Carl-August W. built an impressive series of Late Cretaceous maps using GPlates, GProjector, ArcGIS, Photoshop, Blender, Illustrator, and GIMP.

The sea that split North America stretched from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, roughly a thousand kilometers across. Laramidia to the west, Appalachia to the east, and the two had been separated long enough that their dinosaur faunas went in completely different directions. In Laramidia, there were Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and other ceratopsids. Appalachia had Dryptosaurus as its largest predator, a more primitive tyrannosaur with proportionally longer arms, and no ceratopsids at all.

Where the European continent should be on the map, there’s a scattering of subtropical islands. The name Maastrichtian comes from Maastricht in the Netherlands, where Roman-era limestone quarries produced the first mosasaur skull in 1764. Most of what is now the Netherlands was seafloor. One of the Maastrichtian islands was near what is now Romania’s Hateg Basin. In 1895, twelve-year-old Ilona Nopcsa found bones while walking near the village of Sânpetru. Her brother Franz, eighteen at the time, brought them to Vienna and showed them to his professor of geology, Eduard Suess, who looked at them and said simply “Study them”. Nopcsa did. At twenty he published his first paper. He eventually noticed that the Hateg dinosaurs were too small (Magyarosaurus, a titanosaur sauropod, stopped at about 6 meters, while mainland relatives grew to 15-20). He proposed island dwarfism at a meeting in Vienna in November 1912. Bone histology confirmed him around 2010. He was also a spy, motorcycled across Europe, smuggled weapons into Albania, and in 1913 offered himself as a candidate for the Albanian throne.

The temperature data is more surprising at high latitudes than in the tropics. Indian Ocean surface temperatures reached 28 to 30°C (82.4 to 86°F), not dramatically different from now. At the paleolatitude of modern Antarctica, mean annual temperatures are estimated at 12 to 15°C (53.6 to 59°F). Arctic summers around 15°C (59°F). CO₂ ran somewhere between 1 and 6 times the pre-industrial 280 ppm baseline.

Flowering plants (angiosperms) were already the dominant group by species count, making up 50 to 80% of land plant genera. While flowering plants had become dominant, ferns remained a highly diverse and significant component of the understory and disturbed landscapes. Conifers, cycads, and early relatives of legumes, grasses, and proteas were all there.

South America and Africa had abelisaurids as their dominant large predators rather than tyrannosaurs. Massive titanosaurs like Dreadnoughtus and Alamosaurus were among the largest land animals of the time, following earlier giants like Argentinosaurus. Quetzalcoatlus northropi flew with a wingspan of 10 to 11 meters (33–36 ft). Mosasaurs and plesiosaurs ruled the seas, while small birds and mammals were already widespread.

An asteroid 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) across hit the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, leaving the Chicxulub crater at around 180 kilometers (112 miles) in diameter. The Deccan Traps had been erupting in India for hundreds of thousands of years before that. Scientists still argue about how much each contributed. About 75% of species disappeared, every non-avian dinosaur, pterosaur, mosasaur, plesiosaur, and ammonite among them.

The post The Earth 70 Million Years Ago appeared first on Vivid Maps.

This was the Last Glacial Maximum. The period spans roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, with peak ice extent around 21,000 years BP. The Laurentide sheet covered most of Canada and pushed well into what is now the northern United States. In Europe the Fennoscandian sheet buried all of Scandinavia and most of Britain, with its southern edge running through what is now northern Germany and Poland. CO₂ in the atmosphere was about 180 parts per million, compared to 280 ppm before industrialization and over 420 ppm today. The air was also dramatically dustier than it is now: ice cores show concentrations 20 to 25 times higher than modern levels, blown off bare, vegetation-poor land by strong persistent winds.

The map below was made by @locoluis from the paleoclimate vegetation shapefile published by Nicolas Ray and Jonathan Adams in 2001. It covers the broad window of roughly 25,000 to 15,000 years before present.

The white areas with gray horizontal stripes on the world map above are ice sheets. Just south of the European ice comes polar and alpine desert — the zone covering the area where London is now located. Paris sits in the Steppe-tundra. Berlin is right at the ice margin.

In North America, open boreal woodland covered the Atlantic seaboard where temperate deciduous forest now stands. The interior of the continent was temperate steppe-grassland. The northern Pacific coast held forest steppe, while further south, across what is now California and the American Southwest, the reconstruction shows semi-arid temperate woodland and scrub.

