Fantastic Maps

Maps: Where would we be without them? This was banner year for beautiful, information-dense cartography, which provided a moment of self-reflection like a giant, geographic mirror.

Across cultures, people feel increased activity in different parts of the body as their mental state changes.

Where there once was no land, now there is.

"Zoomable autocomplete map of the world. Yahoo autocomplete results for countries and US states (screenshot of US states shown here)." 

"Technically, they aren't crop circles, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they're beautiful. Simon Beck, a very talented artist from England, has unveiled his latest large-scale murals of geometric patterns in snow. Each one, which is created simply by walking through the snow and leaving behind track prints, adds a surreal element to its natural landscape. Beck walks countless miles on end to produce these mind-blowing symmetrical and elaborate designs on the soft, white bed of snow that covers acres upon acres of land."

"Of the top 400 universities in the world, 128 of them are in North America and 181 in Europe. That’s an overwhelming dominance.
Greater London alone has twice as many top universities than the entire Middle East and North Africa region."

Photographer Janol Apin shoots playful scenes along the platforms.

The map above tracks the international migrations of a very specialized population—professional soccer players—since 1900. The tabs on the right let you isolate particular seasons or countries.

A rainbow network of broadcasts fills America's cities and frontiers. 

One of the reasons I became a geologist was the maps. Geologic maps are beautiful. I will never have enough walls in my house for all the geologic maps I'd love to hang. But these maps are also full of information about the surface of the Earth, with hints of what is below and what came before. There are colors for different ages of rocks, patterns for different kinds of rock, and lines for faults, elevation and boundaries between rock layers.

One of the best things I ever got to do in school was make geologic maps. There are compasses, hand lenses, rock hammers, measuring staffs and colored pencils involved. You get to go out, find the rocks, determine what formation they belong to, which direction those formations extend and how steeply their layers are sloping. You get to draw all that information on the map, and then color it in. It's really fun and also challenging, and very satisfying.

Some of the most memorable geologic maps I've seen have been of national parks. Maybe that's because the parks are one of the few places where you will easily be able to find, and buy, a geologic map of the place you are in at that moment. It also doesn't hurt that these maps reflect the landscapes they depict, and the landscapes are usually pretty amazing in the national parks. These are some of my favorite geologic maps of national parks.

"The map shows the percentage of viewers who tuned in to the Aug. 14 season four premiere of Duck Dynasty, the A&E reality series about a family from West Monroe, La., that makes duck calls for hunters."

Worldwide tea is far more popular than coffee, but preferences for one beverage over the other fall into distinct geographic patterns.

But an ancient globe does.

"All maps face the challenge of making the globe appear to scale in two dimensions. Most, like the traditional Mercator projection, keep either size or shape consistent — not both — which skews our perception of continents and countries one way or the other. 

But when you compare square mileage, a whole new world appears. Inspired by this map of Africa's true size from German graphic designer Kai Krause, we created 11 map overlays to open your eyes to some real geography."

What could be the worst tidal surge in six decades has swamped parts of the U.K. but not London, thanks to the miraculous Barrier.

Phone-call data track the distribution of courtesy (and the lack of it) over recorded conversations. We'd thought better of you, Buckeyes.

Welcome to Aminimal Studio

"Some of the volcanic bluestones in the inner ring of Stonehenge officially match an outcrop in Wales that's 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the world-famous site, geologists announced this week. (See Wales pictures.)

The discovery leaves two big ideas standing about how the massive pieces of the monument arrived at Salisbury Plain: entirely by human hand, or partly by glacier.

As it looks today, 5,000-year-old Stonehenge has an outer ring of 20- to 30-ton sandstone blocks and an inner ring and horseshoe of 3- to 5-ton volcanic bluestone blocks. (See Stonehenge pictures.)"