Awesome Geography

A follower of xkcd’s What If? asked the hypothetical question “What would the world be like if the land masses were spread out the same way as now, but rotated by 90 degrees?” Without changing the Earth’s axis relative to the Sun, it would dramatically impact the climate and ecosystems in most places on the planet. Antarctica gets the biggest upgrade.

If GeoGuessr is too hard for you, check out BenjaminTD’s Unzoomed. It’s a free, quick, and, most of all, forgiving location guessing game. You start off with a zoomed-in top-down view of a city. Each time you make an incorrect guess, the map zooms out to (hopefully) give you more clues. We’d probably do better with maps from video games.

We’ve stopped at the Bong Recreational area in Wisconsin and driven through Dildo, Newfoundland, but many other places have funny names too. Language expert RobWords takes us on a virtual trip around the globe to introduce us to places with names like Dick’s Knob, Scratchy Bottom, and Fan y Big.

Song lyrics often refer to locations, but they rarely are specific and sometimes inaccurate. Jam2Go thought he’d nail down the exact places in songs, starting with the guy in the Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah, who mentions he’s 1000 miles away from Delilah. Then he travels to Ocean Avenue, Africa, Over the Rainbow, and Country Roads.

Artist Isaac Dushku loves maps so much that he goes by the nickname Lord of Maps. After making a Highest Mountains Print that shows the tallest mountains in each US state, he teamed up with his brothers Gideon and Alex to create a book that captures the same idea using cutout pages. The Highpoints has a lay-flat binding for easy coffee-table viewing.

Having lived in Orlando, we can confirm that Florida is, um… different. Wendover Productions looks at the history of the Sunshine State and how it got to be unlike any other place, with its manufactured communities, theme parks, and its population of runaways from other states, stoked by its beaches and low taxes.

We’ve driven through some places with weird names like Hell, Michigan and the Bong Recreation Area in Wisconsin. Lost in the Pond studied a map of America to find more strange place names, and explained the history of their unusual monikers. Though Newfoundland has them all beat.

Previously, CGP Grey explained the surprisingly simple numbering scheme for U.S. interstates. Now he’s back to teach us how the numbers on airport runways work. You’ll also learn how airports decide which way to run their runways and what the North Pole has to do with everything. Oh, and this is not a physics video.

Commemorate your adventures and travels with these outstanding wood artworks from Topo Trail Maps. Each one is custom-made by artist Trevor Crosta based on a trail you specify. They feature deep, 3-dimensional carvings of the terrain, and come in two National Parks designs, as well as a rectangular floating frame.

This 707-piece wooden globe model has a motor-drive mechanism that keeps it spinning. In addition to the rotating globe, a tiny, magnetic ship sails around its base to commemorate Magellan’s journey around the Earth. Each of its 81 continental puzzle pieces has pinholes so you can mark cities you’ve visited.

Montreal artist Olivier Gratton-Gagné is obsessed with maps. Olivier applied his coding and graphic design skills to data on OpenStreetMap, and his iLikeMaps project was born. Based on satellite imagery, each 18″x18″ pillow design is a contemporary work of art, appearing both abstract and detailed with identifiable avenues.

This unique piece of decor puts an illuminated world map on your wall. Created by Zero Degree, the World Light is a 3D cutout wood map by day and lights up with thousands of tiny dots at night, like cities in nighttime satellite imagery. It’s available in natural wood or white finishes, in traditional or geometric map designs.

4DMAPART creates eye-popping elevation map prints. Each image jumps right off the page thanks to an impressive depth illusion that combines light, shadow, color, and topographical data captured by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. They can be printed onto photo paper or metal. The U.S. geology map is our favorite.

When looking at a 2D map of the world, it’s really hard to understand how big countries really are. For instance, the U.S., Australia, and Europe are similarly sized. Developed by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, The True Size Of… lets you drag countries on top of each other to better visualize their relative sizes.

Technically, all of the world’s oceans are connected and therefore they’re a single, giant body of water. Still, geographers sliced them into sections and named them so we’d know roughly where we are. Minute Earth explains where the boundaries are located, and suggests a more logical way of breaking them up based on science.

Despite the crowds, costs, crime, and other drawbacks of big cities, people flock together in densely packed areas, leaving vast areas of the world undeveloped. Wendover Productions looks at the reasons that over 50% of the global population occupies just 1% of the land.