In what is now the Amazon basin, the reconstruction shows two separate fragments of tropical rainforest, with tropical grassland and savanna between them. West African rainforests retreated into scattered patches, surrounded by tropical grassland. While the Sahara shows up as a tropical extreme desert. Australia’s interior, according to Ray and Adams climate reconstruction as tropical thorn scrub and scrub woodland, with tropical extreme desert across a significant area.

How cold was it?

The answer is that it depends on which study you consult, and the estimates have shifted as methods improved. A 2022 reconstruction by Annan, Hargreaves and Mauritsen in Climate of the Past puts global mean cooling at about 4.5°C below pre-industrial temperatures. Tierney et al. in Nature (2020) arrived closer to 6.1°C. Both teams combined climate model simulations with proxy records through data assimilation, and both are methodologically credible. The gap between their numbers comes mostly from differences in which model simulations they used as a starting point.

According to Seltzer et al., low-altitude land between about 45°S and 35°N cooled by 5.8 ± 0.6°C on average. At higher latitudes the numbers were considerably larger. Groundwater from an aquifer under the Paris basin points to local cooling of around 9°C relative to the Holocene.

What happened to biodiversity when the Ice Age ended?

From about 19,000 years ago, the warming picked up fast enough to transform the landscape. Grassland became forest. Bogs crept across country that had been open for millennia. For the large grazers this was a different kind of problem than cold had ever been — there simply wasn’t enough of the right ground left. By about 11,700 years ago roughly 64% of megafaunal genera were gone worldwide. North America lost 38 genera of mostly large mammals. Habitat loss was part of it, but when you look at where and when the losses happened across different continents, they follow human expansion more closely than any temperature curve.

Some animals had no trouble with any of it. Brown bears and wolves are at home in forest, so the change in vegetation barely registered for them. Musk oxen and reindeer kept going in whatever open ground was left. Wild boar, red deer, saiga antelopes, Arctic foxes — all pulled through. Horses did fine across Eurasia but had disappeared from the Americas by about 10,000 years ago. Smaller animals and birds shifted their ranges as the vegetation moved and mostly got on with it.

Oak, beech, and lime had been sitting out the cold in scattered refugia across Iberia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus — far enough south to stay viable. They didn’t rush back north. It took thousands of years, and the genetic record of that gradual recolonization is still there in European forests.

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The map on the left shows where different wolf subspecies used to live. Wolves were found in the Arctic islands, along the Pacific coast, across the Great Plains, in the eastern forests, and even down into Mexico. They were almost everywhere. The map on the right shows where wolves live now. See all the gray areas? Those are places where wolves are gone. You can call it extinct or extirpated. Most of the remaining wolves are far up north, mainly in Canada and Alaska. There are some around the Great Lakes, mostly in Minnesota, where they never disappeared. There are also small reintroduced groups in the Rockies.

Between the mid-1800s and maybe the 1960s, people systematically killed wolves across most of their range. European settlement meant livestock – cattle, sheep. Wolves occasionally killed livestock. Sometimes regularly. Ranchers shot them, trapped them, poisoned them. State and federal governments actually paid bounties for dead wolves. You could make money hunting them. The effort worked. Wolves vanished from something like 95% of their range in the lower 48 states. Gone from most of the West by 1930, gone from most of the Midwest and East even earlier. Only place they held on was northeastern Minnesota and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – too remote, not enough livestock to cause problems.

Canada kept wolves longer because there was more wilderness and fewer people, but populations still dropped hard from hunting and trapping. Then in the 1990s people started thinking maybe we’d overdone it. Yellowstone got 31 wolves from Canada in 1995, more in ’96. Central Idaho got wolves around the same time. There’s been this contentious Mexican wolf reintroduction program in Arizona and New Mexico since ’98 – contentious because some ranchers hate it, wolves still get shot illegally, the population hasn’t grown much. But at least it’s something. Problem is, several subspecies were already extinct by the time anyone thought to bring wolves back.

