The New Geologic Map of the United States

The United States Geological Survey has released a new geologic map of the United States that lets you click anywhere in the country to see the rocks, sediments, and geologic units under your feet, along with their age and material type.

The Cooperative National Geological Map was created by combining around 100 state and regional maps into one seamless, nationwide view of U.S. geology. The map uses standard U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) colors and patterns, but you don’t need to know those standards in advance - when you zoom in on the map, a legend automatically appears. This legend automatically updates to explain the colors currently visible in your map view.

The map sidebar allows you to explore different geologic map layers:

• Earth Surface - geology exposed at the surface.
• Quaternary - deposits from the Quaternary Period (youngest geologic materials).
• Pre-Quaternary - older rocks beneath surface deposits.
• Precambrian - very old basement rocks.

This new national geologic map lets you explore both a simplified national view and the original state-level geology. Users can spot big geologic patterns across the country, then zoom in for detailed views from local maps. It offers instant access to America’s geologic story in a way that’s easy and engaging to explore.

GeoGuesser - Hosted by an AI

The geo-guessing genre has seen a sudden surge in AI-powered experimentation. Just yesterday, I reviewed GeoGPT, which pits players against an AI to identify locations using Mapillary imagery. Today, I came across GeoGuesser AI, a geo-guessing game that’s actually hosted by an AI..

In many respects, GeoGuesser AI follows the familiar geo-guessing format: you’re dropped into a random location in Google Street View and must rely on visual clues to pinpoint where you are. But here’s the twist- unlike every other geo-guessing game, you don’t submit your guess by clicking on a map. Instead, you interact directly with the AI, giving your answers through natural conversation.

This turns out to be a genuinely refreshing change. Not only does it make the game feel more immersive, it also unlocks some unique advantages. You can ask the AI for hints when you’re stuck - like help identifying a language from strange accents on a road sign, or insights into what countries might have cathedrals with bulb-shaped domes. 

If there’s one drawback, it’s the limited pool of locations. After only a few minutes, I started encountering repeat locations, sometimes even three times in a row. Hopefully, this is just a temporary issue that will be solved as the location database grows.

Play GeoGuessr Against an AI

GeoGPT is now one of my favorite geo-guessing games. GeoGPT follows the usual GeoGuessr inspired format: you’re dropped into a random street-level image, and your task is to figure out where in the world you are. But here’s the twist - rather than competing against other humans, you’re up against an AI, which makes its own guesses alongside yours. The closest guess to the true location wins the round.

The game uses Mapillary images rather than Google Street View but the format is straightforward: you play a 20-round match, marking your guesses on an interactive map while the AI does the same. Each round becomes a mini showdown: your human instincts versus GPT-5’s reasoning. If you want to compete against me as well then you need to win more than 5 rounds - because that's how many rounds I won - while GPT-5 took the other 15.

Unfortunately I think there is only one game of 20 rounds available to play. I started a second game and I’m pretty certain that the locations and Mapillary images were the same from the first game played. Hopefully, in the future the pool of locations will be expanded, because this AI twist on the classic GeoGuessr theme is inspired.

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7 Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr

Growing a World Wide Web

Every year Telegeography publishes a comprehensive, annually updated map that visualizes active and planned submarine telecommunications cables around the world. The futuristic looking 2025 Submarine Cable Map was released back in January. This map shows the current extent of the world’s active submarine telecommunications cables and those currently under construction.

The Internet Infrastructure Map allows you to see how the current network of submarine telecommunication cables has developed over the last 36 years. The map combines two key elements of the internet: submarine fiber-optic cables, which connect continents across the ocean floor, and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), the data hubs where networks interconnect and exchange traffic.

One of the standout features of the Internet Infrastructure Map is its animated timeline. Starting from 1989, when the first modern subsea cables appeared, you can step year by year through time and watch the growth of the global internet unfold on the map. The animation reveals how over time the sparse early connections developed into the dense intercontinental webs of cables of today, with new systems being added almost every year. By sliding through to 2025, you can literally watch the internet’s backbone expand, seeing when major routes were built and how new IXPs shifted regional connectivity patterns.

How Big is Anything?

The Size of Anything is an interactive map that lets you compare the sizes of different locations around the world.

To be honest, when I first heard about The Size of Anything I thought, “Not another size comparison map.” Just off the top of my head I can think of several similar tools:

• The True Size Of ... 
• GeoSize Compare 
• Country Size Comparison 
• Reprojector

- all of which let you directly compare the scale of different geographical areas on the same map.

However, as soon as I started playing with The Size of Anything, my mood quickly improved. It’s very well done. Perhaps the most impressive feature is the sheer number of locations you can compare. As long as OpenStreetMap knows about it, The Size of Anything can handle it. That means the options are enormous: parks, airports, islands, neighborhoods, towns, cities - almost anything mapped on OSM.

There’s also a fun extra: if you select the Treasure button, you’ll find a few non-geographic objects to overlay, such as a blue whale, the Titanic, or an airplane.

So, while The Size of Anything isn’t exactly a brand-new concept, it takes the idea and executes it brilliantly. With its huge range of locations and playful extras, it’s probably one of the best tools out there for exploring and comparing the true scale of different geographical areas.

Letters Found on the Moon

This isn’t a tale about Lunar correspondence, but of letters shaped from the craters and shadows of the Moon. Alphabet Moon uses imagery of Lunar contours and ridges to shape a typeface out of unfamiliar terrain. Each letter is drawn not with ink but with the valleys, peaks, and scars of the lunar surface, transforming geological history into the letters of the alphabet.

Enter your name - or any other word - into Alphabet Moon, and watch it spelled out in letters drawn from the Moon’s ancient terrain. Each character is carefully matched to the shape of a crater, ridge, or valley, so that what begins as a simple word is reimagined in a language etched into the lunar surface.

Beneath each lunar letter lies a short explanation of how that form was created. These notes not only reveal the exact location on the Moon where the feature can be found, but also describe the geological forces that shaped it - whether an ancient impact, the slow cooling of lava, or the shifting of the Moon’s crust.

