Geografie
12 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- A patch of land no country wants.
Bir Tawil, 2,060 km² of desert between Egypt and Sudan, is claimed by nobody. The reason: two boundary lines from 1899 …
- Atlantic to Pacific through Panama means sailing southeast.
Panama curves so that the canal from the Caribbean to the Pacific runs roughly northwest to southeast, not east to …
- Greenland is 14 times too big on your map.
The Mercator projection from 1569 preserves angles so sailors could draw courses as straight lines. The price: areas …
- In 2017 Australia had to shift its map by 1.8 metres.
The Australian Plate creeps about 7 cm a year to the north-northeast. But the coordinate system GDA94 had been pinned …
- In western China the sun sometimes rises at 10 a.m.
China spans roughly 5,000 km from east to west, geographically five time zones. Officially, since 1949, only Beijing …
- North is only "up" because we're used to it.
There is no up in space. Medieval European maps often put east at the top, and Islamic cartographers like al-Idrisi put …
- The EU shares a land border with Brazil.
French Guiana in South America is a full part of France and therefore of the EU, using the euro. Its 730 km border with …
- The first law of geography fits in one sentence.
Waldo Tobler wrote in a 1970 paper on Detroit's growth: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are …
- The place where the nearest humans are in space.
Point Nemo in the South Pacific lies about 2,688 km from any land, equidistant from the three nearest islands. Because …
- The prime meridian isn't where the line in Greenwich is.
Tourists stand on the brass prime-meridian line in Greenwich. Your GPS there reads 0.0015° West, though. The modern …
- Two countries need two border crossings to reach the sea.
Around 44 countries have no coastline. Only two are doubly landlocked, surrounded entirely by other landlocked states …
- Why your flight to Tokyo goes over Siberia.
On a sphere, the shortest path is a great circle, a circle centred on Earth's core. On a flat map it looks like an arc …