I recently featured New York in 1.67 Million Buildings - a building age map created by Block and Paper, who have developed similar animated timelines for 80 other US cities and lots of other cities around the world.

One of those other cities is Los Angeles. However, if you want an even wider perspective, Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County lets you view an animated construction history for the entire county. Their map visualizes nearly 3 million buildings constructed since 1880.

These are the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people on the Borderline country border game.

The object of Borderline is very simple. You are shown a map without borders and asked to draw the outline of a named country. You are then scored on the accuracy of your drawn border.  The scoring appears to be based on two measures of accuracy. The game calculates how far the real border is, on average, from your drawn line. The game also compares the length of your line with the actual length of the country's land border (drawing substantially more line than the real border can therefore hurt your score).

Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported 'include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.'

The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration's global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have been deported there alongside a breakdown of the nationalities of those who have been deported.

This animated map shows the movement of the land that now makes up the United States (outlined in red) over the course of 540 million years. It was recorded from the Pangea Map, a new interactive map that “lets you explore 540 million years of continental drift, from the Cambrian explosion all the way to the present day”.

Maps such as Esri's Dance of the Continents, GPlates and Ancient Earth Globe already allow you to explore how the Earth has changed over time through shifting plate tectonics and continental drift.

Since 2012, the London Legacy Development Corporation has gradually transformed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from an essential local green space into a high-density residential hub driven by foreign investment. The before-and-after aerial imagery above provides a striking illustration of how the landscape of the Olympic 'park' is being built over.

This before and after image was created in a matter of seconds by GeoWhisperer. GeoWhisperer is a new tool from Henk van Ess that attempts to take some of the guesswork out of comparing satellite imagery. Designed for OSINT researchers, journalists and visual mappers, it automatically searches historical satellite imagery and uses AI to identify physical changes between different dates.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the European landscape looked radically unrecognizable compared to today. Enormous ice sheets flattened Northern Europe, global sea levels dropped dramatically, and the sheer weight of the ice compressed Earth's crust downward by hundreds of meters.

Europe Under the Ice is an impressive interactive mapped visualization that tracks these massive geophysical changes step-by-step from 24,100 BC all the way to the present day. Press play on the map and you can watch the ice sheets spread and retreat across Northern Europe over the millennia.

Maps such as Pack Lightly's Best Time to Travel and Find the Best Time to Travel translate complex historical weather data into interactive heatmaps. By taking the guesswork out of trip timing, they make it easy to either match a destination with its optimal season or discover which parts of the world offer ideal weather for your travel dates.

For travelers who want deeper control over their planning, SeasonMap takes climate-based travel visualization a step further. Rather than relying on simple, static temperature averages, SeasonMap converts multi-source climate data into dynamic, activity-specific comfort scores (0–100) mapped globally for every month.

I recently reviewed the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find which iconic movie scenes were filmed right around the corner from your house.

However, the fact that a film was shot near you doesn't necessarily mean that the movie is set in your neighborhood. In many cases, filmmakers use one location to stand in for another, either because it's cheaper, more convenient, or simply looks the part.

For example, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, while set almost entirely in the moody, nocturnal streets of Greenwich Village and Manhattan, was shot almost entirely in London. Even more astonishingly, London was also used to create some of the iconic, sweat-soaked Vietnam jungle scenes in Full Metal Jacket.

Blowing up the world has now become even more fun.

We have all had a lot of fun nuking cities around the world with existing nuclear bomb simulators like NUKEMAP, Outrider - Bomb Blast and Ground Zero. But what has been missing to truly satisfy our sadistic, mass-murdering instincts is a really satisfying level of realism.

Thankfully, that has all changed with the 'launch' of the 3D Nuclear Blast Simulator. This new map-based nuke simulation not only lets you choose any location around the world to assess the likely number of human casualties from dropping a nuclear bomb on the area, but also simulates the explosion with a satisfyingly new degree of realism.

TimePin is a GeoGuessr-style game with a historical twist. Your task is to guess not only where a character is from, but also when they lived. 

Each round presents you with environmental photos and a character you can question about their life and surroundings. You have 12 questions available, but can only ask five, so you'll need to choose carefully. The clues might help you narrow down both the location and the historical era. 