Alphabet Moon is a brilliant reinterpretation of Rhett Dashwood’s Google Maps Typography. Back in 2009, Dashwood unveiled an “Earth font” made up of 26 satellite images of our planet, each one resembling a different letter of the alphabet.

NASA appreciated Dashwood’s idea so much that they went on to create their own interactive typewriter, allowing you to write your name using satellite imagery. Type a name into Your Name in Landsat and watch it spelled out in Earth features captured by Landsat satellites. You can even download an image of your word written in massive Earth letters, and by hovering over each letter you can discover where in the world those shapes occur.

And if letters alone don’t satisfy your curiosity, there’s also Earth Clock - an online digital clock that uses satellite images of natural features resembling numbers to display the current time wherever you are.

Changing Parking Lots to Homes

Over recent years, a number of urban planning maps have revealed just how much valuable city land is devoted to surface parking lots. For example, the Parking Lot Map highlights the percentage of land in U.S. city centers taken up by parking.

The School of Cities at the University of Toronto has gone a step further with its project From Parking Spaces to Living Spaces. Using a compelling story map, the school shows how Toronto could repurpose underutilized surface parking lots into new housing. This shift could help address the Toronto housing crisis, while also generating significant property tax revenue for the city.

The interactive map illustrates:

• How much land in Toronto is currently used for parking lots.
• How much of this space sits within 1 km of public transit stations.
• How much additional revenue could be created if these lots were converted into city-owned housing developments.

The report makes a clear case: Toronto’s surface parking lots, often located in prime, transit-friendly neighborhoods, produce little revenue while the city struggles with an acute shortage of affordable housing. Redeveloping these sites into well-designed residential communities would not only increase tax revenue but also create much-needed homes and build more vibrant, complete neighborhoods.

Using AI to Search Maps

The magnificent David Rumsey Map Collection now has an AI Search Assistant that can help you find maps, learn more about individual maps, and even query specific elements within maps.

The David Rumsey Map Collection is one of the largest online collections of maps, and its new AI Search Assistant is a fantastic resource. It not only helps you search and discover maps in the collection but also lets you dive deeper into individual maps and the cartographers who created them.

1. Find Maps in the Collection

From the David Rumsey Map Collection home page, you can now use the AI Search Assistant to find maps based on themes, locations, or any other criteria you can imagine. The Assistant will return a list of maps in the collection that match your search.

Examples of queries you might use are:

• Show me maps of ancient Rome
• Show panoramic maps of New York 
• Show maps that feature compass roses

Ask what projection is used in a map!

2. Ask Questions About an Individual Map

When viewing a specific map, click the blue chat icon in the bottom-right corner to open the AI Search Assistant. You can then ask technical or contextual questions about the map you’re looking at. 

For example:

• What map projection is used by this map?
• Can you translate the map title into English?
• Who was Mercator?

What is this building?

3. Ask Questions about Map Details

When viewing a map you can zoom in on details to ask questions about a specific section of the map. 

Examples of these types of queries might be:

• What was happening at the Colosseum in the time depicted?
• What is this building? 
• What do the words below the map say?

Tourist Minesweeper

Tourist Minesweeper is a twist on the classic puzzle game, using a gridded map of real locations to highlight the spread of Airbnb in popular Spanish tourist destinations. If you’ve ever played Minesweeper (and who hasn’t?), you’ll recognize the rules - but here, instead of dodging bombs, you’re “sweeping” for zones of tourist pressure.

Currently you can play Tourist Minesweeper on gridded maps of Mallorca and Barcelona (more locations are on the way). It is worth noting that the visualization rules are a little different in each location: 

• In Mallorca, a cell has a mine if it contains more than 15 Airbnb listings, turning clusters of vacation rentals into hotspots on the map. 
• The Barcelona map, on the other hand, uses price as its metric: any grid cell with an average nightly rate above €200 is treated as a mine. 

This shift between quantity in Mallorca and affordability in Barcelona highlights different facets of the tourism problem - the sheer density of rentals in one case, and the economic pressure of high prices in the other.

The grid cells in each city are also based on different sized areas. I believe that in Barcelona each grid cell represents a 500 m square, while in Mallorca each grid cell is a 2 km² area.

Via: Quantum of Sollazzo

Roll Your Own Geocoder

One of my favorite recent side-projects has been Meet Cute, a playful web map that generates tiny “micro-romance” stories whenever you click on a location. The conceit is simple: click on a map, and out comes a love story set in the nearest town.

But behind that simple experience was a not-so-romantic technical problem: finding the name of the nearest town.

At first, I leaned on the Overpass API, which is built on top of OpenStreetMap. Every time a user clicked somewhere on the map, my code would:

1. Send a query to Overpass.

2. Ask it to return the nearest place=city|town|village node.

3. Use the closest name to plug into my romance grammar.

This worked beautifully… sometimes.

Overpass is a shared resource, and as many OSM developers know, it can be slow when overloaded. On bad days, a single click could stall Meet Cute for several seconds. Worse, I didn’t want to keep hammering the Overpass servers every time someone got carried away clicking for story after story.

---

Building My Own Geocoder

So I decided to roll my own lightweight client-side geocoder.

I realised that instead of calling Overpass for every click, I could pre-build a list of towns and cities and serve it as a static file. In fact I knew that TripGeo has just such a list of over 11,000 towns and cities around the world, that it uses for its daily Scrambled Maps Challenge. 

Here’s what I did:

• I grabbed the TripGeo dataset of world cities (latitude, longitude, name).

• I saved it into a cities.json file and hosted it on GitHub Pages.

• I wrote a little Geocoder class that loads this JSON into memory and, given a latitude/longitude (defined by a user map click), finds the closest matching city by brute force distance calculation.

const geocoder = new CityGeocoder('https://mapsmania.github.io/geocoder/cities.json');
const town = geocoder.reverse(lat, lon);

The entire geocoder lives in a single JavaScript class which is loaded into Meet Cute and then called when the map needs to find a new location.

