Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above presents a very short history of colonialism around the world from 1492-2008 in one simple GIF. Interestingly, it doesn’t limit itself to European colonialism but also includes the colonial empires of the United States, Russia/Soviet Union and Japan.
Brilliant Maps is now just over 1 year old. Since launching we’ve made a total of 167 posts. So we thought now was as good a time as any to look back at what the 15 best and most popular maps were for 2015 (based on the number of visitors).
If you were one of them, then a huge thank you! It means a huge amount to everyone at Brilliant Maps that you obviously love maps as much as we do.
We’re continually doing our best to bring you maps we think tell interesting stories. We’ve obviously gotten that right many times over the past year, but perhaps more interesting are the maps that didn’t quite find an audience.
The map above shows what Adam’s Bridge (aka Rama’s Bridge or Ram Setu) in the Palk Strait might have looked like prior to 1480 when it connected India and Sri Lanka.
The map above shows the 6 different people who bring gifts to Polish children on Christmas. They range from the traditional Święty Mikołaj (Santa Claus) to the scary Dziadek Mróz (Grandfather Frost).
Earlier this week reddit user nerkuras challenged r/Europe to Draw a map of Europe from memory only.
Several American users took on the challenge and created the hilariously bad maps you can see here. However, there’s not one but two unexpected twists to the story, revealed in the maps below:
The map above shows the world drawn from a single line, just as if it were drawn using an [easyazon_link identifier=”B00000J0HG” locale=”US” tag=”brilliantmaps-20″]Etch a Sketch[/easyazon_link].
Given how popular the Probability of a White Christmas Across Europe map turned out to be, we were happy to find that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has created a similar map for the United States.
The map above shows the probability of a white Christmas, defined as having snow on the ground on December 25th, across Europe. The map was created by Finish reddit user Haayoaie who states that:
The map above shows East Asia (aka The Far East) in 1932. It’s interesting both because of what is and what is not included.
The map above shows the initial 6 states created by the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon granted by the League of Nations in 1922.