The Marine Heat Map

The Marine Heatwave Tracker visualizes marine heatwaves around the world and the intensity of those heatwaves. The map reveals that marine heatwaves are becoming much more common. Which could be very bad news for the planet and for the human race.

As global heating increases it has an effect on the temperatures of the world's oceans and seas. A marine heatwave is defined on the Marine Heatwave Tracker as being when a location experiences temperatures for five days in a row which are in the top 10% of temperatures ever recorded at that location. The number of marine heatwaves have increased by over 50% in the past 30 years. These warming seas can have a devastating impact on marine ecosystems. They could also have a devastating effect on humanity, which relies on the oceans for food, storm protection and the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.


The Marine Heatwave interactive map uses data from over 1,000 different ecological records. It allows you to view the latest recorded marine heatwaves and to explore historic marine heatwave records since 1982. To explore these historical records you can select any date from the calendar in the corner of the map. You can also view a table showing the historical temperature records at any marine location by clicking on the map and selecting the 'time series' button.

The Marine Heatwaves website includes regular links to the latest marine heatwave news from around the world. It also includes links to the authors' own published articles and papers on marine heatwaves.

Discover Your City's DNA

Moovel Lab has created an interactive map tool which will enable you to discover your city's Urban Mobility Fingerprint and Street DNA.

The Mobility Fingerprint map which the tool creates shows the routes which can be taken from a single central location in a city to many destinations around the city within a set travel time. The routes on the map are colored by their compass direction. For example, the map above shows where and how far you can drive from Central Park in 15 minutes and the routes which you would have to drive to get to these destinations.

The Street DNA (on the right in the image above) rotates all the routes on the map so that they align north to south. An ideal straight line here would indicate that the route taken from A to B was in a direct straight line. However very few cities have straight roads shooting out from a central location like the spokes of a wheel. In reality in most cities to get from A to B you have to take many twists and turns. In New York, for example, the city's rivers tend to be natural obstacles when getting from A to B, forcing motorists to route via the Brooklyn Bridge, Battery Tunnel, Queensboro Bridge etc. The result is that New York's Street DNA has lots of routes which deviate a long way from the ideal straight line.


In the example Street DNA images created by Moovel Lab for different cities waterways and topographical features such as hills seem to feature prominently in those cities which have large deviations from the 'ideal' straight routes. The image above shows the Street DNAs for San Francisco and Moscow. Routes in Moscow tend to be far straighter than in San Francisco. In San Francisco the roads have to cope with many large hills and the vast expanse of water surrounding much of the city.

You can use Moovel Lab's Explore tool to create your own Mobility Fingerprint and Street DNA maps. The tool only works for European towns and cities. Using the tool you can adjust the travel time and mode of transport. You can also set any location as the center point for your map visualizations.

Do You Live Near Nuclear Waste?

Greenpeace has released an interactive map which shows the locations of nuclear waste sites and routes across the whole of France. Carte des Dechets Nucleaires is designed to display all the information that Greenpeace has on the location of radioactive material and help people discover how close they live to nuclear waste.

The map includes sites where nuclear waste is stored for at least 300 years, nuclear power plants, decommissioned uranium mines and military sites known to store radioactive waste. The map also shows the main stations through which used fuel and reprocessed uranium pass in trains and the cities or roads through which road convoys of radioactive waste or plutonium are transported.


If you enter an address or postcode into the map then you can find out the closest nuclear waste sites to the entered location. The map lists all the nuclear waste sites within 100 km of your selected address. This list includes details on the type of each of the nuclear waste sites and the exact distance each are from your address. If you select a marker on the map you can view details on the type of nuclear waste held at the facility, or, in the case of transit routes, the type of radioactive material which is transported through that location.

The World of Donald Trump

I have had an idea for a while to one day create a US Diplomatic Map of the World. This would be a map where countries and cities are renamed based on how they have been described by the President of the United States. On this map, for example, the continent of Africa would be called 'Shithole', Germany would be 'A Total Mess' and Mexico would be named 'Drug Dealers, Criminals & Rapists'.