Now, when the user clicks on the map, my code doesn’t need to make a network call at all. It just looks up the nearest city locally. The result is that Meet Cute is suddenly very snappy. Users no longer have to wait for Overpass to respond and every click instantly produces a new love story.

---

You Can Use the Geocoder Too

Because the code is hosted on GitHub you can also drop my lightweight geocoder straight into your own map projects. All you need to do is include the script and point it to the cities.json file hosted on GitHub Pages. For example:

<script src="https://mapsmania.github.io/geocoder/geocoder.js"></script>

<script>

  const geocoder = new CityGeocoder("https://mapsmania.github.io/geocoder/cities.json");

  const nearest = geocoder.reverse(52.517, 13.388);

  console.log(nearest.name); // "Berlin"

</script>

That’s it - no API keys, no server calls, and no waiting on external services. Just a single JavaScript class, a static JSON file of cities, and you have a ready-to-go reverse geocoder that works instantly inside any JavaScript mapping library.

⚠️ One thing to note: the dataset is limited to just over 11,000 cities and towns worldwide. That makes it lightweight and fast, but it also means it’s not as detailed as commercial geocoders. It works perfectly if you only need to identify the nearest major town or city, but it won’t return smaller villages, streets, or individual house or business addresses.

🙂 The Emoji Map of Train Delays ☹️

In the classic 1990s management console game Theme Park, visitors’ satisfaction levels were shown through the use of small expressive icons - 🙂☹️. A similar visual cue has been used in Bloomberg's new mapped visualization of train delays on the New Jersey Transit commuter rail service.

In NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot Bloomberg has mapped a series of smiley-face emojis onto a New Jersey Transit map. Happy, sweating, and sad emojis are used to represent trains that are on time, 10-30 minutes late, and more than 30 minutes late, respectively. The use of expressive smiley emojis on an animated transit map vividly illustrates the levels of delays on different lines during a particularly bad evening commute.

Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains using real-time transit feed data from May through July 2025 to determine that NJ Transit passengers experienced major service disruptions at six times the rate of other commuters on its New York and Connecticut counterparts. The data revealed that there are frequent delays of 15 minutes or more, cancellations, and particularly long delays of 30 minutes or more on NJ Transit trains.

By translating raw delay data into an immediately understandable visual language, Bloomberg’s mapped emoji visualization makes the scale and severity of NJ Transit’s service disruptions as clear as a smiley or sad face emoji.

The Cold Case Murder Map

I'm not a huge fan of crime maps. I think in many cases they oversimplify or distort patterns of criminal activity. However, I find Japan's Unsolved Murder Cases project particularly compelling.

According to the map, there are at least 369 homicides in Japan (since 1995) that remain under investigation - because the murderer has yet to be identified. The map was created by The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s oldest and most influential newspapers, in response to the 2010 Criminal Procedure Law. This law abolished the statute of limitations for crimes carrying the most severe punishment, such as murder. In practice, this means there is no longer a "time limit" on investigations for crimes committed after April 28, 1995.

To create the map the newspaper interviewed Japan's police departments about unsolved cases involving murder and robbery-murder that occurred between April 28, 1995 and December 31, 2023. The map itself presents a choropleth view of the number of reported cold cases in each prefectural police jurisdiction. 

Clicking on a highlighted prefecture reveals details of individual unsolved murders. Each case entry includes information such as the victim's age, gender, and the circumstances of the incident. Obviously these details can be explicitly gruesome (which may be why I feel a little uneasy about finding the map so compelling).

Via: weeklyOSM

Swimming With the Tide

English Channel Swim Tracking has released its 2025 map of English Channel swim attempts, charting the routes of all swimmers who have so far tried to cross from England to France this year.

The English Channel Swim Tracks 2025 visualization is very straightforward - just hundreds of line strings plotted on a single map. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of data makes it heavy to load - in fact, the map repeatedly crashes my laptop. However, despite this, the project is still extremely compelling, and I like it a lot. It has taught me something new, and in a way that only a mapped visualization could.

I had always assumed that swimmers crossing the English Channel took the shortest, straight-line route between the English and French coasts. One glance at the map was enough to disabuse me of that notion. As you can see, most swimmers set off in an easterly direction - almost as if heading toward the North Sea. Those who don’t tend to swim in a southwesterly direction, as though they were aiming for the Atlantic Ocean.

Swimmers rarely take a straight path across the English Channel because of the strong, shifting tides. The currents change direction roughly every six hours, so starting at the right moment is crucial. Many swimmers set off just before a tide shift, allowing the water to carry them in a generally westerly direction while minimizing sideways drift.

As the tide begins to change, swimmers adjust their course and gradually turn in a more south-easterly direction toward the French coast. This careful timing and navigation allow them to use the currents to their advantage, rather than fighting against them. The result is that the tracks often appear curved or counterintuitive on a map, with swimmers weaving in response to the tides rather than following the shortest straight line route between England and France.

The average time for an English Channel swim is typically between 10 and 16 hours (though conditions and swimmer speed can push this higher or lower). Because the tide shifts roughly every six hours, most swimmers experience at least two tidal changes during their crossing. This is why most tracks on the map show at least two major twists, as swimmers adjust their course to move with - rather than against - the tidal currents.

Love Story 2 - Dressed to Kill!

I have given my Meet Cute map a little romantic make-over. Using MapLibre expressions and a bit of creative styling in Maputnik I have managed to transform my Meet Cute base map into something that feels more appropriate for a procedural love-story map generator.

Reimagining Place Names with Expressions

MapLibre allows you to dynamically change label text with expressions, giving you full control over what appears on the map. In my case, I didn’t just want to show “Seattle” - I wanted to see “Sleepless in Seattle.”

