Topic
geography
- Yukon River Delta
The Yukon River delta , Alaska.
- Map Of Paris
Map of Paris by Michel-Étienne Turgot. 1739.
- Switzerland
The beautifully rendered topography of Switzerland. (full resolution)
- Sidi Bou Said
The blue and white architecture of Sidi Bou Said. Tunis, Tunisia.
- Richat Structure
The Richat Structure in the Saharan Desert of Mauritania. An eroded geologic dome.
- Log Booms And Sawmills
Log booms and sawmills. From Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene project. Vancouver Island above, Lagos below.
- Pohja Korvemaa Nature Reserve
Põhja-Kõrvemaa Nature Reserve , Estonia..
- Siberian City Of Yakutsk
The Siberian city ofYakutsk, in the Russian Far East, is unfathomably cold, yet home to over a quarter million people: Yakutsk has an average annual temperature of 17.6 °F winter high temperatures consistently well be…
- The Island Of Hispaniola
The island of Hispaniola , from the ISS. (full resolution version)
- Bell Island
Bell Island), part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago in Russia. I couldn’t believe this: The island was the first among the Franz Josef archipelago to be visited by Benjamin Leigh Smith in his 1880 expedition. In hi…
- Mount Api
The karsting limestone of Mount Api , Malaysia.
- Chillon Castle
Chillon Castle , island fortress on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The building originally dates to the 11th century, but there’s evidence the Romans had forts on the small island a millennium earlier. It’s functioned as f…
- Europe And Its Fragmented City State Landscape Of
Europe and its fragmented city-state landscape of 1444. See the full, zoomable hi-res version.
- Aladaghlar
The Aladaghlar Mountains of northwest Iran.
- Lucernes KappelbrĂĽcke Chapel Bridge Was Built In 1360
Lucerne’sKappelbrücke (Chapel Bridge) was built in 1360. I got to walk across when I visited in 2014. Switzerland is like a 2-sided time warp: part medieval village, part urban futurescape.
- Centuripe A Sicilian Town That Looks Like A
Centuripe — a Sicilian town that looks like a person. Browsing maps is my favorite way into new rabbit holes. Now central Sicily is on the travel wishlist.
- Naypyidaw
The barren highways of Naypyidaw. Don’t listen to the high modernists. You can’t will cities into existence.
- Seaflooding
A harebrained scheme to flood deserts, create ecosystems out of dead zones, sequester carbon, and create new economically productive geographies — through "seaflooding". Take places like the Dead Sea, which is already…
- The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart
This is a fascinating video on the Wallace Line, which separates to biogeographic regions: The wildlife on each side differ tremendously from one another, even the line cuts through straits that aren't wide at all. Na…
- Architecture from Every Country
This was a fantastic thread from The Cultural Tutor — so simple, but had me on an epic Wikipedia / Google Maps rabbit hole. Some of my favorite examples: Las Lajas Shrine, Colombia Samtavisi Cathedral, Georgia Monaste…
- Intro to Areography
The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere. Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.
- Places: The English Channel
This image from Landsat 8 shows the western end of the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall. A phytoplankton bloom spreads for dozens of miles, filling the St. Austell Bay. The only time I was on the Channel was…
- Places: the Tes River Basin
This one cropped up through Google's Earth View Chrome extension. The Tes River runs east to west into northwest Mongolia from the Sayan Mountains in Siberia. It empties into the Uvs Nuur Basin, a UNESCO World Heritag…
- Weekend Reading: Tagging with Turf, Mars Panorama, and Kinds of Easy
🗺 turf-tagger Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser. 🚀 Mars Curiosity Hi…
- Places: Remnants of an Ancient Lake
Lake Chad spans 4 national borders in the central Sahel: Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. Since the 1960s it's shrunk to about 5% its ancestral size, due to overuse, mismanagement, and climate shifts. This NASA pho…
- Weekend Reading: MiLB, Naming Public Transit, and Soccer Playing Styles
⚾ Mapping the New MiLB Landscape Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the co…
- All of the World’s Borders by Age
In preparation for this year’s Geography 2050 theme (“borders in a borderless world”), this map gives a helpful sense of how relatively young most of the world’s international boundaries are. Outside of Europe, most b…
- An Island Chain
I’m an airplane window seat guy. So when on a flight with good views, I end up gazing out the window for most of the time and capturing my own aerial imagery. Our Monday flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan took us…
- Places: Kimbolton Region
I first saw this through Google's Earth View a few months back. It's a coastal area of the Kimberly Region in Western Australia. Bands of low-lying mountain ranges run from southeast to northwest, jutting out into the…
