Maps Mania

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)

Building Age Maps: From NYC to LA

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

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

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

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

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

The World Drawn by 3,000 People

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

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

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

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

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

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

The US Deportation Map

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

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

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

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

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

The 540 Million Year History of the USA

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

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

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

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

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

GeoWhisperer - See How the World Has Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via: Webcurios

Mapping the Last Ice Age

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

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

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

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

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

Also See

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

Where’s the Perfect Weather?

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

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

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

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

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

170,000 Movies - One Interactive Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blowing Up the World Becomes More Fun

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

Blowing up the world has now become even more fun.

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

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

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

Via: webcurios

GeoGuessr Gets an Antipodean Time Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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