What are you closer to right now—the nearest ocean or the edge of space? Reddit user @Many-Excitement3246 created a map that answers this question in a way I haven’t seen before.

Red areas on the map are closer to the sea. Violet regions are closer to outer space. The dividing line is the Kármán line at roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the surface . Why that height? The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale chose it because aircraft wings can’t generate lift anymore when the air gets that thin.

Look at that narrow red band following the coasts. Earth is 12,742 kilometers (7,918 miles) across. Space? Just 100 kilometers up. That’s less than 1% of the planet’s diameter.

You’ve got the Kármán line at 100 kilometers. But the air we actually breathe? That comes from way closer to the ground. The troposphere contains 85-90% of all atmospheric mass. It only extends 8 to 20 kilometers up depending on where you are. Almost all the atmosphere (99% of it) is packed into the first 30 kilometers (19 miles) above the surface.

What actually keeps us alive is thinner than this map shows. Make a version marking where 90% of the air sits, and that coastal band would practically vanish. We’re living under a film of breathable air so thin it wouldn’t even show up on most globes.

Mountain climbers know this firsthand. Summit of Everest? That’s 8.8 kilometers. Get up there and only one-third of the atmosphere is below you. Jets cruise between 9 and 12 kilometers, and they have to pump pressurized air into cabins because your lungs can’t pull in enough oxygen at that height.

It should be noted, the atmosphere doesn’t just stop at 100 kilometers. It thins out over hundreds and thousands of kilometers until it becomes vacuum. The outermost traces stretch up to about 10,000 kilometers.

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Just as Elon Musk backed Trump’s bid for the presidency, Trump’s support across America shapes this Martian landscape. The higher the percentage of Trump voters in an area, the higher that region rises on our red planet’s surface. Trump’s strongest areas form towering Mons (mountains), while his weakest support creates deep Lacuses (Lakes).

The map reveals fascinating features: Trump’s Great Dorsum (ridge) stretches across rural America, while urban Democratic strongholds form Sinus (bays) and Lacus (lakes). In the midst of these Democratic waters, you’ll find Collis (islands) – areas where Trump maintained strong support despite being surrounded by Harris voters. Vast Republican territories spread across the Planum (plains).

Martian Features Guide:

• Mons: Mountain
• Chasma: Deep canyon
• Sinus: Bay
• Lacus: Lake
• Collis: Island
• Planum: Plain
• Planitia: Low plain
• Dorsum: Ridge
• Mensa: Flat-topped prominence

“That’s one small step…” turned into quite a stumble for Harris. Like the moon to her predecessor Biden’s sun, Harris’s support created a distinct lunar topology. Urban Democratic strongholds appear as Montes (mountain ranges) and Insula (islands), while Republican-leaning areas form vast Mare (seas).

Look closely and you’ll find Palus (small lunar seas) where Harris maintained moderate support, and dramatic Mare (seas) where her support dropped significantly.

Lunar Features Guide:

• Mons/Montes: Mountain/mountain range
• Mare: Sea
• Palus: Small mare
• Sinus: Bay
• Lacus: Lake
• Insula: Island
• Terra: Land
• Promontorium: Mountainous cape

This astronomical approach to election mapping might seem unusual, but it reveals clear patterns in how Americans voted. The Martian highlands show Trump’s rural strongholds, while Harris’s lunar peaks cluster around urban centers.

What does your local landscape look like on Mars or the Moon? Is your area a towering Mons or a deep Mare? Share what you notice in the comments below – I’m curious to hear your observations about these interplanetary political patterns.

The post Space Race 2024: Mapping Election Results on Mars and Moon appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Unfortunately, only one planet in our solar system can boast so much liquid water. Nevertheless, let’s fantasize and imagine that Earth is not the only planet covered with water.

