Mapping Tallurutiup Tariunga

Tallurutiup Tariunga, otherwise known as Lancaster Sound, is the southern point of the Last Ice Area, the only area of the Arctic which is expected to retain its summer sea ice until 2050.

The World Wildlife Fund has released an interactive map of Lancaster Sound in order to raise awareness of the area's delicate ecosystem and to promote a campaign to designate the Lancaster Sound a National Marine Conservation Area.

The map includes a wealth of information about the importance of the area to both wildlife and the Inuit people.

If you scroll through the 'Story' section of the map you can learn about the Sound's polar bears, whales, migratory birds and other wildlife. The 'Gallery' section allows you to watch videos of the wildlife and the area's environment. Finally the 'Explore' section of the map explains how the Inuit and local wildlife co-exist and how development could place the whole area at risk.

Scratch & Sniff New York

Scratch upon the surface veneer of New York City and you can usually find the historical foundations which lie beneath the modern city. At least you can with this new Urban Scratchoff map.

Urban Scratchoff is a map which presents modern aerial imagery of New York. However if you click and drag on the map you can wipe away the modern imagery to reveal historical aerial imagery of the city beneath. It is also possible to reverse the order of the modern and historical imagery on the map. This allows you to view the historical imagery and scratch upon the map to reveal the modern imagery underneath.

The code for the map is available on GitHub - so if you have access to your own historical aerial imagery you can create a similar map for your own city or town. The code will also work with any base map layers. You could therefore create a similar map which allows you to scratch upon a modern map to view an historical vintage map layer beneath.

The Glastonbury Festival Map

The Glastonbury Festival site has now become so large that it is very easy to get lost (especially in the dark at night while being attacked by hallucinatory terrors). What is needed is an interactive map of the site - such as the NME's Where to Camp at Glastonbury Map.

Ostensibly the NME's map is a guide to the best camping spots at Glastyonbury, providing an overview of the liveliest and quietest camping spots. If you click on any of the camp sites displayed on the map you can read a good overview of the pros and cons of the site and who the camp site should appeal to. However the NME's Glastonbury Map also includes the locations of the stages, bars, medical points, ATM machines and much more.

If you are attending Glastonbury you might want to bookmark this map on your mobile phone, as it could prove invaluable if you ever get lost. Unfortunately the map doesn't include the option to automatically geolocate yourself on the map. The map could be instantly made so much more useful with the simple addition of an option to find your current location on the map.

A routing engine would also be really useful - but a lot more complicated to implement. Another more simple addition to the map would be an option to click on the stage map markers to see which bands were playing on that stage and when.

The Making of North America

Making North America is a PBS Nova documentary film exploring the history of the geological formation of North America and how the continent's land and mountains have emerged and evolved over time.

You can now also learn more about North America, its formation and its evolution, on this PBS Nova Making North America map. Using the map you can view satellite imagery of some of North America's most distinctive geological sites and view multi-media content explaining the origins of these features during Earth's long history. Be sure to click on the flying satellite on the map to view a great tour of how some of the United States' greatest geological features were originally formed.

Making North America also includes an interactive expedition, in which you have to hunt for clues that help explain the geological forces that have shaped North America. If interactive learning isn't your thing then you can instead just sit back and watch the complete series of Making of America (click 'Watch' from the main menu).

European Rent Maps

Rentswatch, by journalism++, is a new online database monitoring the cost of renting apartments in cities across Europe. As part of its service rentswatch provides interactive maps showing the average rental prices in 14 European cities, including Paris, Berlin and Rome.

Each of the city maps includes a heat map layer showing which areas have the highest and lowest average rents. You can mouse-over any area on the map to view the average rental cost per square meter and the median flat size. The map sidebar also provides a list of the most expensive neighborhoods for renting in the city.

If you want to know more about how the map was made then you can read this Making a map of all the rents in Europe blog post. The post includes information on how Rentswatch created their own data map tiles with links to the code on GitHub.

Rentswatch has also released an API which allows developers to access the rent price database.

Making a Property Price Map

L'Echo has published an interactive map which shows the average house price in all of Belgium's 19,000 neighborhoods. Using the map you can visualize the neighborhoods with the cheapest and the most expensive property in the whole of the country.

If you enter an address into the Do You Live in an Expensive Neighborhood map you can view a choropleth layer which shows the average house price in each local neighborhood. If you mouse-over a neighborhood on the map you can also view details on the number of sales (2010-2014) and the average price which properties in the neighborhood were sold for.

