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If you're looking for the outline of the Alaska you know and love, you might as well give up now. This bizarre map, which appeared in the third volume of Diderot's Encyclopédie, dates all the way back to 1772 — and it's a total hodgepodge of misinformation. More »
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You're looking at just one print from a collection that comprises dozens of spellbinding maps and charts based on the results of the 1870 US census — the ninth census ever conducted, and the first to be performed in the years following the Civil War. More »
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Alternate dimensions aren't outside our everyday experience. In fact, we can use exotic dimensions, like fractional dimensions, to measure things as common as coastlines. Find out about the Hausdorff Dimension before your next trip to the sea. More »
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Want to know how to get from New York to London? Set a course 73 degrees east of north and just keep going. Congratulations, you're on the express loxodrome. More »
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This stunning depiction of some of the world's most impressive geographical features is from a copy of General Atlas of the World (do yourself a favor and click here for the uncropped, hi-res version. Seriously, do it now.) More »
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Feast your eyes on this stunning map of the Lower Mississippi's evolving floodplains, lifted from cartographer Harold Fisk's 1944 report, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. More »
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There's still a lot we don't know about the first human colonization of the Americas, particularly the exact timing, but we do know that it took tens of thousands of years for humans to make it from Alaska to Chile. More »
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There are many areas to explore in the sciences, and one of them has to be comparative gustatory geography. Some rogue scientists put plains and pancakes to the test, in the ultimate battle of the breakfast foods. More »
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This guide is brought to you by Atlas Obscura, and is dedicated to this question: If aliens ever do make contact with the earth... Where will they park? More »
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A couple of years ago, two geographers created one of the most chilling maps you'll ever see - it shows what kinds of natural hazards are most likely to kill you in America. And which regions are the most deadly. More »
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What caused this peculiar configuration of geometric shapes in the desert, and how is it related to urban life in the United States? More »
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San Franciscans will tilt their heads and recognize this as home sweet home. Photographer Håkan Dahlström tilted his camera until the surface of a hill appears level, and the house climbing that hill juts sideways into the sky. Via BoingBoing. More »
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Well, not exactly. Yesterday Gallup released updated data detailing where the world's population would relocate if emigration were a non-issue. Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Botswana, and the United States were among the big gainers, whereas everyone wants to leave Somalia. More »
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If the Earth stopped spinning, the oceans would divide, a megacontinent would emerge at the equator, one day would last one year, and our now-ellipsoid planet would become spherical. But we can finally build that freeway from Jakarta to Houston! More »
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The Bombetoka Bay in Madagascar stretches many tentacles into the mainland via this tidal delta. While sometimes the water is a deep blue, at other times its Cthulhu-like rivulets turn deep red. What makes this strange body change color? More »
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At one point, California's inland Salton Sea was a thriving tourist destination and fishing spot. Nowadays, it's a toxic, hyper-salinated cesspool gone stagnant due to pollution and lack of sufficient drainage. Here are snapshots of the Sea's eerie lakeside towns. More »
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When you create a marker on Google Maps, you could be revealing the most popular religious and sexual habits in your local region. At least, that's what a group of social geographers demonstrated with their "sex and religion" map. More »
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Behold the lush blue sky and moss-covered rocks that defy gravity in the Scottish Hebrides. In a series of photos by National Geographic's Jim Richardson, you'll discover the moon Pandora on Earth. There is even a cliff full of dragons. More »
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No, this isn't Photoshopped - it's a real image, taken from a helicopter among the apartment buildings of mainland Hong Kong. Photographer Jason Hawkes captures bizarre human-made formations from the air - some unrecognizable. More »
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A series of maps showing job gains and losses in the United States over the past five years makes a fascinating study of how joblessness spread across a country heading for massive economic recession. More »
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The National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications in Hungary has put together a helpful real-time map of global disasters. In this detail, you can see a series of earthquakes that hit Greece, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Russia today, as well as an explosion in Norway and a flood in Finland. More »
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Doctor Moreau had one. Syndrome from The Incredibles had one. And if you want to perform your morally questionable experiments, you should probably get one, too. Remote islands allow you to build killer robots, death rays, or societies of human-animal hybrids in peace and privacy, without attracting the unwanted attention of the outside world. Luckily, several real-life islands offer a secluded setting where you can advance the cause of science. More »
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Adrian Leskiw is one of the rarest kinds of science fiction creators: He does his world-building entirely through the medium of road maps. A self-professed road geek, Leskiw creates extremely realistic road systems for fictional countries or alternate versions of existing ones. Here you can see a map he's created of an imaginary island called Breda in the south Pacific, in the year 2040. More »
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One of the most gorgeous images from National Geographic's recent photography contest is this one, of a boiling lake under cloudy skies. It looks like what I imagine the methane lakes might look like on Titan. Taken by Ben Hattenbach, this pool of intensely (and naturally) blue water is a geothermal oasis in an arctic desert in Hveravellir, in the Kjolur region of central Iceland. One of the other winners managed to capture an image of boiling rock arcing through the air. More »
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