Wednesday, July 07, 2021

Equal Population Earth Slices

For centuries cartographers have been trying to peel the Earth like an orange. It turns out that all along they should have been slicing the Earth like an onion instead. 

The World's Population Sliced by Latitude is an interactive map which creates Earth slices with equal sized populations. In the animated GIF above you can see how the World's Population Sliced by Latitude creates a number of Earth slices. Each slice has the same number of people. Notice how the relatively under populated Southern Hemisphere has bigger slices than the Northern Hemisphere where the large majority of human Earthlings live. 

The interactive Earth slicer includes a control which allows you to choose the number of slices that you want to see the Earth chopped into. In the picture above - with the world sliced in two - the population divide between north and south is very clear. 

The World's Population Sliced by Latitude interactive map is a clever visualization of the density of the world's population living in the Northern Hemisphere compared to that living in the Southern Hemisphere. You can view a more granular visualization of global population density on The Pudding's Human Terrain map. This  interactive visualization shows population density across the globe using 3D population pyramids. 

The taller a pyramid block on The Pudding map then the more people live there.The Pudding has also used its own map to explore in more detail the pattern of population density around the world. In Population Mountains The Pudding examines how unevenly the world is populated and how and why population density can take different forms in different parts of the world.

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