Once you've made your deductions, drop a pin on the interactive map and use the time slider to select your date. The closer you get to the correct place and time, the more points you earn. 

Isometric NYC has definitely started a new trend for developing pixelated interactive city maps. In the last few weeks it has inspired Isopolis in San Francisco and London, drawn in London. Now a new project is taking the idea to Brazil - and suggests that we could soon be seeing a lot more of these pixelated cities.

earthToPixels has now transformed aerial imagery of João Pessoa, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil, into a sprawling, SimCity-style isometric pixel-art map.

Like the earlier maps, the pixelated map of João Pessoa is a joy to explore. Buildings, roads, parks and coastline are transformed into a giant isometric pixel-art landscape that you can pan and zoom through, revealing more detail as you explore.

What is the world listening to today? Rotation's Music Map offers a wonderfully simple way to explore that question, with a globe showing the songs currently charting in 166 countries and 174 cities.

Each place on the globe highlights a record that the rest of the world isn't playing. Click on a country or city and the record starts playing, turning the map into a kind of interactive global jukebox. You can also switch between different chart sources, including Spotify, Apple Music and Shazam, to see how the picture changes.

One of my favourite features is the Shuffle option. Rather than simply choosing a random country, it works like a loaded die: it picks a record, then a place, and explains why that particular combination has been selected. It is a nice way of discovering music from places you might otherwise never think to explore.

The craze for building age maps seems to have faded in recent years, which is a shame because I think they can reveal a surprising amount about how a city has grown and changed over time. When you map the age of every building, patterns of development, expansion and redevelopment can suddenly become much easier to see in a way that is hard to grasp from standard historical records.

Since the UN General Assembly voted to promote equal-area projections such as Equal Earth as an alternative to the familiar Mercator projection, there have been a number of interesting attempts to show just how much our perception of the relative size of countries changes when we switch between the two.

(my attempt was this animated tween between a Mercator vs Equal Earth projection)

TripGeo Snaps is a new GeoGuessr type game with a difference. Instead of being dropped into a Street View panorama that you can explore, you are shown a static Street View snapshot. You can't pan around, follow the road or search for clues elsewhere. You have to identify the country purely from the visual clues contained in the image in front of you.

Every game presents you with five locations. Each image initially appears through a small spotlight, so you only get a limited glimpse of the scene. You then have three chances to identify the country from a list of eight possibilities.

How closely related are the world's populations? 

The Genetic Distance Map offers a fascinating way to explore that question by putting genetic similarity onto a map. Click on this map and the surrounding areas are then colored according to genetic distance. The result is a visual landscape of genetic similarity, with similar colours indicating populations that are genetically closer to one another.

For most populations, the Genetic Distance Map displays smooth, concentric rings radiating outwards. In many locations, geographic distance mirrors genetic distance (e.g., clicking on central France highlights neighboring regions in Western Europe). As you might suspect populations that live close together are often genetically similar.

The UN General Assembly has just endorsed a new position on world maps that aims to represent the relative size of the world's land masses more accurately, with the difference being particularly obvious when you compare Africa and Greenland. The resolution, backed by 164 countries, promotes the use of equal-area projections such as Equal Earth as an alternative to the familiar Mercator projection.

So, naturally, I made a map.

Rather than simply putting the two projections side-by-side, this interactive map lets you watch one transform into the other. Click Mercator or Equal Earth to switch between them, or sit back and let the map automatically tween between the two.

And the transformation is quite revealing.

Yesterday the UN General Assembly voted to replace its traditional world maps - based on Mercator - with a map that more accurately reflects the size of Africa - based on the 2018 Equal Earth map.

My Equal Earth vs Web Mercator map allows you to compare how these two maps depict the world side-by-side. Drag the handle in the middle of the map and you can switch between the two projections. You can also pan and zoom around the map and the two views will move together.

Equal Earth vs Mercator

The problem with Mercator isn't that it is a "bad" map. Quite the opposite: Gerardus Mercator's 1569 projection was designed for sea navigation, where preserving angles and directions is enormously useful. The problem is that it is a rather unfortunate choice when you want to compare the size of countries and continents.