By using a case expression, I was able to check the first letter of each city or town name and swap it for something more romantic. For example:

• Cities starting with S become “Sleepless in …”
• Cities starting with L become “Love in …”
• Cities starting with R become “… Romance”
• Cities starting with A become “An Affair in …”

Here’s a simplified snippet showing how this works:

map.setLayoutProperty('label_city', 'text-field', [
'case',
['==', ['slice', ['get', 'name'], 0, 1], 'S'],
['concat', 'Sleepless in ', ['get', 'name']],

['==', ['slice', ['get', 'name'], 0, 1], 'L'],
['concat', 'Love in ', ['get', 'name']],

['==', ['slice', ['get', 'name'], 0, 1], 'R'],
['concat', ['get', 'name'], ' Romance'],

['==', ['slice', ['get', 'name'], 0, 1], 'A'],
['concat', 'An Affair in ', ['get', 'name']],

['get', 'name'] // default ]);

The result? A world map where towns and cities take on the titles of romance movies and love stories. Instead of London, you see “Love in London.” Instead of Rome, you’re reminded of “Rome Romance.” Suddenly the geography itself feels more like part of the love-story theme.

Designing a Romantic Map Style with Maputnik

Of course, labels are only half the story - the map’s colors set the mood too. To create a soft, romantic atmosphere, I turned to Maputnik, a visual editor for Mapbox/MapLibre styles.

Using Maputnik, I swapped out the usual earthy blues and greens for a warmer palette of blush pinks and lavender tones. The result feels like a valentine card painted across the world map.

Once the style was ready, I simply exported the style.json from Maputnik and pointed my MapLibre map to it:

const map = new maplibregl.Map({
container: 'map',
style: 'path/to/romantic-style.json',
center: [2.3522, 48.8566], 
zoom: 2 });

A World of Love Stories

The combination of expressions and custom styling transformed a standard basemap into something much more romantic and poetic. Now, when you zoom across Meet Cute, every city feels like the title of a love story waiting to be told - set against a basemap of warm, romantic colors.

Spies in the Sky - Satellites of the Cold War

US Satellite image of Havana, Cuba 1966

Space From Space's Historic Declassified Satellite Image Gallery allows you to step into the vantage point of Cold War intelligence analysts, exploring the world as it was seen from orbit decades ago.

Since the 1960's U.S. spy satellites have quietly orbited hundreds of miles above the Earth, capturing images that would never be seen by the public - until their declassification. Operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in partnership with the CIA and U.S. Air Force, these missions were part of an unprecedented intelligence effort during the Cold War. The goal was simple but urgent: to monitor military installations, track missile development, and keep a close watch on global hotspots.

The Historic Declassified Satellite Images Gallery showcases more than 500 interactive satellite photographs captured between 1960 to 1984, giving modern audiences a rare glimpse at the geopolitical tensions of the era. The imagery comes from four major reconnaissance programs: CORONA, ARGON, GAMBIT, and HEXAGON (nicknamed “Big Bird”), each designed for specific intelligence-gathering tasks.

Click on any image in the gallery and you’ll open an interactive map viewer. Here you can zoom in, pan across, and explore the selected image in remarkable detail - just as intelligence analysts might have done during the Cold War. The gallery of declassified images can be filtered by Satellite Variant (the four reconnaissance programs), Date Range and Location. 

Space From Space’s gallery is a time machine in pixels and film grain. Whether you’re a historian, a student of geopolitics, or simply curious about the hidden chapters of the 20th century, these images offer an extraordinary window into a world once seen only from space, and only by a select few.

Draining the Planet

ProPublica has mapped the worrying increase in groundwater depletion around the world. In The Drying Planet, the publication examines the hidden reservoirs that lie beneath our feet - vast underground aquifers that supply drinking water, irrigate crops, and sustain industries. When these aquifers are pumped faster than they can be replenished, they begin to shrink, sometimes irreversibly. This process, known as groundwater depletion, can cause land to sink, reduce river flows, and even contribute to rising sea levels as the lost freshwater eventually drains into the oceans.

The map at the center of ProPublica’s feature is built on more than two decades of data collected by NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites. Co-authored by hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, the underlying study takes a comprehensive inventory of Earth’s freshwater - spanning glaciers, rivers, lakes, soil moisture, and aquifers - and tracks how it is changing over time.

The results of the study reveal a stark truth: the rapid drying of landmasses is largely driven by the human over-pumping of groundwater, which now accounts for 68% of water loss in non-glaciated regions. This could have devastating consequences, leading to rising seas, threatening food security, and intensifying the global impacts of climate change.

Unfortunately, ProPublica never allows readers to explore the data for themselves. Their Mapbox powered visualization of groundwater depletion pans and zooms as you scroll, highlighting conditions in various locations around the world. However, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll likely never see how your country is affected, since ProPublica focuses mainly on North America. While this is understandable given its primarily American audience, it feels like a strange editorial choice to create a global map and then never allow your readers to explore it.

Via: Map of the Week

Earth’s Greatest Hits, Live!

Most earthquake apps will show you a map with a bunch of dots. QuakeSound takes those red dots and turns them into sound. That’s right QuakeSound is an earthquake map that actually lets you listen to the planet rumble in near real time. 

QuakeSound takes data from the USGS Earthquake GeoJSON Feed and represents it in two ways: visually, on an interactive Leaflet.js map, and aurally, via the Web Audio API. On the map each earthquake becomes a musical note whose pitch corresponds to its magnitude - higher quakes have higher tones - while the note’s length is tied to its depth, with shallow tremors lingering longer in the ear. The result is a strangely meditative yet subtly urgent auditory portrait of global tectonics.

The app offers two modes of listening. Real-Time Mode captures quakes from the past hour, playing their tones as they arrive. It’s a bit like tuning in to a planetary heartbeat monitor. Soundscape Mode, on the other hand, sequences all the quakes from the past day into a looping composition, creating an ambient, evolving soundtrack that’s equal parts relaxing and eerie.

