Old World Maps

World maps through history.

Al-Idrisi’s world map in an 1154 atlas with Arabia on top:

Longest Straight Lines Without Crossing Coasts

The longest distance you can travel between two points in straight line without crossing any ocean or any major water bodies:

Source and more info

Mapping the Medals: Olympic Medal Distribution

Medal distribution across the globe on 2012 Summer Olympics.

http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/mappingthemedals/

Night Lights Map

Night lights of the world, 2012.

http://www.blue-marble.de/nightlights/2012

Distribution Of World Population

A interesting visualization of world population distribution around the globe.

http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/globe/

Wikipedia Recent Changes Map

A real-time world map of Wikipedia edits by unregistered users.

http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en

Mercator Distortion Puzzle

Map puzzle showing the effects of Mercator projection on the size of different objects on a map. Equatorial areas are smaller than polar areas.

http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledrag.html

Nuclear Capabilities and Potential Around the World

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been signed by 189 nations since its creation in 1968. It has become the international standard by which nations are judged on their commitment to nuclear non-proliferation. But the treaty has not had a perfect record. Learn more about the pread and containment of nuclear capabilities around the world.

http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2008/feb/nuclear_weapons/weapons_interactive.html

Vaguely Rude Place Names

Vaguely rude place names of the world.

http://maps.geotastic.org/rude/

Nuclear Weapons Map

World map highlighting countries with nuclear weapons or are suspected of pursuing nuclear weapons.

Click to enlarge

Interactive version with more info.

Billionaires World Map

The wealth Forbes' billionaires mapped.

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Map of the countries that are most and least welcoming to foreigners

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Buried several hundred pages into a new World Economic Forum report on global tourism, past the sections on air travel infrastructure and physician density (by which they mean the number of physicians per capita, not the mass-per-cubic-meter of individual doctors), are some very interesting numbers. The WEF has compiled survey data from 140 countries estimating the attitude of each countries’ population toward foreign visitors.

Source: Washington Post

The World Divided, 1941

The World divided during World War 2 (July 1941).

Click to enlarge

The political alignments of the world are here shown, centering geographically around the North Pole but ideologically and economically around the U.S. The classification keyed below is necessarily simplified and does not of course meet all the subtleties of politics and diplomacy - for instance, the peculiar position of Vichy and its colonies. The special case of the U.S.S.R. is acknowledged by a special color. 

The situation is as of July 7, 1941, and is subject to change without notice.

Map made by Richard Edes Harrison, Fortune magazine.

Pictures Of Earth At Night

Pictures of Earth at night made by NASA's Suomi NPP satellite.

Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth's land surface and islands. (Source: Nasa)

Composite map of the world assembled from data acquired by
the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012.

NYT: The New World

Interactive map of what could possibly be the world’s newest international borders, by The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/the-new-world.html

World Debt Comparison

Interactive map with national debt comparison and global debt clock

The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is revealed. Our clock (updated September 2012) shows the global figure for almost all government debts in dollar terms.

 http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock

Map of World's Resources

World's natural resources by top countries.

Natural resources are commodities that are considered valuable in their relatively unmodified (natural) form. A commodity is generally considered a natural resource when the primary activities associated with it are extraction and purification, as opposed to creation. Thus, mining, oil extraction, fishing, and forestry are generally considered natural-resource industries, while farming is not. (Wikipedia)

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Extreme Weather Events, June 2012

Significant climate anomalies and events in June 2012. Average global land and ocean temperature was the fourth warmest June since records began in 1880.

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Global Highlights

• The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2012 was 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20^th century average of 15.5°C (59.9°F). This is the fourth warmest June since records began in 1880.


• The Northern Hemisphere land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2012 was the all-time warmest June on record, at 1.30°C (2.34°F) above average.


• The globally-averaged land surface temperature for June 2012 was also the all-time warmest June on record, at 1.07°C (1.93°F) above average.


• ENSO-neutral conditions continued in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean during June 2012 as sea surface temperature anomalies continued to rise. The June worldwide ocean surface temperatures ranked as the 10^th warmest June on record.


• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January–June 2012 was the 11^th warmest on record, at 0.52°C (0.94°F) above the 20^th century average.

More detailed informations here.

Blank map of the continents

Blank map of the continents with country borders and geographic coordinate system. A continent is a large continuous mass of land.

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Countries with greatest risk of terrorism

An infographic of countries with greatest risk of terrorism based on data released by British analysis company Maplecroft and published in the 2011 Terrorism Risk Index.

http://en.rian.ru/infographics/20110808/165625328.html