I use Organic Maps every day. Currently, I'm using it to follow the London Loop, with the route loaded as a GPX track on the map.

I often get annoyed with the London Loop route - particularly when it takes me along a busy road when I can see what looks like a much more pleasant alternative just a few metres away. What I need is a simple tool that will allow me to draw my own alternative routes for the sections I don't like and save them as GPX files, which I can then add to Organic Maps.

My home town of Crawley is apparently the undisputed heavyweight champion of British music.

At least, that is what you might conclude from the UK Music Cities Explorer. When the interactive map's results are normalized by population, Crawley appears as the largest circle on the map, giving it the highest Spotify-listener footprint per resident of any UK urban area in the explorer.

Not bad for a small town in the south of England.

The UK Music Cities Explorer is an interactive exploration of the geographical origins and global popularity of British bands. Using the map, you can search for individual bands or places, explore where artists were formed, compare Spotify monthly listeners and followers, and switch between raw totals and results normalized by the population of each urban area.

Have you ever watched a film and thought, “Wait, I know that street”? A new interactive mapping project makes it easy to find out which iconic movie scenes were filmed right around the corner from your house.

Movie Scene Map turns the globe into an open-air film set. It allows you to explore real-world locations from your favourite movies and TV shows, making it easy to track down specific filming locations - and maybe even visit them in person on your next walk or weekend getaway.

Aside from maps, I would say my next biggest obsession is coffee. For the last couple of months, my favourite bean, Finca La Bolsa, has been out of season and unavailable from my local roasters. I've therefore been using the opportunity to experiment with beans from different regions, different taste profiles and different processing methods.

For some reason, it has only just dawned on me that there might be some coffee maps I can use to help me discover new beans to add to my coffee repertoire.

Go on. Have a guess.

It sounds like the sort of question that should have a straightforward answer. Surely someone, at some point, has walked around Britain with a very long tape measure and worked it out.

Unfortunately, the coastline has other ideas.

The problem is that Britain's coast is full of bays, headlands, inlets and innumerable little squiggly bits. Measure it using a fairly large ruler and you'll skip over much of that detail. Use a smaller ruler and suddenly you're measuring around all those extra twists and turns - and Britain's coastline mysteriously gets longer.

This is the Coastline Paradox: the awkward fact that there isn't really one definitive answer to the question How long is the coastline of Great Britain?

The 15-Minute City has become one of the most influential ideas in contemporary urban planning. Popularised by urbanist Carlos Moreno, the concept is beautifully simple: cities should be designed so that people can reach the things they need for everyday life - shops, healthcare, schools, green spaces, culture and leisure - within around 15 minutes of where they live, ideally on foot or by bicycle.

You don't have to wait for Donald Trump to rename Lake Ontario. Thanks to MapQuest, you can now direct all your small dick energy into hitting Canada where it really hurts - by taking a Sharpie to Canada's geography yourself.

Canada's slow-witted response to the latest U.S. trade war has been to impose tariffs on a range of American imports, thereby increasing the cost of goods for American consumers. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has once again demonstrated why he is known as the "master of the deal" by halting trade talks with Canada and striking back where it really hurts - in the "feels" - with an announcement that he intends to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America."

On Monday I reviewed two animated maps that simulate one day's worth of train travel in countries across the world. Both of these simulations used conventional geographic maps, with the trains shown in their real-world geographical locations. But wouldn't it be cool to see this data animated on a proper schematic transit map?

Here's a little thing I discovered about Chicago: the higher a street's number, the further south it is from the city center.

You can see this very clearly on North America's Numbered Streets. This interactive map colors "all streets with a '#st', '#nd', '#rd', or '#th' in their name in North America, as drawn from OpenStreetMap." 

Have you ever wanted to play GTA in San Francisco? In San Francisco - The Game, you can now drive cars, climb buildings or even hang-glide over the Bay Area - all in your browser.

What makes this game world particularly interesting from a mapping perspective is that this isn't a fictional city inspired by San Francisco. The game's 3D world is built from real-world photogrammetry and elevation data, extracted from Apple Maps 3D data and converted into a playable open-world environment.