I think QuakeSound could be the first real mapped data sonification I've seen. While QuakeSound focuses on earthquakes, the underlying principle of mapped data sonification opens the door to countless other possibilities. Imagine using sound to track bird migration patterns, with pitch representing altitude and rhythm reflecting speed. Or turning global shipping traffic into a symphony, where each vessel’s movement contributes to a constantly shifting score.

The Map to Your Heart

I have become a little obsessed with Mark Sample's No Time to Discourse, an interactive map that procedurally generates climate-disaster microfictions and pins them to locations across the United States. 

Mark's map inspired me to create MultiVerse - a small interactive map that generates a poem for any location a user chooses. That experiment has now led me to my latest project: a location-based love-story generator.

Meet Cute is a playful way to imagine romance in the places you know best. Using its interactive map, you choose a location - your hometown, your favorite vacation spot, or even a city you’ve never been to - and watch as a unique micro love-story is generated set in your chosen location.

Behind the scenes, the Overpass API is used to find a town near the user's clicked location and then a custom RiTa.js grammar weaves together character names, settings, and love obstacles - all tied to the town you selected.

At its heart, Meet Cute’s grammar follows a simple love-story arc: two people meet, an obstacle comes between them, and that obstacle is either overcome… or not.

I was also interested in seeing if AI could do a better job at generating micro-fiction love stories. I therefore fed Google AI Studio the prompt 'Create an interactive map. When a user clicks on the map write a micro-fiction love-story based on that location'. In response to my prompt Google AI Studio created this Map of Love Stories (you may need to connect with a Google account to see the map).

I think that this is a very impressive result from such a simple prompt. I am sure it could be improved beyond recognition by giving AI Studio further prompts - possibly about additional map features and the structure of the created love-story.

Where is Your Dinner From?

The ingredients of your dinner tonight have been on a journey that may have spanned thousands of miles, crossing oceans and continents before finally arriving on your plate. Food Twin, an interactive digital map created by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the nonprofit Earth Genome, offers a groundbreaking way to see that journey visualized. By combining agricultural production data, trade flows, transportation networks, and nutritional metrics, Food Twin reveals the global trade routes used for transporting food produce around the world.

A Global Map of What Feeds Us

Click on the Food Twin map and you can instantly see the types and quantities of food groups exported from the selected area - while the map sidebar provides detailed information on the food types exported and the export destinations. 

The map uses advanced modeling from CU Boulder’s Better Planet Laboratory, Food Twin to chart the flow of food from farms to consumers in over 3,700 states and provinces across 240 countries. It goes beyond showing where crops are grown - it also calculates the calories, protein, and essential nutrients traveling through global trade routes. 

Why This Matters for the Future

The data behind Food Twin isn’t just fascinating, it may also prove vital in preparing for changing climate. The map makes it possible to model how floods, droughts, and heatwaves could disrupt food supply chains. For example, if a natural disaster affects one region of a country the map can help identify which communities around the world would feel the impact first. It is hoped that as extreme weather events become more common, policymakers and researchers can use Food Twin to anticipate disruptions and design safety nets to protect and feed vulnerable populations.

The Trump Appeaser's Map

Donald Trump says he will meet Vladimir Putin next week. He also says that an end to the war must involve “some swapping of territories”.

I thought it might be worth creating an Appeasers Map to visualize an area of land roughly the size of Crimea overlaid on top of the United States. You can drag the shape around to see which areas of the United States you would be most prepared to give to Russia.

The map even has a download button that allows you to share your 'Donald Trump appeasement' territory' on social media. 

The Boring Technical Bit

The map was created in Maplibre. Unfortunately Maplibre does not have a native 'drag' event for polygons. Therefore to make the polygon draggable on the map, I implemented a straightforward interaction using MapLibre GL JS’s event system. 

First, we listen for a mousedown event on the polygon’s fill layer, which signals the start of a drag operation. When the user clicks down on the polygon, we set a flag indicating that dragging has started and store the initial mouse position (startLngLat). This allows us to track movement relative to where the drag began. 

As the user moves the mouse while holding down the button (mousemove event), we calculate the difference between the current mouse position and the last recorded position. We then update the polygon’s coordinates by applying this offset to each vertex, effectively shifting the polygon’s shape on the map. After updating the polygon’s coordinates, we update the map’s data source so the changes appear in real time. Finally, when the user releases the mouse button (mouseup event), we clear the dragging flag and reset the cursor style, completing the drag interaction. This approach allows the user to drag the polygon anywhere they want on the map.

Ghost Signs: Phantoms of the Past

Ghost signs are the fading painted advertisements that you often see on old brick walls and buildings. They're a window into a city's history, hinting at businesses that have long since disappeared. You can find these signs on the sides of buildings, above doorways, and in alleys - silent reminders of a past that still peeks through into our modern lives.

The HK Ghost Signs map is an historical archive of Hong Kong's ghost signs. The map itself has a striking visual style, with a black-and-white base map hinting at a vintage aesthetic - punctuated by bright pink markers highlighting the city's surviving ghost signs. Clicking on a marker on the map reveals a photograph and often some background information about the selected ghost sign’s origins.

Many of the mapped signs on HK Ghost Signs once belonged to shops and businesses that closed decades ago - their painted names and slogans surviving only as faint traces on stucco and brick. Collectively, these points form an alternative tour of the city, one that winds not along the main tourist routes, but through backstreets and forgotten facades. The map even includes 'star' and 'check-in' options for each mapped ghost sign, that make it very easy to create an itinery of signs you might want to visit and also the means to tick-off the signs once visited.

At the other end of the stylistic spectrum is the San Francisco Ghost Sign Mapping Project, which uses a straightforward Google My Map to plot nearly a thousand ghost signs across the Californian city. 

While its visual presentation is less polished than HK Ghost Signs, the project makes up for it with functionality. A handy menu lets you filter the map to show only certain types of signs, such as Building/Business signs or Ad/Brand signs. This makes it easy to focus on just one particular slice of the city’s painted history at a time.

