Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above is one of my all time favourites. It shows Pangaea, a supercontinent that existed from 300 million to 175 million years ago, with modern international borders.
Needless to say it would make international relations a little bit more complicated. Major changes include:
The map above shows one the craziest facts about the world: there are more people living inside the circle than outside of it. However, that’s not the only thing the circle contains.
Inside the circle you’ll also find:
There are a few interesting things to note about the map.
The map above is in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the largest. However, reddit user cragglerock93 disputes this claiming that Dubai’s World Islands, while “… not exactly a geographically accurate map,” are in fact be bigger.
The map above shows where you’d end up if you dug a tunnel straight through the earth and came out the other side. In geography, points on the other side of the world are known as antipodes.
There are a few interesting things to point out about antipodes:
Please note: The data from this map comes from Wikipedia and was believed accurate as of 29 August 2015. As this situation is rapidly evolving the numbers here may now be somewhat out-of-date.
The map above shows the number of Syrian refugees per capita or to put it another the number of Syrian refugees relative to the country’s population. As anyone following the crisis will quickly notice, there has been a widely varying response from different countries.
Notable ungenerous countries include:
9/11 was by far the worst terrorist attack in American history with 2,977 victims (excluding the 19 perpetrators). While the attacks were aimed at the United States, 372 foreign nationals from 61 countries were also victims.
Here’s a list of casualties by country based on data from Wikipedia:
The map above is interesting not because it looks beautiful, which it does, but because of where and when it was published.
The map above is possibly one of the least useful (and also vaguely racist) ethnic maps ever created. Titled “Present Distribution of Europeans, Chinese, Japanese and Negroes,” it was published in William R. Shepherd’s 1911 Historical Atlas.
The map above tells a few interesting stories. On the surface it shows that the US is the clear leader in higher education, with 146 out of the world’s top 500 universities (29.2%). This is over 3 times more than China, the next closest country.
However, that’s not the only thing that’s interesting.