Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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It was this map of Greenland that triggered this post. I say map, but I mean hole in a drainpipe. This picture was sent in by Ruland Kolen, who was […]
A crowd-sourced map suggesting the ‘ideal’ borders for a country that has had so many different ones.
To celebrate her Jubilee year, the Queen had a large chunk of Antarctica named after her; possibly upsetting the Argentinians and Chileans.
The Uruguayan capital does not have a metro system – but it does have a metro map
Country motto: Don’t do today what you can put off until tomorrow. Aren’t we all honorary citizens?
If phantom islands can be discovered as recently as 2012, maybe there are still more of them out there.
War, as Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means [1]. But sometimes, war itself is being continued by other means – cartographic means. Maps are an excellent […]
God know we would have satellites one day, so He left us a message
Among the baker’s dozen of legends obscuring the true origin of the croissant, the one repeated most often transports us back to Austria in 1683. Up before dawn, Vienna’s bakers […]
As shown by this map, the next presidential election will not be decided by 50 states, but by just 11 – the so-called ‘swing states’, that could still go either way.
Could the unforgiving Taklamakan Desert once have been the location of the Garden of Earthly Delights?
In 1937, Nicaragua and Honduras almost went to war… over a stamp.
Geography was my favourite subject in school; physics the one I disliked the most. If only I’d known about this Map of Physics! This spatial representation of the subject, dating […]
A closer look at the cartography of the famous Disney ride
There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check […]
Maybe it’s because the country’s shape tends towards a square, but Poland’s borders give it a solid, anchored appearance on the map of Europe. And yet those borders are relatively […]
The massive southern continent was a supposed to be a counterweight for the lands of the northern hemisphere
These specially-made relief maps showed blind children were sensitive to the geo-distributive aspect of maps
Remember that guy in the Truman Show who pretends to be the protagonist’s best buddy [1]? Who takes him out for a few brewskis on the beach when Truman starts […]
In Celtic legend, the island was almost perpetually shrouded in mist, and visible only for one day every seven years
See children’s roaming rights shrink dramatically, in just three generations
The fictional island has all the attributes necessary for a classic adventure story – including a bunch of intriguing place-names
In the two decades since German reunification, the German government has spent up to €1,6 trillion on upgrading the defunct economic infrastructure of the communist East to match that of […]
George Soros last Sunday blamed Angela Merkel for the euro crisis – and gave her three months to fix it. Speaking at the 7th Festival of Economics in Trento (Italy), […]
Abandoning circular growth, the Russian capital has started sprouting limbs across the surrounding countryside
An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of […]
Just before Rip Van Winkle falls into his thirty-year slumber, he encounters the ghostly spectacle of a handful of ancient Dutch colonials playing at ninepins, the thunder rolling across the […]