When I first clicked on the link for The World Through the Tweets of Donald Trump I was expecting to see that someone had built my map for me. Instead I found something even better. The World Through the Tweets of Donald Trump is a cartogram map of the world in which every country in the world has been resized according to the number of times Donald Trump has referred to it in one of his 8,000 Tweets since taking office.

Russia dominates Donald Trump's world map. 21% of all the Donald's Trump's country related Tweets have been about Russia. Next is North Korea which makes up 11.8% of his country mentions. China and Mexico are the third and fourth most referred to countries by Trump respectively (but definitely not respectfully).

This cartogram was created by World Mapper for (and will feature in) the Bodleian Libraries’ Talking Maps exhibition, which opens on 5 July 2019. You can download the data (a list of countries and the number of Donald Trump's Tweets about each country) at Donald Trump Tweets on the World Mapper website.

These Data Maps are Beautiful

The Geographies of Innovation interactive maps are fantastic works of art. I'd definitely hang them on my walls. But do they work as data visualizations?

Geographies of Innovation is a series of beautiful looking data visualizations exploring where innovative initiatives in Barcelona are located. It includes four different map views of innovative companies in the city, examining how different factors influence the location of these companies. These layers examine the socio-demographic context, the urban fabric, the functional indicators (infrastructure) and spatial organisation (network).


I think it is fair to say that some of the design choices made in the creation of these maps were based more on aesthetic than legibility concerns. However despite the artistic choices of colors and the lack of place labels the maps still work as data visualizations. For example the map above is an effective visualization of the spatial organization of innovative companies. The different colored circles indicate different types of companies and allow you to see where different types of innovative companies cluster in the city.


However some of the map layers can be difficult to read. The map keys and the use of mouse-overs on the map help to some extent. Each map layer also comes with a very brief introduction. These are visually attractive maps but they are also visually complex as well. I definitely think a longer pop-up walk-through tutorial for each layer would be very useful for the user.

The Most Famous People in the UK

There is now a UK version of the very popular A People Map of the USA. The Pudding's A People Map of the UK shows the most famous person from each town in the UK based on each town's most Wikipedia'ed resident.

When I reviewed the American version of the map I couldn't help notice how dominated the map was by pop singers and actors. For example the Wikipedia page for Samuel L. Jackson gets more traffic than the Wikipedia page for George Washington. So Washington D.C. on the People Map of the USA is renamed 'Samuel L. Jackson'.

I was a little disappointed at this preponderance of minor celebrities but I dismissed it as a cultural anomaly. I was fairly certain that a UK version of the map wouldn't reveal a population so obsessed with celebrity. Surely a map of the UK, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, would feature lots of famous engineers, scientists, authors and artists instead of a list of frankly mostly mediocre singers and actors.

How wrong I was.

According to the People Map of the UK the most Wikipedia'ed person in Winchester is an actor (Colin Firth), and not a king (Henry III) nor a saint (Saint Swithun). Judging by the huge numbers of actors and singers on the map then people in the UK are just as obsessed with celebrity as people from the USA. 

I am at least pleased that luminaries such as William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Stephen Hawking and Ben Dover made it on to the UK version of the map.

Toronto by the River

Toronto is a city of rivers. At least it used to be. In 1802 there were numerous rivers flowing into Lake Ontario. The city still has a number of rivers but just as many have been buried or removed over the last two hundred years in order to create space for the city's  continuing development.

Lost Rivers of Toronto is a fascinating map showing the history of Toronto's disappearing rivers. The map provides a picture of the city in 1802 before any of Toronto's rivers were removed. The map also includes a timeline which allows you to see where and when the city's rivers have been removed over the last two centuries. Rivers on the map are actually colored to show the year when they disappeared. This gives you a good idea about when different areas in the city were developed. If you want to see if there is a correlation between when districts were developed and when rivers disappeared then you could try comparing the Lost River of Toronto map with the Toronto Building Construction Dates map.