Mercury

Mean radius: 2,440 km (1516 miles) / 0.3829 Earths
Length of the equator: 15,329 km (9,525 miles)
Surface area: 7.48×10⁷ km² (2.89×10⁷ mi²) / 0.147 Earths
Mass: 3.3011×10²³ kg / 0.055 Earths

This topographical map created by PythonMaps using Python libraries: raster, NumPy, and matplotlib show the first planet from the sun, with the ocean covering ~71% of the surface, like Earth. Data comes from NASA observations.

On this topographical map, low altitude areas are shown in dark blue, and high altitude areas are dark red. For comparison, the highest and lowest points on Mercury are about 8.9 km (5.5 miles) apart. On Earth, the highest and lowest points are about 19 km (12 miles) apart.

If we consider that the Earth’s mean radius is 6,371 km (3959 mi), Mercury’s radius is 2,440 km (1516 miles). So the elevation difference is slightly more significant for Mercury than for Earth compared to the overall radius.

Below on the enlarged topographic map of Mercury’s surface, many flow channels on Mercury look like on Earth, but in fact, these channels have been created by lava.

If there were water on Mercury, then after a relatively short period, most of these channels, small islands, and highly irregular coastlines would get worn down by the water and look more like Earth’s landmasses.

Venus

Mean radius: 6,052 km (3,761 miles) / 0.9499 Earths
Length of the equator: 15,329 km (9,525 miles)
Surface area: 4.6023×10⁸ km² (1.7761×10⁸ mi²) / 0.902 Earths
Mass: 4.8675×10²⁴ kg / 0.815 Earths

Scientists believe that Venus might have had oceans several billion years ago, perhaps much like those on Earth.

The topographical map below created by data scientist Alexis Huet shows what a wet Venus looks like with a similar amount of water to Earth.

Flat, volcanic plains cover roughly 80% of the Venusian surface, consisting of 70% plains with crinkle ridges and 10% flat plains. Nearly a thousand impact craters on Venus are equally scattered across the planet’s surface.

Here the physical map of terraformed Venus created by Neneveh.

Earth

Mean radius: 6371.0 km (3958.8 mi)
Length of the equator: 40075.017 km (24901.461 mi)
Surface area: 5.1007×10⁸ km² (1.9694×10⁸ mi²)
Mass: 5.97237×10²⁴ kg

Oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers of water on Earth are hard to surprise anyone. We are used to seeing our hospitable planet like this.

Our planet looks much more unusual without water.

Mars

Mean radius: 3389.5 km (2106.1 mi) / 0,5320 Earths
Length of the equator: 21,297 km (13,233 mi)
Surface area: 1.4480 x 10⁸ km² (0.5591 x 10⁸ mi²) / 0.284 Earths
Mass: 6.4171×10²³ kg (0.107 Earths)

The surface of Mars resembles plains, deserts, polar caps of Earth. Above the surface of Mars towers the highest volcano in the solar system – Olympus Mons. Its height is 21 kilometers, which is 2.5 times higher than Mount Everest.

The Martian polar ice caps are mainly composed of water. If only the south polar ice cap melted water to cover the planet’s surface to a depth of 11 meters (36 feet).

Here the map of Mars built by Reddit user Crikey, with the surface 71% covered by water.

Below is the hypothetical map of a terraformed Mars.

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Canals were confirmed by later observers. In 1894, Percival Lowell, a prosperous cosmologist from Boston, made his first observations of Mars from a private observatory built in Arizona (Lowell Observatory). He concluded that the canals were real and finally mapped hundreds of them. Percival Lowell thought that the straight lines were artificial canals built by intelligent Martians to transport water from the polar caps to the equatorial territories.

As a result during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were “canals” on the planet Mars. Many people had thought that only an advanced civilization could create such unnaturally straight lines. For decades, people lived with the thought that a competing civilization of intelligent beings was successfully developing on Mars! No wonder what Its legacy has had a very real effect in areas like pop culture. For instance, Ray Bradbury wrote his famous work The Martian Chronicles (1950), and H.G. Wells wrote his incredibly influential Martian-invasion novel The War of the Worlds. It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode became famous for allegedly causing panic among its listening audience. These works were far from the only ones.

