Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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All Stories
‘Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Dante Alighieri was about 35 and suffering from what […]
There’s much to criticise about this map of Pangea [1], but in spite of the geological anachronisms, it’s hard to tear your eyes away from it. The map shows a […]
Maybe you’ve never heard of Emmaland or Sophialand, but if you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a better than 90% chance that you live in either one of […]
Dakota was sliced in half to generate two extra Senators, and separated north from south because of resentment over the location of the capital
Dull Flag, Tongue of Gangsta and dozens more strange toponyms dot these windswept Scottish archipelagoes
How fear of swimming led to two very different evolutionary approaches to conflict resolution
Isogloss maps are irresistible, even if they are about cucumbers
It disappeared from central London in 1869, after an archeological magazine praised its historical value
Last week, Harry Beck finally got his blue plaque. The house where the designer of the iconic London Tube map spent his first years is now marked by a memorial […]
The strange birth of America’s two ‘radio nations’
The Pope is not just the supremo of the Catholic Church, he is also the head of state of the Vatican
One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters. It’s […]
Sure, the Allies are advancing… but a snail could do it quicker!
Why does the Purple Line in this alternate-universe railway map terminate in Quincy, Illinois?
What was first, the chicken or the map? That question is perhaps as unanswerable as the one featuring hen vs. egg [1]. Not that it matters. Stare long enough at […]
Question: Which contest is the nec plus ultra for puzzle fans and quiz aficionados everywhere? Answer: The MIT Mystery Hunt (MMH), which kicks off every year on the Friday before […]
A bizarre ‘planisphere palindrome’ version of the Earth
It was this map of Greenland that triggered this post. I say map, but I mean hole in a drainpipe. This picture was sent in by Ruland Kolen, who was […]
A crowd-sourced map suggesting the ‘ideal’ borders for a country that has had so many different ones.
To celebrate her Jubilee year, the Queen had a large chunk of Antarctica named after her; possibly upsetting the Argentinians and Chileans.
The Uruguayan capital does not have a metro system – but it does have a metro map
Country motto: Don’t do today what you can put off until tomorrow. Aren’t we all honorary citizens?
If phantom islands can be discovered as recently as 2012, maybe there are still more of them out there.
War, as Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means [1]. But sometimes, war itself is being continued by other means – cartographic means. Maps are an excellent […]
God know we would have satellites one day, so He left us a message
Among the baker’s dozen of legends obscuring the true origin of the croissant, the one repeated most often transports us back to Austria in 1683. Up before dawn, Vienna’s bakers […]
As shown by this map, the next presidential election will not be decided by 50 states, but by just 11 – the so-called ‘swing states’, that could still go either way.
Could the unforgiving Taklamakan Desert once have been the location of the Garden of Earthly Delights?