Unrelated to ghost signs (but lovely nonetheless) - M+, Hong Kong’s museum for visual culture, has an interactive map of Neon Signs that are also dotted around the Chinese city. Bookmark both Hong Kong maps, and you may be able to find faded ghost signs sharing the same walls with neon - providing a striking clash of past and present in the same city space.

7 Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr

I am a huge fan of GeoGuessr, but unfortunately without becoming a paid subscriber it is now a very limited game. I don't blame GeoGuessr for developing its subscription model. The Google Maps API isn't cheap and I'm sure Google sends GeoGuesssr huge invoices every month. However that does mean there is a huge potential market for a free geo-guessing type game.

MapiGuesser

MapiGuesser uses the crowd-sourced Street View alternative, Mapillary, to create a fun, geo-guessing-style game. If you've ever played GeoGuessr, then you'll know what to do: use the interactive 360° panoramas to explore your random location, figure out where you are, and click your guess on the interactive map.

Each game consists of 10 rounds, and you're awarded points based on how close your guess is to the actual location.

At the moment, MapiGuesser has one major flaw: the base map uses MapLibre's very low-detail demo tiles. The game would be significantly improved by simply switching to OpenFreeMap tiles - at no added cost to the developer.

Wikidata Guessr

Wikidata Guessr is a fun game that involves trying to identify the locations shown in images randomly selected from the Wikidata knowledge base. 

The only problem with Wikidata Guessr is that identifying the locations depicted in still images can be incredibly difficult. The difficulty level of Wikidata Guessr means that I would personally start with some of the other GeoGuessr alternatives listed on this page, especially if you are a novice GeoGuessr player. 

If you are a GeoGuessr pro then you will probably love the challenge posed by Wikidata Guessr. If you do find Wikidata Guessr challenging then you might find some of the thematic rounds (such as parliament buildings, rollwercoasters or mountains) a little easier to play.

Backdrop

Backdrop is probably the best game ever devised in the history of mankind (full disclosure - I developed Backdrop myself, so I may be a little biased).

Backdrop is a map based game which is somewhat similar to the very popular GeoGuessr game. However in Backdrop instead of Google Maps Street View images you have to identify the locations depicted in famous pictures painted by some of history's greatest artists.

In GeoGuessr you can stroll around in Street View to pick-up clues as to the location that you have been dropped in. In Backdrop if you don't immediately recognize the scene depicted in the painting there are only a couple of clues available to you. Usually the title of the painting is a huge clue as to the location that is depicted (mouseover a painting to reveal its title). If that doesn't help then the name of the gallery where the painting is located might be a clue as to the location shown in the artwork (although it might also be a complete red herring). 

Each game of Backdrop involves identifying the locations of 5 paintings chosen at random. You win points based purely on how close you click to the correct location.

OpenGuessr

Very much like GeoGuessr OpenGuessr is an online geography game that uses Google Maps Street View images to drop players in random locations around the world. Players must then use the clues from their surroundings to guess where they are on the map. The closer their guess is to the actual location, the more points they earn. 

The 'open' in OpenGuessr very much refers to being open or free to play. The game itself is not open-source and it doesn't use open-sourced map data or panoramic imagery. In fact like GeoGuessr the new OpenGuessr game uses Google Map's proprietary data and imagery. Which does make me wonder how long OpenGuessr can survive itself before it will have to start charging users to play.

TimeGuessr

If you are looking for other free alternatives to GeoGuessr then you might also enjoy TimeGuessr. TimeGuessr is another very similar game to GeoGuessr - except in TimeGuessr you are asked to identify the location shown in a photograph rather than the location of a Google Street View panorama. 

As the name 'TimeGuessr' suggests this game also comes with an additional requirement. Like Geoguessr this game requires you to guess a location by dropping a pin on an interactive map, however in TimeGuessr you are also required to guess the time, or rather the 'date' when the image was captured. For me the extra dimension of time in TimeGuessr actually makes it more fun to play. Now as well as using the visual clues to try to determine where in the world a photograph was taken you also have to use the same visual clues to work out in what year the picture was captured. 

Cityguessr

GeoGuessr fans should also have no problem understanding how to play Cityguessr. In Cityguessr you are shown a Street View panorama of a random city. All you have to do is identify the city using the visual clues (street signs, street furniture, architectural signs etc) within the Street View images. 

In most cities you can explore a little by using the arrow signs in Street View to move yourself around. However you only have 135 seconds before you have to make a guess. Unfortunately sometimes Cityguessr gives you a user submitted Street View and you are unable to explore - which can make identifying the correct city very difficult. It's still fun to try though and if you do guess right it makes it even more satisfying.

City Guesser

City Guesser is a fun location guessing game, which requires you to identify a location revealed in a video and point to it on an interactive map. 

The game shows you a random video of someone walking around a city or a famous monument. You have to pick up on the visual clues in the video (such as the languages & words used in street signs and the design of the street furniture) to identify where you think the video was shot. Once you have made your guess you just need to click on the location on an interactive map and you are awarded points based on how close you got to the real location. 

There are a number of different games that you can play. You can choose to view videos just from one country - or you can play either a Worldwide or Europe game - featuring videos from across the world or from just within Europe.

Ocean Warming Stripes

These Ocean Warming Stripes show the alarming extent to which average global sea surface temperatures have risen in the 21st Century, compared to the norm of annual global temperatures dating back to 1850. In the visualization, each year since 1850 is represented by a colored stripe. The color of each stripe is determined by the average global sea surface temperature. As you can see, there has been a steady increase in global sea surface temperatures this century - and an alarming spike in temperatures in the last 3-4 years.

The oceans absorb over 90% of the excess heat caused by the greenhouse effect from our use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. This ocean warming has far-reaching impacts: it disrupts marine ecosystems, bleaches coral reefs, intensifies hurricanes and tropical storms, and contributes to the melting of polar ice, which in turn raises sea levels. Additionally, warmer oceans can alter global weather patterns, threaten fisheries and coastal communities, and reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon, further accelerating climate change.