The subspecies question is where this gets messy. Old-school taxonomists in the early 1900s named 23 or 24 different North American wolf subspecies. They measured skulls, compared fur colors, looked at body size, noted geographic ranges. Modern genetics tells a more complicated story. Turns out some of those “subspecies” were probably just local variations – wolves that looked a bit different because of their environment but weren’t genetically distinct enough to really be separate subspecies. Current science usually recognizes three to five main types.

• Arctic wolves (short, stocky, pale fur, live on the tundra and islands).
• Northwestern wolves (the big ones from Canada and Alaska – these are what got reintroduced to Yellowstone).
• Great Plains wolves (medium-sized, lived on the prairies, mostly extinct now).
• Eastern wolves around the Great Lakes (there’s an ongoing argument about whether these have coyote genes mixed in).
• Mexican wolves (smallest subspecies, adapted to desert mountains).

But maps like this one use the older classification system with 23+ subspecies because that’s how the historical data was recorded.

Current numbers?

Best estimates say 60,000 to 75,000 wolves in North America total. Canada probably has 50,000 to 60,000. Nobody’s counting every single wolf, so these are educated guesses based on surveys and modeling. Alaska has somewhere between 7,000 and 11,000. The lower 48 states have around 6,000. Minnesota alone has 2,900. Wisconsin and Michigan together have maybe 1,500. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming combined are around 2,000 to 2,500. Washington and Oregon have smaller populations that are slowly growing. Mexico’s got the smallest number – 45 wild wolves. These totals seem decent until you realize pre-1850 there were probably hundreds of thousands of wolves across the continent.

Historical Distribution of North American Wolf Subspecies

Present Distribution of North American Wolf Subspecies

Six of the subspecies listed in the table—mogollonensis, monstrabilis, and youngi—no longer exist; they were extinct by the mid‑1900s. Mexican wolves almost joined them. By the early 1980s they were gone from the wild. Some survived in zoos and captive breeding programs. In 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing captive‑bred Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. The wild population there is now a little over 200 animals.

The post North America’s Wolf Subspecies appeared first on Vivid Maps.

On the map, white areas had at least 1 cm of snow on December 24. Teal-green areas, “barmark” in Swedish, had bare ground. Each map covers one year between 1975 and 2024.

The far north stays white almost every year. Norrbotten and Västerbotten keep their Arctic winter climate intact. The southern third of Sweden is a different story. Skåne, Halland, the western coast used to get snow most Christmases. By the mid-2000s, green became the norm there.

Earlier decades tell one version of Swedish winter. The 1970s and 1980s were mostly white, with green appearing only at the southernmost tip and a few coastal spots. Then something shifts. Years like 2006, 2008, 2013, 2015 and 2016 show bare ground pushing far north into central Sweden. Recent years look similar — 2022 and 2024 both have large green sections across the south. The snow line has crept northward.

SMHI data shows Sweden has warmed by about 1.9°C since the late 1800s, roughly double the global average. All but two years since 1988 have been warmer than the 1961-1990 average. Winter snow cover now lasts 16 fewer days on average compared to 30 years ago.

The post White Christmas in Sweden: Five Decades of Vanishing Snow appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Chernozems (a subset of “Black Soils”) are among the most fertile types of soil. In Russia, they are called chernaya zemlya, or “black earth,” because they are very dark, sometimes almost pitch black. This rich color originates from organic material that has accumulated over thousands of years, often reaching 5 to 15 percent.

How do soils like this even form? It’s from being under huge grasslands for ages, with winters that are freezing, hot summers, and rain that’s balanced just right. If there’s too much water, nutrients get flushed deep underground. Not enough, and the vegetation can’t produce enough organic matter to enrich the soil. So what happens is these dense grasses shoot up annually, wither away, and decomposing into the soil.

Those grass roots reach deep and keep dumping in more organics season after season, slowly building these thick layers full of humus. Nowadays, we’ve got roughly 230 million hectares of chernozems, mostly scattered across the Eurasian steppes and the prairies in North America—places where the weather and vegetation have lined up similarly for eons.

The global distribution shows these soils are incredibly concentrated geographically.

The Distribution

Russia has a whopping 1.2 million square kilometers of chernozem, which is 52% of the global total.

Ukraine is next up with 340,000 square kilometers (15%), and Kazakhstan has 300,000 square kilometers (13%). Those three countries alone account for 80% of it all.

Over in North America, they stretch across the Great Plains. The U.S. and Canada together have about 14%.

