Today's 30DayMapChallenge is - Prompting Only

Yesterday Andy Woodruff posted this animated contour map:

Have you ever wondered how many satellites have passed overhead while you've been going about your daily business? Probably quite a few. But how many of them were actually looking at you? Watched is an intriguing new interactive map which attempts to answer that question by revealing which satellites have passed over any location on Earth during the last seven days, and, more interestingly, which of them actually took a photograph.

Visit Watched and enter any location in the world. The map will then reconstruct the satellite activity above that spot over the previous week, identifying the satellite that passed within viewing range and searching public satellite imagery archives for photographs captured during those passes.

There is something undeniably romantic about casting a message in a bottle into the ocean. After all, what could be more enchanting than surrendering a personal secret to the tides, with nothing but the hope that it might one day wash ashore and find its way into a stranger's hands?

Tell the Sky takes this idea to the skies. However with this interactive map, instead of throwing a bottle into the ocean, you write a message on a glowing virtual lantern and release it into the wind. Carried by real-world wind currents, your lantern drifts across the world until someone catches it, reads your message and adds one of their own before sending it on its way again.

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Utopia.

There have been lots of pixel-art maps appearing online recently. I covered several of these projects in my recent Pixelate the World post. For today's challenge I thought it might be interesting to create a pixelated map of London – not as it is, but as it might look in an ideal world.

Greater London covers approximately 1,591 square kilometres. If each zoomed-in map tile covers roughly 0.15 square kilometres, I would need in the region of 10,600 images to create enough tiles to cover the entire capital. That's a few too many for a simple map challenge, so I decided to create a much smaller map - using just one tile - of Trafalgar Square.

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is 10 minute map.

My Mount Fuji map took 30 seconds.

Vibe-coding might be cheating (and perhaps even the end of civilisation as we know it), but it really can help developers create online maps very, very quickly. To create my map, I simply entered the following prompt into ChatGPT:

'I have downloaded a geojson of Mount Fuji. Can you give me the code for a three.js illuminated neon contour map. Add an animation to rotate around the center of the mountain. My geojson URL is https://mapsmania.github.io/mapchallenge/contours.geojson'

It then took me 30 seconds to download and run the resulting HTML file. Job done!

For thousands of years, cartographers have been mapping more than just the known world. Medieval and early modern maps often mixed observed geography with religious beliefs, folklore and mythical stories, placing legendary cities, lost kingdoms and biblical locations alongside real-world places.

Mythical Tours is a fascinating narrated journey through this imaginary geography, using centuries of historical maps to track down the locations of places that many people today believe exist only in legend.

If your children are too young to enjoy Untappd, you could introduce them to Birds Around the World instead. With this map, rather than tracking all the beers they've drunk, they can collect all the different birds they've discovered! Get them started with binoculars and field guides rather than pints and beer goggles.

Birds Around the World is an interactive 3D globe that allows children to explore the world's birdlife. Hundreds of bird species are represented on the globe, with each dot marking where a particular species can be found. Click on a bird to discover a photograph, its conservation status, what it eats and, best of all, a recording of its actual bird call.

Before mobile phones, radio and even the telegraph, fire beacons were used as an early warning system designed to alert communities to the approach of hostile forces. The beacons were deliberately positioned on prominent high ground, allowing one fire to be seen from another. When an enemy was spotted, a chain of burning beacons could then relay the warning across the landscape.

The system was particularly important during the threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588. Beacons could take various forms, from simple bonfires to barrels of pitch or iron fire baskets mounted on tall wooden poles. Some were substantial enough to have permanent structures.

In October, YouGov published a small-multiple visualisation showing the popularity of regional names for alleyways in the UK. The maps in What else do Britons call an alleyway? are based on survey data. YouGov asked 39,224 Britons which words they personally use to describe an alleyway. The resulting maps show the percentage of people in each county or region who use particular terms.

I thought it might be interesting to also map the different words for alleyways that actually appear in street names around the UK.