The map was created for L'Echo by Maarten Lambrechts. Maerten has also written up an interesting Making Of blog post explaining the process behind creating the interactive map and the static maps he also created for L'Echo's print edition. The interactive map has a number of different layers, including Stamen's Toner map tiles, the neighborhood boundaries, a layer for the map labels and the data layer.

The Road Map to the White House

Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has combined a dot map of votes cast in the 2008 Presidential Election with a dot map of 2010 census data showing the geographical distribution of race and ethnicity in the United States. The map has been created to help visualize some of the nefarious ways in which current redistricting practices work.

The Congressional Dot Map allows you to directly compare the racial distribution within congressional districts with Democratic and Republican votes cast in the district. In the accompanying blog post Dustin explains how race and ethnicity and past election data is often used during redistricting to pick and choose the kind of voters in the congressional district. The blog post provides examples from the map to show how some of the most bizarre congressional districts have been designed in order to pack as many types of particular voters and ethnicity in one area.

The map can also be used to see whether particular ethnic groups tend to vote for one party or another. For example in numerous polls the majority of Hispanics have identified as Democratic voters. The Congressional Dot Map seems to support these polls. If you zoom in on areas with a large Hispanic population and then examine the Presidential Election data you can see that in most largely Hispanic areas most people seem to have voted for the Democrats.

This may explain why Donald Trump recently tweeted "I love Hispanics!". He now seems to realize that he might need some of the 27.3 million Latino voters to vote for him in the upcoming Presidential election.

The History of US Immigration & Population

Metrocosm has released an interesting animated map which visualizes Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration. The map starts in 1820 and shows the top countries where Americans have emigrated from for every decade. It provides a great visualization of the changing patterns of migration to the U.S. over time.

As the map plays out a running total shows the cumulative number of people who have emigrated to the USA. Beneath this 'Total Migration' figure you can see the top three countries where immigrants have originated from for the current decade. The brightness of each country on the map also indicates the number of migrants moving to the U.S. at the given time.


If you are interested in U.S. population trends then you might also like this animated map showing the Mean Center of Population for the United States 1790-2010. The map was created by the U.S. Census Bureau to show how the mean center of the U.S. population has shifted westward in the last 220 years - from Kent County, Maryland to Texas County, Missouri.


Another interesting mapped illustrations of this westward shift in the U.S. is this animated cartogram. The cartogram shows US Population Trends Over The Last 220 Years and visualizes how the mean center of the U.S. population has continually moved in a westerly direction.

The states on the cartogram change size to reflect their population size for every decade since 1790. The animated cartogram clearly shows the general westward migratory pattern of the American people over the last 200 years.


In 1790 the most populated cities in the U.S. were all on the East Coast. In the 2010 census seven of the ten largest cities were located in the Sun Belt region of the south and west.

Shifting Cites shows the top ten most populated U.S. cities for every decade since 1790. The map also shows the mean center of population in the USA for each decade. When you select a decade from the slide control the blue markers show the location of the top ten most populated cities and the red marker shows the mean center of the population.

The left hand side panel also updates to show a numbered list of the top ten cities for the selected decade. The small window in the top right-hand corner of the map also updates to provide more general information on the patterns of population movement being shown on the map.

Colorful Cartography

I don't imagine that there are many major road junctions in the world that are are celebrated for their beauty. I certainly wouldn't want to live next to one. However, while road intersections might be ugly, they can appear beautiful on maps. Especially if you add a little color.

Artist Nicholas Rougeux has created a series of posters featuring line drawings of major road intersections. Interchange Choreography uses data from OpenStreetMap to map out a number of major road junctions, which feature three or more roads. The roads in each poster are colored based on whether they are major or minor roads.

You can buy posters of each road junction separately or a poster featuring all of the interchanges in one work of art.

Nul Points - Geographic Bias in the Eurovision Song Contest

This Saturday millions of Europeans will sit down to watch three and half hours of excruciating television. Much of that time will be spent listening to contestants from around Europe singing some of the worst songs ever written. The rest of the evening will then be spent watching judges from each country awarding points to their favorite songs.

The voting system in the Eurovision Song Contest is ludicrously complicated. However, having endured a few of these contests before, I think I know how the system works. Basically each country awards the highest points to their nearest geographical neighbors.

You can see how this system works by exploring a new interactive map The European Song Contest - Points Map. Using the map you can click on any of the participating countries to see which countries have awarded them the most points in previous Eurovision Song Contests. The darker a country appears on the map then the more points that country has awarded to your selected country in previous competitions.

If you play around with the map for a while then I'm sure you'll discover that my theory holds true. Points are awarded not on the quality of the songs performed but on how close you live to the performers.