A time where ‘real world’ conferences are a memory of the past is a good opportunity to look at the wealth of material that has been put online instead. Here is one of my talks that has recently been put online. It’s a four-minute ‘Lightning talk’ given at last year’s Anniversary Annual Conference of the Global Young Academy. Lightning Talks are giving a brief overview of a topic aimed at a broader audience, and here I am – obviously – talking about mapping and cartograms: The talk gives a brief insight into how in human geography and other social sciences cartograms are increasingly used as an alternative approach to visualising quantitative data. It showcases some underlying geospatial methods and demonstrates how also environmental sciences can benefit from these mapping techniques for creating powerful visualisations of complex geographical data. While the results are very unusual depictions, these techniques have the power to provide novel perspectives of our planet and re-engage the audience with the underlying phenomena and processes in an entirely new way. This can be highly relevant in communicating science to the public as much as for our own understanding of the data that we are working with. Powerful visualisations are a valuable tool of re-connecting science to truth and reason in a global world.