting a street removes all the other buildings from the map, making it much easier to focus on the ages of the buildings along that particular stretch of road. It's a simple but effective way to compare the architectural history of individual streets without the distraction of the surrounding city.

The second feature lets you step down to street level and explore Paris in 3D. Switch to the street-level panorama to see the city from a first-person perspective, then walk around and explore. The buildings remain coloured according to their construction dates, so you can investigate Paris's architectural history from the ground as well as from above.

Together, these features turn the map into more than a chronological visualization. You can watch Paris grow through the decades, compare the buildings along a single street, and then wander through a 3D version of the city to see its architectural history up close.

Via: Datawrapper's Data Vis Dispatch

The World is Your War Zone

2026-10-12T04:04:00.000-05:00

There are quite a few ugly buildings in my town that I'd like to demolish. Now I have the chance to actually knock them down (if only virtually) with World Strike.

World Strike is a fun new open-world, real-time multiplayer tank game where the arena is literally the entire planet - and every single building can be reduced to rubble. So if you’ve ever looked at a building and thought, "This would benefit from some high-explosive ordnance," then World Strike is the browser game you've been waiting for.

From a web mapping perspective, World Strike is an impressive technical showcase of Three.js integrated directly inside MapLibre GL JS. Rather than rendering standard extruded vector tiles via MapLibre's built-in fill-extrusion layers, the developer routes OpenStreetMap footprint data into a custom Three.js WebGL layer.

This unlocks a depth of visual detail rarely seen in interactive map games:

Procedural Architectural Rendering: Buildings feature detailed windows complete with illusionary interior depth ("rooms behind the windows").

Synchronized Destruction Mechanics: Buildings don't simply vanish when hit. Instead, they collapse section-by-section based on damage hitboxes.

Persistent Multiplayer State: Rubble from destroyed structures remains on the map for all connected players, transforming recognisable urban landscapes into persistent warzones.

World Strike pushes the boundary of what can be done with Three.js canvas integration inside MapLibre. For another example of map data used with Three.js you can try playing my own Hunt for Red Octangles game.

Mapping the Cosmos

2026-10-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

Want to explore the night sky? Two new interactive maps offer very different ways to do it. Skyviewer lets you explore the vast astronomical survey being created by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, while Stargazing for Beginners helps you work out what you can actually see in the sky above you.

Skyviewer is an interactive window onto Rubin Observatory's survey of the cosmos. Located in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for the next ten years, creating an enormous time-lapse record of the changing universe. You can use Skyviewer to explore the results from these scans, navigating around Rubin's imagery to discover stars, galaxies and other celestial objects.

The experience also includes Skysynth, which turns this visual exploration into a sonified journey through the cosmos.

If Skyviewer is about exploring the universe, Stargazing for Beginners is about exploring the sky above your head. The interactive sky map uses your location and the current time to show what is visible, with a mobile orientation mode that lets you point your phone at the sky to identify objects.

You can speed up time to watch the sky change over hours or days, filter objects by type and limiting magnitude, and search for individual stars and other celestial objects. The map also includes altitude charts, twilight information and a calendar of upcoming astronomical events.

There is even an astronomical events layer showing rise and set times, lunar phases, Moon perigee and apogee, equinoxes and solstices, planetary events and conjunctions, meteor-shower peaks, eclipses and future planetary transits. You can therefore use the map not just to see what is in the sky now, but to find out what astronomical events you might be able to watch in the future.

Animated Map Videos

2026-10-09T02:00:00.000-05:00

Ever wished you could turn your holiday GPS track into one of those slick animated maps you see in travel videos? Map Animator lets you do exactly that - and you don't need any video-editing or mapping skills to get started.

This free browser-based tool lets you draw a journey on a map or import a GPX recording and then turn it into an animated video. You can use it for road trips, motorcycle tours, cycling adventures, hikes, sailing trips and pretty much any other journey you can record with a GPS device.

There are plenty of ways to customise the appearance of the animation. You can choose different map styles, add place-name signs and markers, and even add your own photographs to the route. Photo signs appear as the animated route reaches the location where the photograph was taken, briefly popping up like instant prints before shrinking down to a small circular photo. For a more elaborate presentation you can also switch on 3D vehicles, complete with little animated details such as a wake behind a boat, smoke from a train or footsteps for a walking route.