If you want to know what happened in yesterday's midterm elections, you should probably start with The Economist's Swing from 2024 map. The map is paywalled, but the screenshot above tells the story rather well: almost the entire USA (perhaps with the exception of South Dakota) swung towards the Democrats.

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Polygons.

At the risk of starting World War III, I've created a map of Poland's Historical Borders. The map uses polygons to show how Poland's borders have changed at different points in its history. The historical boundaries were downloaded from OpenHistoricalMap.

It seems astonishing to me now that only a fortnight has passed since I climbed to the roof of Maps Mania Tower and proclaimed to the world that the Age of the Pixel Map had begun. And yet here I stand before you today, bearing the sad news of its demise and announcing, with no little ceremony, that The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived.

Two weeks ago, I observed that "One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective." My proposed solution was to create a pixel map offering four distinct viewpoints: North, South, East and West.

For Day 2 of the #30DayMapChallenge, the theme is Lines. For my contribution, I've created MapterGLOW, an interactive 3D terrain map that turns elevation data into glowing neon contour lines.

The map uses elevation tiles from Mapterhorn to build a three-dimensional model of the landscape, overlaid with luminous cyan contour lines at 50-metre intervals. You can rotate the terrain, tilt the camera and zoom in and out to explore the topography from different angles.

What if every European capital sent out a car at exactly the same moment, with the aim of reaching every town and village in Europe before its rivals? Which capital would claim the most territory, and how far would its influence extend beyond its own national borders?

If Every European Capital Sent Out a Car at the Same Moment is an intriguing interactive map from Copilot Travel that attempts to answer these questions. It imagines 38 cars setting off simultaneously from 38 European capitals, with each car travelling outwards along the road network at typical driving speeds. Every location in Europe is then assigned to whichever capital's car can reach it first.

Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France.

My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain.

The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high.

The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its routes.

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai ignited a golden age of Japanese landscape art with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Capturing the topography, seasons, and human activity around Japan's sacred peak, Hokusai’s masterpiece inspired his contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige, to create One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - a breathtaking visual survey of Japan’s bustling capital.

Both series belong to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), "pictures of the floating world," a genre of Edo-period woodblock prints. More specifically, they elevated the sub-genre of Meisho-e (名所絵), or "famous place pictures." Fueled by a 19th-century domestic travel boom, these prints served as both fine art and geographical guides, cataloging iconic landmarks and scenic views for a public eager to explore.

Yesterday I visited the Night Maps exhibition at the Warburg Institute, which explores the history of celestial maps and globes, and how mapping the heavens has shaped our understanding of the world. Which might account for why I was so blown away by TripGeo Space - a brand new collection of space and sci-fi development projects.

Currently, TripGeo Space consists of two interstellar space tours:

I recently shared this map (above) showing the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people playing the Borderline country border game. This combined map brings together all the borders and coastlines drawn by players in Borderline and its companion game, Coastlines.

In Borderline, players attempt to draw the outlines of individual countries on a blank map from memory. The results can be surprisingly interesting, which is why, alongside the global map above, you can also explore How the crowd draws every country. 

This multiple-map visualization animates between each country's actual borders and a composite outline created from all the players' attempts to draw it.

Lately, I’ve been wondering why there's been such a dearth of interesting map styles among all the new "vibe-coded" projects floating around. My guess is that AI toolchains encourage developers to churn out projects at breakneck speed, leaving little time to jump into Maputnik and craft a bespoke style that actually complements their app’s aesthetic.

But just as I was losing hope of ever seeing another genuinely inventive style - reminiscent of the golden age of Stamen's Water Color Map or the Hand Drawn Map of Toulouse, along comes Location Scout (known in Japanese as Dokodemo Rokehan / どこでもロケハン).

North Up Daily is a new free daily map game with a simple premise. Each day, you are presented with a map of a city in which all the individual map tiles have been randomly rotated. Your task is to rotate each tile until the map is back to normal, with north pointing up.

