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Mapped.Earth

@mapped.earth

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Animated maps that move you, drawn by real data.
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If you like the maps you see here and want one of your own, please reach out! No commission or project too large or small.

Email: Aaron@mapped.earth
IG DMs also work! by @mapped.earth

Every map you've ever seen slices the ocean apart to keep the land whole. This one does the opposite.

The Spilhaus projection tears the continents apart so the water never has to break: every ocean on Earth, drawn as one single connected body. Layered on top is a full year of real satellite-tracked surface currents, colored by sea temperature.

Have you ever actually seen the whole ocean at once?

Data: NASA OSCAR surface currents, NOAA OISST sea-surface temperature

#ocean #oceancurrents #cartography #map #dataviz by @mapped.earth

Every light in this loop is real, and every one is on its own true cycle: the lighthouses and harbor beacons of New England, flashing tonight exactly as they flash here.

The big rotating optics sweep. The quick-flash and occulting lights blink in place. The green and red glows mark harbor mouths and channel edges, real bearings a ship steers by. The densest chain is Maine, where the coast breaks into thousands of islands and ledges, and the cluster around Cape Cod and Nantucket guards shoals that reach far out to sea.

Light data: OpenSeaMap / OpenStreetMap and NOAA's electronic navigational charts. Overlapping harbor beacons consolidated.
#newengland #maine #lighthouse #maps #cartography #dataviz #atlantic #geography #mapping by @mapped.earth

Lower the North Sea just 30 meters and Dogger Bank becomes an island. At about 45 meters Britain is joined to Europe across Doggerland, a plain people hunted on until roughly 8,000 years ago.

Ireland looks like it should join too, but in the last ice age the Irish Sea was filled with ice, not dry land, and the sea came back as the ice melted. The last water left is in the Skagerrak, about 700 meters deep.

Data: EMODnet Bathymetry · NOAA ETOPO 2022 · NASA Blue Marble · ICE-6G_C sea level and ice. Heights exaggerated 12x.

#northsea #doggerland #geography #iceage #maps by @mapped.earth

Each fall about 590,000 Common Cranes leave the bogs and forests of Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Russia and fly south to winter in France, Spain, North Africa, Israel and Ethiopia.

Swedish and German cranes gather by the tens of thousands on the island of Rügen before crossing to France and Spain. Cranes from European Russia fly to Israel's Hula Valley, and some go on to Ethiopia.

Each dot stands for a group of simulated birds placed from real sightings and GPS tracks, not tracked individuals.

Data: eBird checklists via GBIF (doi:10.15468/dl.8vfm69 and doi:10.15468/dl.jkrft2), GPS tracks from the Movebank Data Repository (doi:10.5441/001/1.597, doi:10.5441/001/1.604, doi:10.5441/001/1.593), flyway counts from Prange and Ilyashenko 2019. Imagery: NASA Blue Marble Next Generation.
Photo: Tjustorparn, CC BY-SA 4.0.

#birdmigration #cranes #commoncrane #birds #maps by @mapped.earth

Each fall more than 5 million Snow Geese leave their nesting colonies around Hudson Bay and the central Arctic and pour south to the rice fields and coastal marshes of Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.

Greater Snow Geese from Bylot Island rest on the St. Lawrence on their way to Delaware Bay. Far to the west, the geese of Banks Island and Russia's Wrangel Island spend the winter in California's Central Valley and on Puget Sound.

Each dot stands for a group of simulated birds placed from real sightings and band recoveries, not tracked individuals.

Data: eBird checklists via GBIF (doi:10.15468/dl.c9xe7a and doi:10.15468/dl.m3wd8x), USGS Bird Banding Laboratory band recoveries (doi:10.5066/P1KPZGAR), ECCC waterfowl population status report. Imagery: NASA Blue Marble Next Generation.
Photo: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0.

#birdmigration #snowgoose #geese #birds #maps by @mapped.earth

Half the people in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador live on less than a quarter of one percent of the land.

Labels point to the top of each 3D column. The city is at the column's base.

Data: Kontur Population 2023

#populationdensity #maps #dataviz #canada #ontario #quebec #newbrunswick #novascotia #pei #newfoundland by @mapped.earth

Half the people in British Columbia, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nunavut and Manitoba live on less than a twentieth of one percent of the land.

Labels point to the top of each 3D column. The city is at the column's base.

Data: Kontur Population 2023

#populationdensity #maps #dataviz #canada #britishcolumbia #yukon #nwt #alberta #saskatchewan #nunavut #manitoba by @mapped.earth

Twice a day the tide flows into the Rade de Brest through one narrow strait, the Goulet, and twice a day it flows back out. This was a neap week: by October 19 the sea at Brest rose and fell just 1.7 meters, and the jet through the Goulet eased to well under half its strength before building again, while the whole Rade cooled.

These are the Rade's surface currents hour by hour from October 16 to 23, 2026, colored by water temperature, from the Iroise down the Aulne and up the Élorn.

Data: Ifremer MARC, MARS3D model (open license); coastline © OpenStreetMap contributors

#brest #radedebrest #bretagne #finistere #dataviz #map by @mapped.earth

Lighthouses of Greece: from Othonoi in the west to Strongyli, off Kastellorizo, in the east.

The big stations sweep: Tainaron, Sapientza, Psyttaleia, Kassandra, Alexandroupolis, Armenistis on Mykonos, Gourouni on Skiathos. The harbor lights and buoys blink in place, each on the rhythm printed on the chart.

Spetses, first lit in 1837, was among the first lighthouses of the new Greek state.

Data: OpenStreetMap, NGA List of Lights.

#Greece #Lighthouses #GreekIslands #Aegean #IonianSea #Crete #Maps by @mapped.earth

Lower the Mediterranean just 110 metres and you can walk from Malta to Sicily, the way people could in the last ice age.

Keep draining and the sea floor turns out to sit on a slab of salt a kilometre thick, left the last time this sea really did dry out. The last of the water pools in a trench off Greece, where Africa is sliding under Europe.

Data: EMODnet Bathymetry · NOAA ETOPO 2022 · NASA Blue Marble · ICE-6G_C sea level. Heights exaggerated 12x.

#mediterranean #geography #ocean #iceage #maps by @mapped.earth