Tag: World
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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.
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How the world is governed: 197 countries, 112 systems
Democracy or not is only the first question. Compare head of state, executive, federalism, chambers and voting system, and the world’s 197 countries fall into 12 families and 112 exact systems. 80 countries have a system nobody else shares.
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Where the world’s islands are
I counted every island in a detailed open map of the world’s shorelines: 181,588 of them, 23,150 over a square kilometre. Canada has the most, and 10.3% of the world’s people live on one.
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Drowned valleys: the villages flooded for reservoirs in the age of big dams
From Capel Celyn to Mologa and the Lost Villages of the St Lawrence, I mapped the 100 places Wikipedia records as flooded by reservoirs. Most went under between 1930 and 1979, just as the world’s dam building peaked.
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The Nobel brain drain: where laureates were born, and where they won
I drew a line from birthplace to prize for 760 Nobel prizes in the sciences and economics. 31% went to someone working outside their birth country, the United States gained 131 more laureates than it grew, Germany’s share fell from 31% to 7% after 1933, and Japan became a late riser that keeps its laureates.
