Tag: world maps

• Every battle in history, mapped

  

  Wikidata knows of 20,202 battles. I mapped the 13,712 with a place and a date, from 3001 BCE to 2026, to find the most fought-over places on Earth, follow the centre of war century by century, and see how much the famous map is really a map of who wrote things down.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  history, maps, war, world maps

• Desert, forest, ice: the world in 1900 and now

  

  In 1900 farms covered 19% of the world’s ice-free land. Today they cover 37%. Two maps from HYDE 3.3 show where the new fields and pastures came from, which forests went, and where the trees came back.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  landscape, weather and climate, wildlife, world maps

• Life on the moving map: 540 million years of animals on the drifting continents

  

  I put 409,895 fossil finds, from trilobites to dinosaurs to hominids, back where they lived on the drifting continents. Watch Pangaea form and break apart, see who ruled when, and why 66% of the finds come from North America and Europe.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  landscape, maps, wildlife, world maps

• Ptolemy’s world, measured

  

  Ptolemy wrote the ancient world down as a table of coordinates. I matched 2,358 of his places to where they really are: shrink his longitudes by 0.72 and the map falls into place, but Scotland is still turned on its side and Sri Lanka is 15 times too big.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  history, old maps, Romans, world maps

• The Earth at night: where the world lit up and where it went dark

  

  Seen from space, the planet gave off 57% more light in 2024 than in 2012. Nepal’s light grew 9.3 times and Africa’s cities blazed up, while war halved the light of Ukraine and Yemen, and new LED street lamps made France look 40% darker than it is.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  cities, space, world maps