The result is an extraordinary browser map that doubles as a game. San Francisco's famously steep hills, dense streets and distinctive buildings are all rendered as a detailed 3D landscape. You can explore the city on foot, clamber over buildings and rooftops, jump into one of the cars scattered around the streets, and even fly over the city strapped to a hang-glider.

One Day on Rails maps more than 70,000 train journeys across Europe during one single day this summer. It also maps 5,737 journeys across the USA, 34,206 journeys in Tokyo and 11,075 journeys in London.

One Day On Rails visualizes an entire day's railway activity on one single animated interactive map. Rather than showing trains at a single point in time, One Day on Rails uses real timetable data to animate thousands of services moving along their actual routes.

The main European visualization combines railway data from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and France. In total, it maps 70,427 scheduled journeys, with cross-border services carefully deduplicated so that the same train isn't counted twice when it appears in different national datasets.

DrillerDB Underground is very different from a conventional map, which presents the Earth's surface as a flat 2D view from directly above. Instead, it offers a striking oblique 3D view where the surface of the earth has been sliced open like a layer cake. Rising above the horizon is standard aerial imagery draped over USGS 3DEP elevation data, but the real star of this map lies directly underneath: a volumetric 3D cross-section revealing the actual geological strata layered beneath the surface.

Turning 13 Million Well Logs into 3D Geology

Anyone who has ever flown from America to Europe has probably noticed that the outward flight usually takes considerably less time than the return journey. The reason is the jet stream - fast-moving winds high in the atmosphere that generally blow from west to east. Flying east, aircraft can get a significant push from these winds, while flying west means battling against them.

The same phenomenon affects flights to Hawaii, and Flight Map from HawaiiTravelers lets you explore exactly how much extra time the winds appear to add to the journey.

SmokyMountains.com has been producing its fall foliage maps for more than a decade. The Smoky Mountains 2026 Fall Foliage Prediction Map has now been released to visualize this year's expected progression of fall foliage across the contiguous US. 

Rather than simply highlighting where autumn is happening now, the interactive map lets you travel through the season week by week to see when different parts of the country are expected to change colour. The map divides the US into counties, with each county coloured according to its predicted foliage stage. The legend ranges from No Change and Minimal through Patchy, Partial, Near Peak, Peak and Past Peak. This makes it particularly easy to see the gradual movement of autumn across the country.

Spain's 2026 World Cup win was hardly a massive surprise to football fans. It was another chapter in what has become an extraordinary period of Spanish dominance in international football. Spain won the European Championship in 2024 and the Nations League in 2023, and the Spanish women are the current World Cup holders. They also came agonisingly close to adding the 2025 Women's European Championship, only losing to England on penalties in the final.

Spain's success didn't come from nowhere. Behind the country's seemingly endless supply of talented footballers is la cantera - literally "the quarry" - the system of youth academies and local football infrastructure that develops the country's players.

What would the world look like if countries were resized according to the number of people living in them? You can explore that question in Gapmover, an map that shows how the relative size of countries has changed from 1800 and is projected to change through to 2100.

Unlike a conventional map, this animated population cartogram continually distorts the shapes and sizes of countries so that their area reflects their share of the world's population. As you drag through the timeline, countries swell and shrink, offering a striking visualisation of the changing balance of population around the globe.

If you want to take a trip through the history of Richmond, Virginia, Yesterdays is a wonderful place to start. This interactive map brings together thousands of historical photographs and pins them to the places where they were taken.

You can simply browse the map and see what photographs have been recorded in different parts of Richmond, or search the collection by date, subject and other data. For example you can set the timeline control to just view photographs of Richmond taken in the 19th Century. The result is a wonderfully addictive way to explore Richmond - one photograph, street and neighbourhood at a time.

One of the perennial questions in UK politics and geography is “where is the border between the North and South?” I can now definitively answer that question thanks to MapSplit.

Giuseppe Sollazzo’s MapSplit interactive map allows you to map any UK-specific dataset and then “draw a movable straight line across the UK” to view a statistic for each side. This means I was able to upload all the Greggs outlets in the UK onto Giuseppe's map and instantly discover the dividing line across the country where there are an equal number of Greggs north and south of the line. Ending, forever, the debate about the border between the North and South.