Your score is based on how quickly you complete the map, with penalties for the number of moves and hints you use. Solve the puzzle quickly and you could find yourself on the Daily Leaderboard.

Will there be fair elections on November 3rd? I can't promise that, but Karim Douieb can promise a fair election map.

His 2026 House Forecast Map replaces the standard geographical congressional district map with one where every district is equal in size. Click the "One seat, one cell" button, and the map morphs from a 'geographic map into one where each state is resized by its seats and every district gets the same area.'

The interactive map synthesizes data from the Cook Political Report, categorizing all 435 House seats according to race competitiveness ratings:

• Solid / Likely / Lean Democrats: 214 seats
• Solid / Likely / Lean Republicans: 200 seats
• Toss-ups: 21 seats

Cartographers generally agree that there are significant benefits to viewing at least five maps or globes every day. Regular map consumption can help improve your geographical awareness, strengthen your navigational muscles and provide essential nourishment for your inner explorer.

The 5 A Day campaign is based on advice from the International Geographical Union, which recommends playing at least one map game every day to lower the risk of geographical ignorance, chronic misplacement and embarrassing incidents of getting lost.

Fortunately, you don't need to swallow an entire atlas to get your daily geographical intake. Here are three nutritious map games to add to your daily cartographic diet.

Do you remember the World's Most Notable People Map. On Monday, I decided I'd build a World's Most Notable Places Map, showing locations based on their Wikipedia QRank. I abandoned the project today after discovering the Wikipedia Importance Map.

Earlier this month, Wikimedia Enterprise released the Geospatial Wikidata Databset.. This is a large, open dataset that connects geographic features in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with information held in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.

• Isopolis - isometric San Francisco
• London, drawn - isometric London
• earthtoPixels - isometric João Pessoa, Brasil

London is twice as big as Colorado on the Actual Scale map.

Size comparison maps are nothing new. You’ve almost certainly used The True Size Of ... to drag the outlines of countries around a world map and compare their geographical sizes.

Actual Scale uses a similar drag-to-compare interface, but instead of geographical size, it compares population. Search for any city, state or country and drag its outline anywhere on the world map. The outline will grow or shrink to reflect the population density of the area it covers, while keeping the same total population.

In the image above, I’ve dragged London across the United States. Its boundary adjusts to encompass the same population wherever it lands. Drop London over New York, for example, and it suddenly looks a lot smaller!

There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City.

Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog's name, breed and birth year, along with the owner's ZIP code.

Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city's dog population has changed over time.

Using the map you can search for a breed, a dog's name, or a neighborhood to discover where your pooch would fit in - and where they would stand out from the crowd. The map is colored by the most common dog breed in each neighborhood.

Walk Score provides address-level walkability scores, neighborhood maps, transit reports, and bike scores for virtually every city, town, and neighborhood in the U.S. and Canada. Integrated into real estate platforms such as Redfin, it is well-known and widely used across North American real estate markets. Unfortunately, its coverage outside North America is patchy.

This is why Raian Pollock decided to create Walkably. 

Walkably maps walkability across 31 European countries, giving every street a score from 0 to 100. The scores are calculated from two factors: Reach (60% of the score) and Street Quality (40%).

Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters?

The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters - meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment.

If you’re looking to explore actual, science-backed climate projections rather than wild cartographic extremes, Climate Central's Coastal Risk Finder is probably a better sea level rise map. However, Sliding Shores does offer a more dynamic, global perspective by rendering the entire planet as a 3D interactive globe rather than as a flat 2D map.

There are travel blogs and then there is Three Steps Off the Coast.

For the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey (now accompanied by their son Victor and pet dog) have been documenting their travels and sharing their photos, stories, itineraries, and budgets with the world on their popular travel blog. Now, to celebrate their ten-year anniversary of travel blogging, they have brought to life their 10 most memorable trips as immersive 3D travel maps.

