I always thought the island of New Guinea looked like a dinosaur. I just looked up the Wikipedia entry for the The Federated States of Micronesia and noticed that island chain does as well.
I almost took a day trip to the Berkshires yesterday before wisely thinking better of it. A high school friend posted this snowfall accumulation map on Facebook with the caption “We’re orange.”
I love how the county borders bisect Seneca and Cayuga Lake in New York.
Antarctica. Not so much a continent as an archipelago underneath a (hopefully) permanent ice cap.
Found in CGPGrey’s excellent video What are Continents?
Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaximander, in addition to having a very cool name, is credited with creating the first map of the world during the 6th Century BCE. That map has been lost, naturally, and this image is a recreation from a description by Herodotus.
I came across this while trying to determine the boundaries between continents, specifically the one between North America and South America. Nobody knows and everyone assumes it is the man-made Panama Canal.
The boundary between Europe and Asia is more jagged than you might expect and it follows the course of rivers rather than current national boundaries. This large color-coded map of the world illustrates that last point.
Source: Wikipedia
I can’t look at Google Maps’ Mercator projection of Antarctica without seeing a giant man who is about to eat another piece of the continent with his Argentina-sized spork.
I noticed a familiar name while perusing a map of Tunisia the other day. George Lucas filmed parts of Star Wars in Tunisia and he borrowed the name of a local town for his fictional desert planet.


