Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
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 As this situation is rapidly evolving the numbers here may now be somewhat out-of-date.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.
The map above is a more accurate reflection of the economic territory of each of the world’s countries. It includes not only land and territorial waters but also Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), which extend up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) off a country’s coast.
The map map above shows all countries (in red) that have territorial disputes with at least one other country. Those in white have no ongoing territorial disputes. The data used for the map came from Wikipedia’s List of territorial disputes.
A few of the more interesting disputes include:
As with our previous look at the Counterintuitive Comparison Of Relative Population Latitudes Of US, Canada & Europe, there are quite a few interesting things to note.
The map above shows the percentage of each country’s population that has some claim to European ancestry. Taken together, it could be argued that Europeans are the world’s largest diaspora, with an estimated population of over 480 million people.
However, just what constitutes European ancestry is highly controversial.