10 Maps That Will Blow Your Mind

We trawled the net and put together a list of 10 maps that will blow your mind and challenge your preconceptions, my personal favourite is the map showing the actual size of Africa! I mean wow why are we not told this at school and why do all the maps we see show it in the wrong size? Anyway, we hope you enjoy this list as much as we did putting it together.

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This map was compiled by a data visualizer named John Nelson. Each dot on the image stands for an earthquake with at least a magnitude of 4. The size of the earthquake is represented by the brightness of the dot, and it’s breathtaking to see the shape of tectonic plates shown in this manner. There are over 203, 000 of dots on this map, and it was made in 2003.

This futuristic-looking Internet map is a brain-child of TeleGeography. Specifically, this map shows complete internet bandwidth between major cities, internet exchanges, and IP transit on major internet routes. Maps cool design was inspired by a movie called Tron Legacy, and we dare to say that it fits it like a glove.

Global warming is changing the climate at an increasing pace. Because of this, scientists developed a map that shows the possible trajectory of animal migration in America. This project is known as Migrations in Motion and shows the likely path of 3 different types of animals: mammals, birds, and amphibians.

On average, around 100,000 aeroplanes take off every day from one of 3, 275 airports spread over the globe. Martin Grandjean, a researcher from Switzerland, decided to map all of this out and thereby created one of the most visually satisfying maps. Longitude is represented with a different colour (red, yellow, green or blue), and the size of the cluster stands for the number of routes. This graph contains 37,153 single flights.

Many people are shocked when they see the real size of Africa. That is because the most commonly used map of the world (Mercator projection) dated from the 16th century features a wildly distorted size of this continent. Here, Africa is shown to be a little smaller than Canada, when in reality it is 3 times bigger. The picture above shows the Peters projection, which is more accurate in showing relative sizes of each continent.

A Redditor by the name Gradeskee put in a lot of work to mark each one of 7000 rivers that join into Mississippi. The name is a combination of 2 words misi-ziibi, which stands for the Great River. We can clearly see why this is the case.

This map illustrates just how many people are living on the territory of Southeast Asia. A little under 4 billion people live here, which is over half of the world's population (roughly 7.1 billion). Aside from China and India, there are over dozens of countries in this circle: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, South and North Korea, Burma, etc. U.N estimated that by 2050, over 3.3 billion people will live in bigger cities.

Currently, we have just a little under 200 (195) countries in the whole world. This is beautifully illustrated by the myriad of flags above. Out of them, only 2 countries are not part of the United Nations: the State of Palestine and the Holy See. Most of the Countries are located in Africa (54), followed by Asia (48), then Europe (44).

This is yet another impressive work of John Nelson. He used data available from NASA and NOAA to present every hurricane and tropical storm since 1851. They are marked by intensity, with dark blue being a tropical storm, and light green a level 5 hurricane. There are also 2 neat graphs that show proportional strength over the seasons and improved detection ability over time.

This piece of art was created by Cameron Beccario. He used the information available from the Global Forecast System to create an accurate model of wind fluctuation. Wind speeds (0 - 225 m/h) are represented with different colours ranging from blue which stands for light breeze up to pink for a serious hurricane.