Mining may have been one contributing factors to why Australia as one of the few advanced economies did not go into recession following the global financial crisis 10 years ago. While mining is a profitable business in Australia, once the mines are no longer profitable, they are often abandoned leaving a scarred landscape and sometimes dying communities behind. A dataset by the Queensland regional government has records of almost 15,000 abandoned mines in the state. The following map gives an overview of their distribution:
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Sports Report: The globalised world of European football
Football is a truly global phenomenon. Statistics about the real support are problematic, but there are estimates of up to 3.5 billion fans of football globally. A study conducted in 2006 by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which represents 211 members as the global governing body of football, estimated 270 million people being active in football worldwide. FIFA’s data give a rough idea of the global importance and global distribution of the phenomenon football, even if the numbers will have changed since this study was conducted.
From the statistics published, Asia emerged as the biggest player with 85 million footballers (Europe 62, Africa 46, North- and Central America with the Caribbean 43, South America 27, and Oceania 0.5 million). In terms of population share, Europe, South America and North/Central America with the Caribbean are ahead of other regions with about 7 per cent of their respective populations.
European football remains the most relevant globally, when it comes to the revenue of its national sports leagues. England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France (with Monaco) have the most profitable football leagues in the world. This makes the European administrative body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) the perhaps most important of the six continental confederations that are part of FIFA.
UEFA consists of 55 national members, which in part are also on the Asian continent. According to their 2016 report, 20344 players were participating in UEFA competitions back then. Here, geography plays an important role in understanding the global dynamics of football. European football leagues see significant inner-European flows of talents into the most prestigious leagues. But being such an important player internationally, 1374 international players from outside the UEFA countries compete in UEFA tournaments. In comparison, the largest single national representation from within Europe is that of Spain with 865 players. It should be noted that these numbers do only count those in the European competitions, rather than all players in national leagues.
Higher Education Students and Graduates in Europe
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Promoting equity in education and training is consistent with the European welfare state model, with part of the Europe 2020 Strategy aiming to significantly reduce numbers of early leavers from education and increase numbers of graduates with a university degree. The following maps give an insight into the social and spatial disparities in higher education across Europe’s countries and regions. They are all gridded population cartograms where each area is proportional to the number of people living there.
This is a map of students as a percentage of the total population aged 20–24. The reported share can often be higher than 100%, where there are more students who study and live in a city in term time than the numbers of 20- to 24-year-olds that the city officially houses. Also many students are counted who are aged 18, 19 or over 24:
United Hates of America
Where in America can the country’s various hate groups be found?
A brief geography of time
Sometimes referred to as the fourth dimension, time has a highly geographical relevance. For human geography, population sizes can have as much impact on the ‘tempo of places’ as culture or even climate. In physical geography, the concept of time is indispensable for an understanding of how the natural environment has changed and keeps changing.
In the 21st century, time has been described as being a commodity itself, affecting everything from manufacturing and trade, to financial flows and global transport links.
The general geographic distribution of time zones is based on the general concept of dividing the world into zones of equal time following a 24-hour day around the world. In theory, this means that there are 12 time zones of 15° width in which each differs by one hour’s time difference.
The necessity of time zones was closely linked to growing needs of transport and communication links during industrialisation. British railway companies began adopting Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which helped to coordinate timetables. In 1880, GMT became standard across Britain and time differences of tens of minutes between cities in the country started vanishing. At a global level, time zones became established in the first decades of the 20th century.
The lighter side: A changing Earth at night
NASA’s recent release of a new Earth at night composite image is the first release of a new global map of night light distribution since 2012. Since their previous release, NASA has worked on an improvement of the underlying algorithms that provide clearer and more accurate imagery from the raw satellite data.
The latest version (shown as a small inset map in this cartogram feature) is not only the most accurate picture of light intensity around the globe, but the underlying data also allows a direct comparison of the changes that occurred between 2012 and 2016. For achieving this, the datasets of the two years were corrected for the changing light effects caused by the moon as well as “seasonal vegetation, clouds, aerosols, snow and ice cover, and even faint atmospheric emissions (such as airglow and auroras)” which “change the way light is observed in different parts of the world”. Both datasets also cover the period of a full year to take seasonal changes into account.