Climate Central has released a series of tools designed to visualize the influence of human-caused climate change on ocean temperatures around the world. In addition to the climate stripes visualization shown above, there is a Climate Shift Index interactive map that 'shows how much climate change has affected the likelihood of a particular day’s ocean surface temperature across the world.' On this map, increases in sea surface temperatures are represented using red hues.

The use of climate stripes is a particularly powerful method of visualizing temperature increases over time. In 2018, Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, released this innovative form of data visualization to illustrate how temperatures have risen around the globe over the last century. His clever Climate Stripes visualizations of global heating over time have quickly become a data visualization design classic.

The Underground Atlas

Beneath every forest, grassland, and field lies an invisible world that quietly sustains life on Earth. This world is woven together by mycorrhizal fungi - that live in symbiosis with plant roots. These fungi act like underground lifelines, delivering water and nutrients to plants, improving soil health, and even storing massive amounts of carbon.

But until now, this underground world was almost invisible.

The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) has now changed that by releasing the first-ever high-resolution map of Earth’s mycorrhizal biodiversity. The Underground Atlas uses over 2.8 billion fungal DNA sequences from soil samples collected in 130 countries to plot a detailed, 1 km² global map of underground fungal diversity. This unprecedented resource reveals where the world’s richest fungal ecosystems are - and how vulnerable they are to human activity.

Click anywhere in the world on the Underground Atlas and you can view a prediction of the number of mycorrhizal fungi species that can be found there. You can select to view a prediction of either Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) fungi or Ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi.

By revealing where underground fungal networks live and thrive, the Underground Atlas brings the global diversity of mycorrhizal fungi into view - and, it is hoped, will help us better understand and protect these vital ecosystems in a time of dramatic climate change.

Pixel the Planet!

Wplace turns the entire world into your canvas. It’s an interactive map where anyone can paint - one pixel at a time - and watch as a shared, global artwork comes to life.

If you’ve ever contributed to r/place, the concept will feel instantly familiar. r/place was a wildly popular collaborative experiment on Reddit, where millions of users battled for pixels and created a massive digital mosaic together. You can still explore the incredible results of the last event on the interactive 2023 r/place Atlas.

Wplace uses Maplibre with OpenFreeMap map tiles to create a very similar collaborative drawing experiment only this time the whole world is your canvas. Zoom-in anywhere in the world and you can start coloring pixels in order to create your own drawing.

When you first log in to Wplace, you’ll get 62 pixels to start painting the world. And don’t worry about running out - your pixels automatically replenish over time, so you can keep creating. Still can’t get enough? Wplace even has its own store where you can stock up on extra pixels and keep the creativity flowing.

If you’re still feeling creative, you’ll also love exploring Hexagen World. This unique game world is built entirely by players using AI-generated prompts. Think of it as another cousin to r/place - but instead of placing single pixels, you’re adding beautifully AI-crafted hexagon tiles to a living, collaborative map.

Getting started is simple: register for Hexagen World, pick a blank hexagon, type in your prompt, and watch as your custom tile appears on the map. Every tile helps shape this ever-evolving world - one hexagon at a time.

Mapping the MutiVerse

Every town, every mountain, and every quiet river had its own poem waiting to be discovered. 

Meet MultiVerse - an interactive map where a single click anywhere in the world generates a unique poem inspired by that location. From the bustling streets of Tokyo to the silent hills of the Scottish Highlands, MultiVerse lets you explore not just geography, but language, emotion, and imagination.

Why?

On Saturday, I stumbled upon No Time to Discourse, an interactive map that procedurally generates climate disaster micro-fictions and pins them to a map of the United States. In my review, I pointed out that it never actually used real place names in its stories. So, to be fair, I wanted to see if it was even possible to create procedurally generated literature that truly came from any place on the map. The result is MultiVerse.

✨ How It Works

MultiVerse blends real-world location data with a language engine to craft poetry that changes as you roam the map. Under the hood are two main drivers:

1. Overpass API: Finding the Soul of a Place

When you click on the map, MultiVerse needs to know where you are. That’s where the Overpass API comes in.

• Overpass is a query engine for OpenStreetMap (OSM) data.

• When you click the map, MultiVerse sends a request asking: “What’s the nearest town, village, or city to this point?”

• The API responds with details about the location, such as its name.

This means that every poem is tied to a real place. If there’s an OSM record, MultiVerse can find it.

2. RiTa.js: The Language Engine

Once MultiVerse knows where you clicked, it turns that location into verse using RiTa.js, a JavaScript library for generative language.

• RiTa uses grammars - sets of rules that describe how words can combine.

• MultiVerse feeds the location name into a grammar and then generates a short poem.

• The result might look something like:

  Winter gentle breeze  
  Wakes softly in Kyoto’s streets  
  Fading with the dusk
  

Because the grammar is flexible and randomized, each poem is (largely) unique - and each town can have hundreds of possible variations, each offering a new way of seeing the place.

I say “(largely) unique” because MultiVerse uses a set of rules that randomly combine adjectives, verbs, and nouns. At the moment, my MultiVerse grammar (set of rules) and vocabulary (word dictionary) are quite limited, so you will probably notice some repetition in the poems it generates. However, the beauty of RiTa.js is that you can easily expand the grammar rules and the vocabulary data. With a larger vocabulary and a more complex grammar, the chances of spotting repetitive patterns would drop dramatically.

Feel free to create an improved version of MutiVerse yourself by forking it on GitHub.

A Speculative Atlas of Climate Disaster

No Time to Discourse is an interactive map of procedurally generated climate disasters that reimagines a United States reshaped by endless ecological catastrophes. It is a map that invites you to explore a dystopian future America where every click reveals a new story of survival, loss, and adaptation. The result is a picture of a future that feels both imagined and disturbingly plausible.