10 Years, 10 Adventures is a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements, and trip narration. Instead of relying on standard mapping libraries like Mapbox or Google Maps SDKs, the project uses a bespoke WebGL rendering engine paired with custom heightmap and route data.

The new era of building age maps has begun. Block and Paper have been busy recently creating animated building-age maps of cities around the world, showing urban development unfold over time. The style has since been emulated by others, including Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County.

Now Alexander Bogachev has imported the idea to France, creating an animated building-age map of Paris that shows when each of the French capital's 122,435 buildings was constructed.

There are quite a few ugly buildings in my town that I'd like to demolish. Now I have the chance to actually knock them down (if only virtually) with World Strike.

World Strike is a fun new open-world, real-time multiplayer tank game where the arena is literally the entire planet - and every single building can be reduced to rubble. So if you’ve ever looked at a building and thought, "This would benefit from some high-explosive ordnance," then World Strike is the browser game you've been waiting for.

From a web mapping perspective, World Strike is an impressive technical showcase of Three.js integrated directly inside MapLibre GL JS. Rather than rendering standard extruded vector tiles via MapLibre's built-in fill-extrusion layers, the developer routes OpenStreetMap footprint data into a custom Three.js WebGL layer.

Want to explore the night sky? Two new interactive maps offer very different ways to do it. Skyviewer lets you explore the vast astronomical survey being created by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, while Stargazing for Beginners helps you work out what you can actually see in the sky above you.

Skyviewer is an interactive window onto Rubin Observatory's survey of the cosmos. Located in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for the next ten years, creating an enormous time-lapse record of the changing universe. You can use Skyviewer to explore the results from these scans, navigating around Rubin's imagery to discover stars, galaxies and other celestial objects.

Ever wished you could turn your holiday GPS track into one of those slick animated maps you see in travel videos? Map Animator lets you do exactly that - and you don't need any video-editing or mapping skills to get started.

This free browser-based tool lets you draw a journey on a map or import a GPX recording and then turn it into an animated video. You can use it for road trips, motorcycle tours, cycling adventures, hikes, sailing trips and pretty much any other journey you can record with a GPS device.

FactMap is the latest map game to be a little like GeoGuessr. However instead of guessing the locations of random Street View images, in this game you need to point to the locations of five daily historical or geographical facts.

FactMap gives you a fact and asks you to work out where on Earth it happened. The answer might be the place where a famous person died, where a treaty was signed, where a band formed, or where a particular animal lives. For example, one question might ask: Where did Julius Caesar die? You then drop a pin on the map and see how close you were.

In September, we were graced with the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find where iconic movie scenes were filmed, and the World Cinema Atlas, which allows you to discover movies by where they were set

Now, a new interactive map lets you discover films by both where and when they take place.

What if Czechia had become part of the British Empire? Perhaps, like the United States, its map would now be dotted with towns and cities bearing familiar English place-names.

There is actually no need to imagine this alternative historical timeline because Czengland is just such a map - a map of the Czech Republic with all the Czech place-names replaced with British equivalents. So Prague becomes London, Brno becomes Birmingham, and a whole host of Czech streets, districts, towns and landmarks acquire familiar British names.

Are you ready for the 2026 #30DayMapChallenge? It begins on November 1st and this year's daily themes have just been announced.

If you’re new to it, the idea of the #30DayMapChallenge is simple: create a map every day for 30 days based on a different theme each day. You can use any data, tools, or styles you like. It’s a great way to experiment, learn new techniques, and connect with the global mapping community.

While many participants use traditional desktop GIS software or static graphics tools, my focus is almost entirely on building interactive, web-based maps. To keep a fast pace across the 30 days, I rely on a lightweight, open-source web stack that allows me to quickly source, inspect, transform, and render spatial data directly in the browser.

Here are the primary open-source tools I will be using this year:

This animated map shows a year's worth of lightning strikes across the United States. The animation reveals the clear seasonal patterns of lightning storms across the U.S. As you watch the animation, you can see the country's lightning season move northwards with the changing seasons.