If you want to discover the best spots nearby to watch the sunset, then you need the Sunset Atlas. Choosing a good local spot to watch the sun disappear below the horizon can involve a fair amount of trial and error. Sunset Atlas takes some of the guesswork out of finding the perfect sunset viewpoint by mapping sunset viewing conditions across Europe.

The interactive map uses a colourful heatmap to show the quality of sunset views, with warmer colours indicating locations where the setting sun has a more unobstructed line of sight. You can click on the map to see the Sunset Score for any location, rated from 0 to 100. Or click on the 'Find Best Spots' button to instantly discover the highest-scoring sunset spots near your location.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a city in possession of a good railway network, must be in want of an animated train map. Yet, having once beheld the grandeur of Mini Tokyo 3D and the intricate labyrinth of the Shinjuku Station Indoor, one might reasonably despair of any further elegance in the art.

Mr. Gregg Tavares, however, was of a different mind entirely. Reader, he married them.

The Falcon 9 crash is just one of 44 landing and impact sites mapped by azmth Luna. These range from the Soviet Union's Luna 2 in 1959 to the latest commercial lunar missions, with successful landings, failed missions and accidental impacts all represented. The resulting collection provides a comprehensive visual history of humanity's attempts to reach the Moon.

The American population is moving south and west. You can see that migration writ large in the US Population Growth Atlas, an interactive map showing how the populations of every US county and state have changed between 1980 and 2025.

The most striking feature of the map is the broad band of population decline running through the middle of the country. From the Dakotas and Montana, south through Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma and into parts of West Texas, large numbers of counties are coloured red or orange. It is an “Emptying Middle” separating the rapidly growing populations of the coasts and the Sun Belt.

At the moment (as I write), 6.962 billion people are awake, while another 2.1 billion are fast asleep. Awake Globe visualizes this constantly shifting global rhythm of sleep and wakefulness, revealing where people around the world are currently awake, asleep, or somewhere in between.

The map presents the Earth as a glowing, rotating globe. Daylight sweeps across its surface at around 1,000 miles per hour (at the equator), while millions of tiny coloured points show where people are currently awake or asleep. Blue represents people who are tucked up in bed, while green indicates those who are awake, with a spectrum of colours in between showing the gradual transition from sleep to wakefulness.

I had determined not to post about Castle Map despite it being written about extensively elsewhere. There are already hundreds of maps of castles around the world and, although I have nothing against AI-generated maps, this one struck me as particularly uninteresting.

That first impression wasn't helped by the site's design. Castle Map takes the illegible grey-text-on-a-black-background AI design trend to even greater lengths by applying the same colour scheme to the map itself, with dark grey land set against a black sea. Not only are the menu options in the legend almost impossible to read, but the map itself is barely legible.

However, today I discovered that Castle Map includes a neat GeoGuessr-style game: CastleGuessr. 

Isometric NYC appears to have started something of a trend. In the last few weeks alone it has inspired both Isopolis - San Francisco and now London, drawn, another sprawling AI-generated city rendered in the style of a classic SimCity map.

If you are already afraid of flying then you might want to give CrashAtlas a miss. This interactive map of aircraft accidents is unlikely to do much for your aerophobia. On the other hand, if you've ever wondered whether a plane has crashed near your home, then CrashAtlas may prove to be a fascinating, if slightly macabre, diversion.

CrashAtlas is a global interactive map dedicated to documenting the history of aviation accidents and incidents around the world. The map plots thousands of crash locations, allowing you to explore where aviation accidents have occurred geographically. 

Following the success of Isometric NYC, it was probably only a matter of time before another city received the same pixel-art treatment. Now Isopolis - San Francisco has recreated the City by the Bay as a sprawling isometric world that looks as though it has been lifted straight from the golden age of SimCity.

From the skyscrapers of the Financial District to the city's famous hills, bridges and waterfront, San Francisco has been transformed into a giant retro cityscape that invites endless exploration. SimCity fans will immediately recognize the aesthetic. The map captures San Francisco as a dense tapestry of tiny buildings, winding streets, parks and piers, all rendered in a consistent pixel-art style. 

On August 12, 2026, a total solar eclipse will cross Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. While eclipse chasers in Spain can enjoy totality, there is one potential problem. By the time the Moon's shadow reaches the Iberian Peninsula, the Sun will be hanging just above the western horizon. If there's a mountain between you and the setting Sun, you could miss part - or even all - of the eclipse.

