The 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang have come to an end. Branded as the ‘Games of new horizons’, they were as much about politics as they were about actual sports. The following cartogram series focuses on the sports side of the games, showing the distribution of medals that were awarded during the games. The maps show each country resized according to the number of medals received by each country (with the Olympic Athlete from Russia shown as Russia):
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The World in 2018
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7.6 billion people producing an estimated global GDP of 131 trillion dollars (measured in purchasing power parity), that is the world in 2018. In its latest forecast, the International Monetary Fund predicts predicts a continuing global economic growth of 3.9%, while according to the United Nations Population Division an extra 83 million people will populate this planet (1.9% growth). The following two cartograms show, how the distribution of wealth and people looks this year by resizing each country according to the total number of people (top)/GDP output (bottom):
Christmas Card-o-gram 2017: Aurora meets GDP
This year’s christmas card-o-gram blends a view of northern lights (captured near Höfn, East Iceland) with a cartogram of global GDP distribution in 2017:
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.