During winter, lightning is largely confined to the Gulf Coast before activity spreads north in spring. By summer, thunderstorms are lighting up much of the country, with particularly intense activity across Florida and the Southwest, before the storms retreat south again in autumn.

On April Fool’s Day 2015, a button was added to Google Maps which, when selected, turned the streets of the current map view into a fully functioning game of Pac-Man. Players could navigate the familiar streets, eating dots and avoiding ghosts just as they would in the classic arcade game.

Pac-Man on Map is a tribute to that much-missed April Fool’s Day feature. The game similarly transforms real-world streets into a playable Pac-Man maze, using road data to generate a layout wherever you choose to play.

Bert Spaan has taken Mapterhorn's global terrain data to create an interactive global Relief map. What is particularly interesting about this new map is that, unlike traditional topographic maps with a fixed colour-to-elevation scale, the map's colour spectrum adapts dynamically to the specific region or bounds currently in view.

As you pan and zoom across different landscapes, the colour grading shifts to highlight local topographic variations, producing a striking and constantly changing view of the world's mountains, valleys and plains. This works particularly well when switching between very different environments: the colour range changes to bring out the relief at the scale you're viewing, rather than leaving low-lying terrain looking uniformly flat.

Much has been written about how this year's El Niño is already breaking records. Climate Dashboard's new interactive map lets you explore how this unusually strong El Niño could affect climate conditions around the world, including what it might mean for the weather where you live.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in which unusually warm ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific disrupt atmospheric circulation, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns around the world. These effects can mean wetter conditions in some regions and drought in others.

There are lots of 3D maps that visualize the tens of thousands of human-made satellites orbiting the Earth, such as SatelliteeXplorer and James Darpinian's See a Satellite Tonight, which uses Google's Street View imagery to show you exactly where to look in the night sky if you want to watch a satellite passing overhead.

Perigee takes a rather broader view of humanity's presence in space. As well as visualizing thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, this impressive 3D viewer lets you explore spacecraft orbiting the Moon and Mars, and even track probes travelling through the wider Solar System.

Bosphore 1819 is an interactive version of a beautiful 1819 topographical map of the Bosphorus. The original Plan Topographique du Bosphore de Thrace ou Canal de Constantinople et de ses environs was surveyed by François Kauffer between 1776 and 1786, before being redrawn and expanded by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage and published in 1819.

The original map is wonderfully detailed, but navigating it isn't particularly easy - particularly if you can't speak or read French. Hundreds of villages, palaces, fortifications, streams, capes and other landmarks are labelled using French spellings of Ottoman Turkish names. Bosphore 1819 turns all those labels into a database that can be searched using the modern place-names of the region.

You would think that interactive mapping platforms are the perfect tool for building territory expansion games. However, I can think of very few good map conquest games.

There are a few popular 'Risk'-type games, such as War.app, that involve claiming and conquering territories on a map. There have also been a few 'Monopoly'-type games, such as Upland, that involve buying and selling virtual real estate on an interactive map tied directly to actual addresses in major global cities.

InkDom, however, may be the territory-grabbing game that we have all been waiting for. It turns the real world into a giant game board where you can draw a loop around your neighbourhood and claim everything inside it as your own. Even better, you also claim the people who live there.

There are plenty of maps that show you where the world's lighthouses are. Lighthouses, live does something much more interesting: it shows you how they actually work. Instead of just showing each lighthouse as a static point on a map this map gives you a sense of what its light signal actually looks like at sea.

Lighthouses, live plots charted coastal lights on a dark, night-time relief map and animates each one according to its real-world light characteristics. Some lights sweep continuously across the sea, while others flash in distinctive sequences, with the timing and colour of each beam taken from nautical charts. Impressively, terrain data is also used to block the light based on the surrounding topography, so you can actually see how each lighthouse's beam is constrained by the coastline and landscape.

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.