Alessio Zanol's EclipseMap is designed to solve exactly that problem. Rather than simply showing the path of totality, the interactive map calculates how the surrounding landscape affects your view of the eclipse, helping you find locations where the horizon remains clear.

CheapFoodMap is an interactive map that highlights restaurants across the United States where you can still find meals for under $10. Rather than focusing on national chains, it celebrates local diners, neighborhood taquerias, family-owned cafés and other hidden gems.

Every listing includes the featured meal, its current price and the date that the price was last verified, allowing users to judge how reliable the information is in an age of inflation, when menu prices seem to change every few months.

German Döner Kebab restaurants have started popping up all over London. For some reason, the idea of a German kebab still strikes me as slightly incongruous - a bit like a Swiss curry or a French taco. However, according to a recent analysis of OpenStreetMap food venues, there are far more döner kebab restaurants in Germany than there are in Turkey. In fact, 51% of the world's döner shops are located in Germany.

The surprising truth is that restaurant names often tell us more about migration and language than they do about the birthplace of a dish. That's the premise behind Flavor Lines, an ingenious interactive map that uses millions of restaurant names from OpenStreetMap to reveal the invisible cultural boundaries that shape the world's cuisine.

Tourism websites often present destinations using static maps, brochures and carefully curated lists of attractions. Bigfoot's BC demonstrates that there is a much more engaging alternative. By turning British Columbia into a playful 3D world that visitors can explore as a giant Sasquatch, it transforms the traditional tourist guide into an interactive adventure.

Built with three.js and powered by open geographic data, this map recreates the province of British Columbia as a charming low-poly landscape. The terrain follows British Columbia's real topography, while roads, lakes, parks and settlements are all positioned using real-world geographic data. The result is a map that resembles an open-world video game.

Since the launch of the Google Maps API back in 2005, two fictional journeys have been mapped over and over again: Phileas Fogg’s global circumnavigation in Around the World in Eighty Days, and Odysseus’ long voyage home in the Odyssey.

For some reason Homer’s hero is having a bit of a moment - and a sudden surge of new Odyssey maps means Odysseus seems to have pulled ahead of Phileas Fogg in the fictional journey mapping contest.

The latest entry in this sudden wave of Homeric cartography is The Odyssey Journey, an animated, narrated retelling of Odysseus' decade-long voyage back to Ithaca.

Free Map Tiles Providers:

• OpenFreeMap
• VersaTiles
• Maptoolkit.org

One of the biggest barriers to building web maps has always been the cost and complexity of map tiles. Services such as Google Maps and Mapbox offer excellent infrastructure, but commercial pricing can quickly become prohibitive as projects grow. Self-hosting OpenStreetMap vector tiles is an alternative, but maintaining a global tile server yourself is far from trivial.

Randall Munroe's famous xkcd comic Map Age Guide distilled two centuries of global geopolitics into a wonderfully simple flowchart for dating maps. Does the map show Germany divided into East and West? Is there a Yugoslavia? Does South Sudan exist? By answering a handful of such questions about borders and country names, the comic demonstrates how you can usually work out when almost any modern map was made.

Date the Globe turns this idea into a really fun daily map game.

One of the biggest challenges when moving home is deciding which compromise you are prepared to make. You might want to live close to work, a good school, a supermarket, a park, a gym and your favourite coffee shop - but finding somewhere that sits within easy reach of everything is rarely possible.

Close is an interactive travel-time map of the United States designed to solve exactly that problem. Instead of measuring access to just one destination, it allows you to select up to six different amenities and then colours every census block according to the travel time to the furthest of those destinations.

Using Close is refreshingly straightforward: 

1. Search for a city or neighbourhood
2. Add the destinations that matter to you
3. Choose how you would travel to each one - walking, cycling or public transport

Shinjuku Station has a well-earned reputation as one of the world's largest and most bewildering transport hubs. The  Shinjuku Station Indoor interactive 3D map tackles that complexity by turning the station's official indoor mapping data into a clean, schematic three-dimensional blueprint. This map strips everything back to the essential geometry of corridors, platforms and rooms, making it much easier to understand how the station's many levels fit together.