Sure, those areas are huge for farming there, but they pale next to the massive Eurasian zones where everything just clicked over a way bigger landscape.

If you check the map, there’s this long, mostly unbroken stretch from Ukraine heading east through Russia right into Kazakhstan.

Kastanozems and Phaeozems

Over here on the second map, we’re looking closer at Eurasia and including two other soil types that usually show up around the edges of chernozem areas.

Kastanozems are more of a chestnut color, not as dark. They form in drier spots, typically south of the chernozem core, so their organic buildup isn’t as thick. You’ll find big areas of them in southern Russia and Kazakhstan.

Phaeozems come about in wetter spots than chernozems. A good chunk of the North American prairies are actually phaeozems, not the full-on chernozems. The extra water shifts how plants grow and things decompose, but they’re still top-notch for growing stuff.

All three soil types support major crop production. Wheat dominates in many areas, along with sunflowers and corn.

Why These Soils Matter for Farming

It’s no wonder Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan lead the way in grain exports—they’ve got the bulk of these super-fertile soils.

The post The Most Valuable Soil on Earth appeared first on Vivid Maps.

When you imagine the Sahara, you think of endless dunes, sharp rocks, and the scorching sun beating down, right? That’s the mental image for just about everybody. But imagine jumping back roughly 8,000 years – the whole area would look totally unfamiliar. North Africa had these massive grasslands spreading out everywhere, small lakes sparkling here and there in the light, and people actually getting around by boat, crossing huge parts of the continent like it was routine.

Cartographer Carl Churchill created a map that recreates the scene, drawing on research about the African Humid Period, which lasted roughly from 7000 to 3000 BCE.

Back then, the weather patterns were very different from today. The monsoons would push a lot farther north, bringing steady rain to spots that might not get any for years today.

Churchill’s map really puts the spotlight on Lake Chad – it’s enormous. These days, it’s dwindled to a tiny piece of what it used to be. Then there’s Lake Darfur sitting in western Sudan, along with Lake Ahmet. Over in Tunisia and Algeria, the Chotts were actual lakes full of water, not the crusty salt depressions they turned into. Folks back then treated these lakes like natural routes, jumping from one to another to travel across the land.

How do we know any of this is real? Well, satellites help a ton – they can detect old riverbeds right from space. It’s kind of spooky, seeing these faded marks on the ground where water once flowed strong.

The rock art is what seals it for scientists, though. Spread out across the Sahara, you’ve got these old carvings and paintings of hippos, crocodiles, and giraffes. I mean, really, who’d bother illustrating a hippo in a bone-dry desert? Those animals only hang around where there’s constant water.

Don’t forget the sediment cores either. Researchers drill down into what used to be lake beds and extract these long tubes of built-up dirt. From Lake Chad, they find pollen stuck in there from grasses and plants that only grow with regular rain. Every layer gives a peek into what was growing at different points in history.

The change didn’t happen super slowly all the way through; it sped up at some point. Over thousands of years, shifts in how Earth orbits messed with the monsoons in Africa. Rain started dropping off, plants thinned out, and the uncovered sand reflected more heat, which made things drier still. It became this runaway process, and around 3000 BCE, the desert was mostly formed.

Sure, Churchill couldn’t get every lake’s outline spot-on – there’s too much patchy evidence over such a giant area. But the main idea? That’s undisputed. The grassy regions turned into desert, and it totally reshaped where people lived and how they got around in Africa.

The post When the Sahara Was Green appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Back in 2015, Jeffrey Linn took USGS data about what happens when all the ice on Earth melts—80.3 meters (over 260 feet) of sea level rise—and turned it into a map. Los Angeles Bay replaced the basin, with new names marking where neighborhoods used to be.

“Strait Outta Compton” runs through Compton’s former location. The airport became “Ex-LAX.” Downey? “Drowney.” Beverly Hills’ 90210 zip code? “9021 Cove.” Knott’s Berry Farm? “Knott’s Oyster Farm.” “The O. Sea” covers the central basin. Further north there’s “Firth of Fullerton,” plus “Huntington Abyss” and “Mudflats of El Monte.”

Linn made a second version using different projections showing 215 feet (65.5 meters) of rise. The numbers changed slightly, but the basin still ends up underwater.

