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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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“This work uses real statistics on Austria to create an image of Austria,” Babak Fakhamzadeh here on his website about this work, ‘Numbers’, that he created for Paraflows in Vienna, demonstrating […]
n “Looks tasty, doesn’t it”, says one of the submitters of this map made out of Spam. Well, that’s a matter of opinion (but I think he was being ironic, […]
n Christa Dichgans (°1940 in Berlin) is a German painter who has shown a proclivity towards cartography in her work. Generally, her map paintings consist of a monochrome background surmounted […]
Scientists predict the Earth will end 5 billion years from now, when the Sun becomes a red giant. Certain religious people are more alarmist, claiming the Apocalypse is just around the corner.