Navigation is simple and intuitive. Users can pan across the station, zoom in and out, and hold Ctrl while dragging the mouse to rotate the view, making it easy to examine the station from almost any angle. Individual floors can be toggled on and off using the built-in control panel, allowing users to isolate a single level or view multiple floors stacked vertically. 

Streetnames by Elo is a fascinating interactive map which colours streets according to how highly the internet rates the people, places or things they are named after. The map combines OpenStreetMap's `name:etymology:wikidata` tags with EloEverything's crowd-sourced Elo rankings to create a surprisingly revealing view of the world's street names.

EloEverything asks users to choose which of two randomly selected things they prefer, building an Elo rating for everything from the Sun to headaches. By matching those ratings to OpenStreetMap's street etymology data, Streetnames by Elo turns road networks into a colour-coded map of collective internet opinion.

NYCSim is a truly impressive digital twin for New York City. Part real-time spatial platform and part living sandbox, this browser-based simulator allows you to explore a virtual Manhattan from the comfort of your own home. By pulling in live municipal transit data, real-time air quality metrics, and local weather feeds, the platform transforms a static city plan into a living, breathing map. 

This animated map reveals how agricultural productivity is expected to be affected by climate change around the world throughout this century. It uses the new Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index (CADI) to show where and how global heating is likely to alter crop-growing conditions.

According to the Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index, more than 640 million people already live in agricultural regions where food production has fallen by over 10% compared with 30 years ago. Looking ahead, the map suggests these declines will accelerate, with almost half of the world's population expected to be living in areas experiencing reduced agricultural productivity by the middle of the century under a high-emissions scenario.

Where is Downtown? is an interactive map surveying tool designed to crowdsource the boundaries of "downtown" for any city. 

The process is very simple:

• Enter the name of a city into the search bar
• Draw your perceived outline of "downtown" on the map
• View a heatmap of all the collective responses submitted so far

Last month I posted a review of Klimadashboard's European Heat Tracker, which visualizes how many people across Europe are exposed to extreme heat in real time. Since then, temperatures have continued to exceed seasonal norms across much of the continent, and new mapped visualizations have continued to document the unfolding heatwaves.

TripGeo Air is an impressive new browser-based flight simulator that lets you fly over a photorealistic 3D model of the real world.

What makes TripGeo Air particularly fun - besides the thrill of flying over your favorite landmarks - is the game's progression tasks. New pilots begin with simple circuit training before unlocking a series of paid jobs, including sightseeing flights, cargo deliveries, and passenger charters. Completing jobs earns credits which can be spent on unlocking more than twenty different aircraft, from light propeller planes to regional turboprops and airliners, each with its own handling characteristics. The result is an enjoyable progression system that gives players rewards and a reason to keep returning to the skies.

If you've ever looked at a railway map and wondered which routes are truly worth travelling, then TrainRouter has the answer. The interactive map showcases 767 of the world's greatest train routes across 118 countries, covering around 372,500 kilometres of railway.

Rather than simply displaying rail networks, TrainRouter acts as a curated railway atlas. Every highlighted line has been selected because it offers something distinctive, whether that's spectacular scenery, historic significance, engineering achievement or simply a memorable journey between two cities.

The map's filtering tools make it easy to discover routes that match your interests. You can explore High-speed, Classic, Night Train and Scenic railways, or browse the 60 most famous routes from around the world. Routes can also be filtered geographically by continent, or by journey type, including city-to-city services.

Launched in late 2025, Prakrit Ojha's War Atlas is an interactive map that visualizes more than 8,500 historical battles. Spanning from 1500 BC to the present day, it offers an immersive, guided tour through the history of human conflict.

Now there’s another War Atlas on the scene. Not only does this new map share the same name, a very similar URL, and a nearly identical thematic DNA, it also adopts a very similar AI-generated aesthetic. (A quick plea to all vibe-coders out there: please stop with the microscopic gray text on black backgrounds!) 

While the original War Atlas focuses on the precise points where battles took place, this new version tackles the broader political canvas. It maps 10,584 named conflicts layered over fluid, shifting empire borders spanning from 2500 BCE to the present day.