- EthicalGEO
Our friends over at the American Geographical Society have spearheaded a new competition (in partnership with the Omidyar Network) called EthicalGEO to seek out new ideas on how the community can better understand the…
- Places: The Kolyma River
This striking image shows sediment flow from the Kolyma, a 1,300 mile braided river that originates in the mountains of Eastern Siberia. For about eight months of the year, the Kolyma River is frozen to depths of seve…
- Imaging the Earth, Every Day
Most people don't know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet's satellite constellation can cove…
- Places: Mergui Archipelago
On this edition of Places is the Mergui Archipelago, a string of coastal islands off of southern Myanmar in the Andaman Sea. I saw this image a few years back on NASA's Earth Observatory feed. It's an amazing snapshot…
- Places: Col du Galibier
The mountain stages of the Tour de France are some of my favorite events in sports. This edition of Places features a tribute to this year's 18th stage, and one of my favorite climbs of the Alps: the Col du Galibier,…
- Places: Great Slave Lake
Our place for today I found via NASA's Earth Observatory feed: the Great Slave Lake of the Canadian Northwest Territory. While it's a big body of water when you pan over it on the map, it's size is hard to fathom when…
- Places: Lake Natron
Only geography nerds have NASA's Earth Observatory feed set up in their RSS reader. On there a team from NASA share interesting images from around the world as they come in from the various earth observation satellite…
- Places: Richat Structure
I browse maps all the time, panning around in Google Earth whenever I want to look something up, favoriting things along the way. I thought I’d start documenting some of those here. The Richat Structure is a circular…
- Weekend Reading: Brains and Language, Hillshading in Blender, and Antifragility
🧠Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language "It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk," the authors wrote…
- The Geography of The Odyssey
I love this piece — a detailed analysis, backstory, and new map of Odysseus's supposed voyages around the Mediterranean: In 1597 the cartographer Abraham Ortelius became the first person to draw a map of Odysseus’ tra…
- Mapbox Boundaries
Mapbox has built this curated dataset of administrative boundaries from country level down to local geographic units like arrondissements, prefectures, and districts. Knowing how difficult it is to aggregate and clean…
- Equal Earth Physical Map
Tom Patterson has released a new version of his Equal Earth Map, this time as a physical topographic map style. Beautiful stuff.
- Sierra Nevada, Basin and Range
One of the highlights of the west → east flight from Northern California is the chance to get views over the ranges of California, Nevada, and Colorado. The first leg of my flight home this week took me from San Jose…
- A Live Experiment in Disassembling a Map
This was a cool idea from cartographer Daniel Huffman. He live-streamed a walkthrough taking apart one of his map projects in Illustrator to see how he puts it all together. I love this idea and am excited to see him…
- The Salton Sea
I don't remember what got me to it, but the other day I found this short documetary video about Southern California's Salton Sea, a saline lake about 80 miles inland from San Diego: I knew about its infamy as a failed…
- A Vast Wilderness
I picked up John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country this week. You could think of it like a biography of Alaska: the region pre- and post-statehood, its people, the wilderness, wildlife, and its vastness. Woven througho…
- A Primer on Foresight
The last several months I've been spending quite a bit of time working on this: our geospatial data and analytical product line called Foresight. We've been in this business dating back to 2000 in various forms and us…
- The Earth in 8K
{% include video-vimeo.html id="240106846" title="The Earth in 8K" %} Mesmerizing, hypnotic video shot in 8K pointed straight down from an airplane. It looks like these were originally shot for Apple to use as their "…
- What Did the Earth Look Like?
In the spirit of yesterday's post on the Earth of the past, this interactive map lets you browse back in time to see what oceans and landmasses looked like all the way back to 750 million years ago. Try typing in your…
- The History of the World on One Map
Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map. This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Gree…
- Cycling: A Sport for Geographers
The UCI World Tour season kicks off this week with the Tour Down Under. I started following pro cycling closely about 5 years ago, but since it’s fairly hard to get access to on broadcasts, I only get to watch a handf…