The Martian Channels not only have left a big mark on popular culture but have even influenced modern space exploration. 

The arrival of the United States’ Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965, which took pictures revealing impact craters and a generally barren landscape, was the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Mars could be inhabited by higher forms of life, or that any straight lines that cross the Martian surface and canal features existed.

And nowadays, as a result of decades of Mars exploration, we have more information about the surface of Mars than there is about the Earth’s seafloor.

The post A Short History of Martian Canals in Maps appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Mars is home to dizzyingly tall mountains and deep canyons. Olympus Mount is the tallest mountain in the Solar system. It’s about two and a half times taller than Mount Everest. The surface of Olympus Mons is geologically very young and the volcano may still be active. The Martian canyons called the Vales Marries are approximately the length of the entire continental United States and over three times as deep as the Grand Canyon. Like Venus and Mercury, Mars has impact craters off over the planet where meteors have fallen through the thin atmosphere to strike the surface.

Billions of years ago, the surface of Mars and Earth looked very similar. Although the Martian surface no longer holds any liquid water. Mars probably once had lakes and rivers, as well as a thick atmosphere like Earth. Why did Mars become a cold and waterless desert while life flourished on Earth? Knowing more about the history of Mars might also help us understand more about the past and future of Earth.

A topographic map of Mars

The distinctive red color of the Martian surface is because of the dust particles that coat the ground. Planet-wide dust storms can occur when high winds blow the dust into the air.

A geology map of Mars

The space race
Spacecraft exploration of Mars began in earnest during the 2Oth century Space Race when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to explore the Solar system with satellites and manned missions. Since then over 50 space missions have been launched toward Mas – about half of them successful. Some notable missions include the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, which collected the data used to design this geologic map. The Curiosity rover, a car-sized robot, is a recent addition to the planet. Curiosity is equipped with six independent controlled wheels, a robotic arm, and tools for analyzing Martian rocks.

The post Mapping Mars: The Topography and Geology of the Red Planet appeared first on Vivid Maps.

The chart below created by the xkcd team shows the “depth” of various Solar system gravity wells.

Each well is scaled such that rising out of a physical well of that depth – in constant Earth surface gravity – would take the same energy as escaping from that planet’s gravity in reality.

Each planet is shown cut in half at the bottom of its well, with the depth of the well measured down to the planet’s flat surface.

The planet sizes are to the same scale as the wells. Interplanetary distances are not to scale.

It takes the same amount of energy to launch something on an escape trajectory away from Earth as it would launch it 6,000 km upward under constant 9,81 m/s2 Earth gravity. Hence, Earth’s well is 6,000 km deep.

This is why it took a huge rocket to get to the Moon, but only a small one to get back.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, has the weakest gravity of all the planets in the Solar System. Its gravity is only about 38% of Earth’s gravity, making it easier for spacecraft to escape its gravitational pull.

On the contrary, Jupiter is more than 300 times as massive as Earth and has a gravity about 2.5 times stronger than Earth’s gravity.

Jupiter is not much larger than Saturn, but much more massive. At its size, adding more mass just makes it denser due to the extra squeezing of gravity.

If you dropped a few dozen more Jupiters into it, the pressure would ignite fusion and make it a star.

The Sun is by far the most massive object in the Solar System, accounting for over 99.8% of its total mass. Its immense gravity holds the entire Solar System together and governs the orbits of all the planets, moons, and other celestial objects.

To learn more about the Solar System and gravity, have a look at the following books:

• National Geographic Atlas of Space
• Space Atlas, Second Edition: Mapping the Universe and Beyond

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Meteorite Basics

Before we dive into the specifics of meteorite impacts in the U.S., let’s clarify what a meteorite is. Meteorites are rocks from space that survive the fiery passage through Earth’s atmosphere and land on the planet’s surface. They come from asteroids, the Moon, or Mars, and their impact can range from small thuds to significant craters.

Meteorite Impact Sites in the U.S.