What makes this dystopian vision of America's future so effective is the accuracy and variability of the hundreds of procedurally generated climate disasters that it presents. No disaster is ever the same. One click might bring you a tale of a wildfire displacing thousands in the Pacific Northwest; another might land you in a drought-stricken Midwestern town where water has become more valuable than land. The result is a mosaic of possibility, a reminder that climate change isn’t one disaster but many overlapping and compounding events.

What lets this vision down a little is the map's aesthetic. At its core, No Time to Discourse is an interactive atlas powered by Leaflet.js and Stamen Design’s watercolor tiles. I have no problem with this serene aesthetic. The painterly backdrop of the map stands in stark contrast to the content it delivers: procedurally generated disaster scenarios rendered through Rita.js-generated micro-fictions.

However, I do think that some effort could have gone into developing Leaflet's default markers and info windows into something a little more visually interesting. Using custom images for the map markers and designing bespoke info windows could have enhanced the sense of immersion and created a more interesting and appropriate disaster aesthetic. As it stands, the interface is functional but somewhat utilitarian, which slightly undercuts the emotional weight of the stories it delivers. 

I also wonder if reverse geocoding might have been used to make the micro-fictions a little more contextually relevant. At the moment, each micro-fiction seems oddly unconnected to its location on the map. I have not used Rita.js before, but I imagine it might be possible to extract town and neighborhood names from the map and have these appear in the procedurally generated climate disasters in order to anchor the stories more firmly in their geographic context. This small change could create a stronger sense of place, transforming each disaster from an abstract scenario into something that feels more immediate and personal - an imagined event unfolding in a location that the user can recognize.

Despite these minor criticisms, No Sense to Discourse remains an interesting experiment in procedurally generated fiction - one that is worth revisiting, if only to see what new climate disasters it will imagine next.

Via: Webcurios

Solve the Global Treasure Hunt!

Treasure Guessr is a new daily challenge game that requires you to identify a different location every day on an interactive map.

The premise of Treasure Guessr is simple: you're shown a small map of a mystery location, and your task is to pinpoint that location on a larger interactive map. Of course, this sounds easier than it really is - after all, the world is huge, and most of us only know a tiny fraction of it. But don’t worry! You have five minutes to find the treasure, and as the timer counts down, you’ll be able to zoom out slightly on the treasure map -often a crucial feature for narrowing down the location.

There are two daily game modes: Normal and Expert. As you might expect, the Expert mode is significantly more challenging than Normal. It usually involves locating a spot on a very sparse-looking map (for reference, my time for solving today’s Expert game was 3:54 if you want to try and beat me!). Meanwhile, Normal mode tends to feature maps with more recognizable landmarks or well-known locations, making it a bit easier to play.

In addition to the Daily Challenge, you can also create your own Treasure Guessr games. Creating a custom challenge is simple: just select the location you want your friends to find on the map, and you’ll get a shareable link to your personalized Treasure Guessr game. You can then challenge your friends to see who can find the treasure the fastest!

🏴‍☠️ Here’s my Treasure Guessr game for you—let me know in the comments how long it takes you to find the treasure!

Play Destination X

Have you ever dreamed of playing GeoGuessr in real life? Well, hold on to your hats, because the new reality show Destination X (airing in the US and the UK) is an interactive geoguessing game that you can actually play yourself - right from your own home.

In Destination X, contestants are whisked away on a bus with blacked-out windows, dropped at secret locations across Europe, and challenged to solve cryptic clues to figure out exactly where they are. It’s part travel adventure, part mystery, and part geography challenge - and here’s the best bit: you can join in online.

The Destination X Game lets you play along in real time. You’ll tackle geography quiz questions, and with every correct answer, your guessing area on an interactive map shrinks by 100 kilometers. Then, you’ll get a GeoGuessr-style photo clue of a famous European landmark. Identify it, and your search zone narrows again.

A new Destination X Game is released for each episode, challenging you to identify that episode’s location. If you play while an episode airs, you can even earn a special “LIVE” badge by finding the location before the contestants do.

To play Destination X, you’ll need to sign in to the BBC’s iPlayer - so you must be a UK TV licence payer to play.

I think it also helps to watch the show while playing. I tried the game without having seen the episode, and although I answered every quiz question correctly and identified the landmark, my guessing circle still covered half of Europe. Without the extra context from the show itself, it was virtually impossible to pinpoint last night's location. Presumably if I had watched the show I would have had many more clues to help me in my quest.

The Global Movie Map

Over the years, there have been a number of interactive maps that have plotted movies and TV shows based on where they were shot or set. There have also been several attempts to map novels by their settings.

StoryTerra takes this idea further - it maps movies, television dramas, and novels all in one place!

Zoom in on any location in the world on StoryTerra, and you can discover which movies and novels take place there. Thanks to a hierarchical location system (e.g., Paris → Île-de-France → France), you can explore at any scale, from a single city to an entire country. Each novel or movie set in the selected location appears as a color-coded card in the map sidebar, and you can click on these cards to read a synopsis of the selected title.

StoryTerra also has a powerful timeline feature. This allows you to filter results by centuries, decades, or even individual years. Whether you’re curious about ancient China or 1940s France, you can see exactly which stories align with that period. (Note: items appear to be mapped according to the date when they are set, rather than when they were written or released.)

The data for the map comes from publicly available datasets of books, movies, and TV shows. However, each item had to be manually checked for its setting and time period. Currently, there are just over 100,000 mapped items. Because of this careful curation process, some popular titles may not appear on the map.

For example, clicking on Brighton, UK, brings up around 40 results - a fair number. However, I can think of three classic movies set in Brighton, and one of them is missing. While StoryTerra includes Brighton Rock and Genevieve, the iconic Quadrophenia is absent from the map’s list of Brighton-based stories.

Although StoryTerra does not give a definitive list of TV shows, movies or novels set in a chosen location it does normally provide a reasonable selection of results. For me, that’s enough. When I travel, I enjoy reading novels set in my destination (both before and during the trip). I can definitely see myself using StoryTerra before visiting a new location to find movies to watch and novels to read that will help me connect with my holiday destination.