The resulting animations can be exported as MP4 video in 1080p, 2K or 4K, with frame rates from 24 to 60fps. You can choose from landscape, portrait, square and other formats, making the resulting clips suitable for dropping straight into a video editor.

If you're looking for a quick way to turn a GPS track into an animated map for a travel video, Map Animator is an impressively capable solution that manages to keep the whole process simple. Best of all, everything happens in your browser, so your routes, photos and videos stay on your own computer rather than being uploaded to external servers.

GeoFactGuessr

2026-10-08T02:42:00.000-05:00

FactMap is the latest map game to be a little like GeoGuessr. However instead of guessing the locations of random Street View images, in this game you need to point to the locations of five daily historical or geographical facts.

FactMap gives you a fact and asks you to work out where on Earth it happened. The answer might be the place where a famous person died, where a treaty was signed, where a band formed, or where a particular animal lives. For example, one question might ask: Where did Julius Caesar die? You then drop a pin on the map and see how close you were.

There are five questions every day, with everyone receiving the same set of questions. Each round is worth up to 1,000 points, with a maximum daily score of 5,000. The closer your pin is to the correct location, the more points you receive. The scoring is based on straight-line distance, although the game sensibly makes some questions more forgiving than others. Pinpointing a city is one thing; trying to identify the exact location of a shipwreck in the middle of an ocean is quite another.

You can also ask for a hint if you're completely stuck. However, using a hint reduces the maximum score for that round from 1,000 to 750, so there is a trade-off between playing it safe and taking a guess.

Five new facts arrive every day at midnight (Paris time).

Via: webcurios

Find Movies - by Location & Period!

2026-10-07T02:00:00.000-05:00

In September, we were graced with the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find where iconic movie scenes were filmed, and the World Cinema Atlas, which allows you to discover movies by where they were set

Now, a new interactive map lets you discover films by both where and when they take place.

If you have a keen interest in watching a movie set in a particular time and place, then TitleAtlas is the interactive map for you. For example, you could use TitleAtlas to search for films set in 19th-century New York (Gangs of New York, Little Women, etc), or to find movies set in London during the Swinging Sixties (The Krays, Quadrophenia, etc).

The TitleAtlas search bar also allows you to filter by genre and film rating - so (if you are so inclined) you can easily look up Romance films set in Paris or action movies set in Hong Kong - and filter out any without a good IMDB rating.

And if all that was not enough already - TitleAtlas also lets you search for TV series in exactly the same way - by period and by location.

Alternative History Maps

2026-10-06T02:00:00.000-05:00

What if Czechia had become part of the British Empire? Perhaps, like the United States, its map would now be dotted with towns and cities bearing familiar English place-names.

There is actually no need to imagine this alternative historical timeline because Czengland is just such a map - a map of the Czech Republic with all the Czech place-names replaced with British equivalents. So Prague becomes London, Brno becomes Birmingham, and a whole host of Czech streets, districts, towns and landmarks acquire familiar British names.

What makes this map particularly interesting is that these aren't just random name swaps. An attempt has been made to use close analogues. For example, in Prague Malostranská is labelled Westminster. Both are historic central areas closely associated with national government and parliament, so this immediately gives a Londoner a familiar geographical reference point for understanding where they are in Prague.

Click on any (English) place-name label on Czengland to see both its borrowed and real names, with links to locate either one in Google Maps. The map also highlights the selected feature, so a street, river or district is clearly visible rather than simply appearing in an information panel. That panel also provides a brief definition of the clicked location, which often helps explain why the chosen analogue has been used.

A second main map view reverses the idea, showing Anglická republika - the UK with Czech place-names. So the relationship works in both directions: Czech places acquire British identities on one map, while British places acquire Czech identities on the other. The two views can therefore be explored as alternative geographical versions of each other.

This isn't the first interactive map I've used that features analogue place-names, but I haven't seen one undertaken in quite so much detail. I genuinely think that this kind of map could be quite useful for tourists visiting a country. The developer now just needs to provide analogue place-names for the other 200-odd countries in the world.

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)