In the United States, an average of 7.6 meteorites falls each year. Among them stony meteorites are 78%; Irons, mesosiderites, and pallasites – 22%. The most common mass range for United States meteorites is 4-8 kg.

Moreover, the U.S. has witnessed several significant meteorite impacts throughout its history. One of the most famous is the Meteor Crater in Arizona, also known as Barringer Crater, created around 50,000 years ago by an iron meteorite about 50 meters in diameter. This impact left a crater over 1,000 meters wide and 170 meters deep, serving as a stark reminder of the Earth’s vulnerability to cosmic impacts.

Another notable impact site is the Canyon Diablo crater field in Arizona, which includes several smaller craters formed by the same meteorite shower that created the Meteor Crater. These craters range from 15 to 120 meters in diameter, highlighting the widespread nature of the impact event.

The map of the United States created by Reddit user thearrowhead shows all recorded meteorite impacts in the United States from 1918 to 2018.

Other Impact Sites

While the Meteor Crater and Canyon Diablo are among the most famous, the U.S. has experienced numerous other meteorite strikes, albeit less dramatic. For example, in Peekskill, New York, in 1992, a meteorite struck a parked car, creating a small crater and causing significant damage to the vehicle.

In recent years, advances in technology and monitoring have enabled scientists to track and record smaller meteorite impacts more accurately. While these events rarely cause significant damage, they serve as a reminder of the ongoing interaction between Earth and the cosmos.

Interested in meteorites? These books will be useful!

• Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World
• Meteorites: The Story of Our Solar System

The post All Recorded Meteorite Impacts in the United States appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Until around 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had a thicker atmosphere and was warmer than the present day, and evidence suggests that liquid water flowed on its surface, carving the many river channels that remain there today. The lakes shown on this map are lakes that are theorized to have existed around this time. In the north was an ocean, though it was probably never as high a sea level as shown here. At the north pole of the red planet was the ocean hundreds of meters deep. It is believed that much of this water was lost to space, carried away over time by the solar wind, and that which remains on Mars today is frozen in the polar ice caps and is also likely to be found frozen and buried across the planet under the surface layer of dust.

Many present-day geologic features and craters had yet to form or were in the process of forming, such as the Tharsis or Olympus volcanoes and the Valles Marineris canyon, but the map below uses modern terrain data so it doesn’t truly reflect how the terrain really would have looked back then. During this time period, Mars would have actually appeared to be more grey like the Moon or the planet Mercury, as the iron in the soil had yet to rust.

Also included on this map are the locations of the 7 successful Mars landers.

Terraformed Mars

The post Ancient Mars appeared first on Vivid Maps.

NASA

A new map of the thickness of Mars’ crust shows less variation between thicker regions (red) and thinner regions (blue), compared to earlier mapping. This view is centered on Valles Marineris, with the Tharsis Montes near the terminator to its west. The map is based on modeling of the Red Planet’s gravity field by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The researchers mapped the density of the Martian crust, estimating the average density is 2,582 kilograms per meter cubed (about 161 pounds per cubic foot). That’s comparable to the average density of the lunar crust. Typically, Mars’ crust has been considered at least as dense as Earth’s oceanic crust, which is about 2,900 kilograms per meter cubed (about 181 pounds per cubic foot).

Via NASA

The post A new gravity map of Mars appeared first on Vivid Maps.

Reddit user: phtsx, Data: ibge.gov.br

Spiritism is a spiritualistic philosophy codified in the 19th century by the French educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, under the code name Allan Kardec; it proposed the study of “the nature, origin, and destiny of spirits, and their relation with the corporeal world”. Spiritism soon spread to other countries, having today 35 countries represented in the International Spiritist Council.

Spiritism postulates that humans are essentially immortal spirits that temporarily inhabit physical bodies for several necessary incarnations to attain moral and intellectual improvement. It also asserts that spirits, through passive or active mediumship, may have beneficent or maleficent influence on the physical world.

The term first appeared in Kardec’s book, The Spirits Book, which sought to distinguish Spiritism from spiritualism.

Wikipedia

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