Lost Rivers of Toronto was created by Lost River Walks, who provide free guided walks tracing the courses of Toronto's forgotten waterways. The Lost Rivers of Toronto map includes three interactive map tours which provide a step-by-step guide to walks along Toronto's lost rivers and creeks.

All Roads Lead to Rome, Iowa

One of my favorite interactive maps of all time is Moovel Lab's All Roads Lead to Rome. The map is a beautiful visualization of 500,000 different routes that can be taken to Rome from all across Europe. Of course Moovel Lab didn't stop there and they went on to create a similar map visualizing flight paths to Rome. Flights to Rome displays the quickest flight routes to the Italian capital from 712,425 locations around the world.

Did you know that there are 9 cities called Rome in the USA. When Moovel Lab discovered this fact there was only one thing they could do. And that was to create the All Roads Lead to Rome, USA Edition. This interactive map shows 312,719 routes from across the United States to the nine different cities called Rome. On the map the colors represent the routes leading to the closest Rome from different starting points across America.

All the Romes in America are fairly eastern. The most western is Rome, Iowa. The town in Iowa is very small and has a population of around only 100 people. There are only three roads leading out of Rome, Iowa. However, if the few remaining citizens ever want to escape Rome, then luckily those few roads eventually connect to other roads leading to hundreds of thousands of destinations across the country.

Name the Country from its Rail Network

Can you identify a country from its national rail network? There are nine countries/regions to identify in the image above. See how many you can get on your own before checking the answers at the bottom of this post. Hint: the individual maps are not to scale.

I created these nine mini railway maps using the OpenRailwayMap. The OpenRailwayMap uses OpenStreetMap date to map the world's railways. Using the map you can view rail infrastructure around the world for railways, subways, trams, miniature railways and funiculars.

To create the image above I used the OpenRailwayMap API. The OpenRailWayMap API allows you to simply load the OpenRailWay map tiles into a number of different interactive mapping platforms. I added the OpenRailWay map tiles to a Leaflet map. If you load the map tiles into Leaflet without adding any other map tiles you get a map of just the world's railway lines, without any other map data (for example place labels, country borders etc), which is perfect for creating a little railway network map quiz.

Answers (select text below to reveal)

Great Britain, North America (Canada, USA and Mexico), Italy

India, Spain & Portugal, Japan

Australia, France, Denmark & Norway and Sweden.

The Cheapest Energy by County

The Energy Institute's Levelized Cost of Electricity interactive map shows the cheapest electricity generation technology in every US county. The map allows you to see where it is cheapest to use coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind or solar power to generate electricity.

The costs for each power source are based on a number of different factors. However users can edit the cost of each power source from the map sidebar. Users can also edit the value assigned to CO2 emissions in calculating the energy costs. Based on the Energy Institute's calculations the cheapest form of generation technology in much of the central states is wind power. In most of the south of the country solar power is the cheapest electricity technology.


You can explore how America actually generates power on the U.S. Power Plants map. U.S. Power Plants is an interactive map showing the locations, size and type of America's electric power plants. The map is a great way to see where different types of power plant are located, how much each type of energy source contributes to the country's power supply and how much each source contributes to CO2 emissions.

The number of map filters on U.S. Power Plants means that the map can provide lots of different insights into American power supply. For example the individual fuel filters allow you to see where different power sources are concentrated in America. Select hydro power and you can see that hydro power plants are concentrated in the north-west and north-east of the country. While solar power plants are mainly located in California.


Esri's Atlas of Electricity is another great way to explore where the USA gets its electricity from and how it distributes this power across the country. At the heart of an Atlas of Electricity is an interactive map plotting the location and size of the grid's power plants and transmission cables. This map allows you to explore the location and capacity of the country's electricity producing power plants and how they connect to the national grid.

As well as mapping the physical infrastructure of the electricity grid this story map examines the primary energy sources used to generate electricity in the USA. It maps the size and capacity of coal-fired power plants, natural gas power plants and petroleum power plants. Alongside these fossil-fuel sources of power An Atlas of Electricity plots the size and capacity of the U.S.'s nuclear power plants, hydroelectric power plants and solar & wind power plants.