His third map tackles San Diego the same way. The bay expands inland, coastal neighborhoods disappear, and what’s left reorganizes around the remaining hills.

Linn’s been making these since 2013. His work has shown up in the Washington Post and Foreign Policy. He calls his project “Conspiracy of Cartographers”—a dig at people who think climate change is fake. If there’s a conspiracy, it’s physics. You can grab prints at conspiracyofcartographers.com.

Here you can find another map created by Jeffrey Linn, which shows the Islands of Seattle.

The post When Los Angeles Becomes a Bay appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Looking farther ahead – not just a century but thousands to millions of years – the numbers become much larger. If every glacier and ice sheet on our planet melted, global sea level would rise by roughly:

I built maps to show these changes, using height data from the GEBCO 2020 Grid, preprocessed by Sean Bradley.

But I didn’t stop there. I decided to “flood” the planet even further – at least hypothetically. What if Earth received the hidden oceans of other worlds in our Solar System?

Earth’s oceans today contain about 1,335 million km³ of liquid water. But in the Solar System, you can find worlds that can boast of a huge amount of water. Even Pluto likely hides beneath its crust a little less water than our planet.

Here’s how much water a few other ocean worlds might add to our seas:

At that point, our planet would turn into a water world, covered with a multi-kilometer layer of water. For the purposes of visualization, I stopped at Europa – because even Callisto’s water is nearly four times greater than Earth’s.

Below is the animated map I created. It shows major cities fading as they go underwater, while the highest peaks slowly vanish from view as they are submerged.

But while pouring alien oceans onto Earth is just a thought experiment, the opposite direction—our oceans shrinking away—is not. That is the real fate of this planet.

As the Sun slowly brightens, Earth will eventually cross a threshold called the moist greenhouse effect. Once that happens, water vapor will rise high into the atmosphere, break apart under solar radiation, and escape into space.

Models suggest this will begin in about 2.1 billion years. After that tipping point, the oceans could be lost in less than 200 million years—a blink in geologic time.

We are used to considering our planet as something permanent. But the time will come when even the planet will be unsuitable for life, at least in the form that exists now. Therefore, let us take care of our planet and not shorten the time of our possible stay on it.

The post When All the Ice Melts — and When the Oceans Disappear appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Historically, pandas lived across large parts of southern and eastern China, and their range even extended into northern Myanmar and Vietnam. Today, however, they are found only in fragmented mountain forests in Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces.

The contrast between the green (historic range) and red (current range) makes clear just how much their habitat has contracted. Much of the change is due to deforestation, farming expansion, and the natural isolation of bamboo forests in mountainous areas.

Since the 1980s, massive conservation programs have expanded reserves, built bamboo corridors, and cracked down on poaching. These efforts helped the species recover from “endangered” to “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List in 2016.

The post The Changing Range of the Giant Panda: Then and Now appeared first on Vivid Maps.

To understand the scale of change, take a look at the side-by-side maps created by Josh Holder for The New York Times, using Copernicus ERA5 climate data that shows the number of days per year when temperatures exceeded 30ºC (85°F) in Europe.

To understand the scale of change, take a look at the side-by-side maps created by Josh Holder for The New York Times, using Copernicus ERA5 climate data that show the number of days per year when temperatures exceeded 30ºC (85°F) in Europe for the period 2020-2024 compared to the period 1980-1984.

The maps show a clear transformation. In the early 1980s, most of northern and western Europe barely registered more than a handful of days above 30ºC each year. Fast forward to 2020–2024, and parts of Spain and southern France are now experiencing two to three months of these hot days annually. Even regions further north (Austria, Germany, Poland, the UK, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania ) have seen sharp increases.

This isn’t just about more days of discomfort. Longer, hotter summers affect agriculture, water supply, energy demand, and even the way cities are built.

If you want to look beyond the present into the future, I recommend exploring my own interactive map: Find Cities With a Similar Climate (2050). I built it using the Global Environmental Stratification dataset, which models climate shifts under four different emissions scenarios. With it, you can compare how today’s European capitals will resemble cities much further south by mid-century.

Maps like these make climate change tangible. Instead of abstract numbers, they show us where summers are lengthening and intensifying. And if current trends continue, the transformation we’ve already seen between the 1980s and 2020s may look modest compared to what’s ahead.

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