Map Oddities

Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.

How far you can get by train from any European station in five hours, drawn as coloured bands. Ruinous for an afternoon's productivity.

Renders every road in any city as white lines on black and nothing else, which turns an ordinary street plan into unexpectedly good art.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.

Colour in countries, states or regions and export the result, which is where most of the maps you see argued about online are made.

Everybody notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, plotted at their birthplace, so you can find out who else came from your town.

Every railway line on Earth mapped with signalling, gauge, electrification and maximum speed, by people who care about this very deeply.

A database of essentially every named summit on Earth, with prominence figures, ascent logs and rankings that fuel very long arguments.

A full year of merchant shipping movements animated on one dark globe and split by cargo type, which turns global trade into a visible swarm.

A live feed of OpenStreetMap edits as they happen, zooming to each contributor's patch of the world one small correction at a time.

The actual cables carrying the internet between continents, each one named, with its landing points and the year it went live.

Drag countries across the Mercator projection and watch Greenland shrink to its actual size. Settles the argument in about ten seconds.

The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.