Gallery: The Most Amazing, Beautiful and Viral Maps of the Year
01MapBox OSM
Great maps were everywhere in 2013. Some seemed [destined to go viral](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/viral-map-respect/). Some were stunning to see. Others had noble intentions and interesting stories to tell. Lots were made by people who aren't professional mappers. Here are some our favorites. It's by no means an exhaustive list (and we were paying closer attention to new maps after we launched Map Lab in July), so if we missed one you think we were crazy to leave off this list, let us know in the comments. __Above:__ The million-plus amateur cartographers who volunteer their time to plot roads, streets, and even shrubbery for Open Street Map were busier than ever this year. The beautiful map above, created by MapBox, shows how the database has grown since its inception in 2004. Hot pink areas are newly mapped, blue and green areas are older. (There's a [zoomable version](https://www.mapbox.com/osm-data-report/) on Mapbox's website). OSM's database of more than 21 million miles of roads and 78 million buildings, keeps finding new uses, such as helping first responders to disasters like this year's [typhoon Haiyan](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan_(2013)) in the Philippines. *Image: [MapBox/OpenStreetMap contributors](https://www.mapbox.com/about/maps/)*
02Ostrich Egg Globe
This globe, from the early 1500s, may be the oldest surviving globe that depicts the Americas (as well as Japan and Arabia). A paper in the fall issue of *The Portolan*, the journal of the Washington Map Society, argues that the globe was made in 1504, which would likely make it a few years older than the copper [Hunt-Lenox globe](http://exhibitions.nypl.org/treasures/items/show/163) at the New York Public Library. This one is about the size of a grapefruit and was made from the bottom halves of two ostrich eggs. Along with the Lenox globe, it's the only historical map known to include the sentence HIC SVNT DRACONES (here are dragons). *Image: [Washington Map Society](http://www.washmapsociety.org/)*
03NOAA Hurricane Tracks
This map shows the paths of every hurricane and cyclone detected since 1842 -- nearly 12,000. [NOAA keeps the track info in a single database](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/08/hurricane-tracks/), and made this map which shows the frequency of the storms. You can clearly see that more storm tracks have overlapped in the western Pacific ocean and northern Indian ocean. This is largely because of the length of the typhoon season, which basically never stops in the warmer waters there. NOAA also mapped the storm intensities. *Image: NOAA*
04MapStack
Making beautiful maps just keeps getting easier. [MapStack](http://mapstack.stamen.com/), a free online tool released in June by Stamen Design, lets you create maps by combining up to five artfully altered layers of satellite imagery and Open Street Map data. Simple sliders let you play around with things like background color and opacity. Best of all, it's easy to use, [closer to Instagram than Photoshop in complexity](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/stamen-design-reveals-an-instagram-for-maps/276713/), so no coding expertise or knowledge of GIS is required. *Image: MapStack/Stamen*
05Iceland Isomap
Iceland’s interesting topography can be seen beautifully on this map made up of elevation contours, or isolines made by Aitor Garcia Rey. You can [explore and zoom in on the map hosted on CartoDB](http://iceland.cartodb.com/tables/iceland/embed_map?title=true&description=true&search=false&shareable=false&cartodb_logo=true&sql=) and read [all the gory details of how it was made](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/iceland-map/). *Map: Aitor Garcia Rey*
06PLUTO
On July 24 New York City’s Department of City Planning quietly released its trove of tax lot records, freeing a trove of data that spawned a flood of maps and gave open data advocates something to celebrate. The dataset, called [MapPLUTO](http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml#pluto) (short for Property Land Use Tax lot Output), is a detailed tract of every piece of property in the city. The map above, [PLUTO Is Free](http://andrewxhill.github.io/cartodb-examples/scroll-story/pluto/index.html#0) by [Andrew Hill](https://twitter.com/andrewxhill) of CartoDB is a celebration of the data windfall. *Map: Andrew Hill*
07Wind Globe
The image above is a screenshot from an [amazing interactive global map](http://earth.nullschool.net/) of near-real-time wind pattern forecasts, based on data from the [Global Forecast System](http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/). Cameron Beccario, inspired by last year's extremely popular [U.S. wind map](http://hint.fm/wind/), built this visualization using D3 and other javascript modules. The interactive version is really fun to play with by turning the globe with your mouse, and the patterns are nothing short of mesmerizing. It's maps like these that make us [really want to learn how to code](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/make-better-maps-with-d3/). *Map: Courtesy of [Cameron Beccario](https://twitter.com/cambecc)*
08Racial Dot Map
The map above has a single dot for each person in San Francisco, colored according to race (White: blue dots; African American: green dots; Asian: red; Latino: orange; all others: brown). [The full map](http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html), created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, covers the entire country -- 308,745,538 dots -- and is based on data from the 2010 U.S. Census. The racial dot map became one of the most viral maps the internet as ever seen. *Map: Dustin Cable*
09NYPL Building Inspector
Old maps are great, but there's no point hoarding them away where no one ever sees them or uses them. The New York Public Library is doing some creative things [to make its huge collection of historic maps more accessible and relevant](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/phone-map-game-new-york-city/) in the digital age, and their [Building Inspector](http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/) game, launched in October, is the latest example. It harnesses the idle time of New Yorkers (or anyone else) to inspect and correct building footprints in the digitized versions of fire insurance maps from the 1800s. In just a few weeks, volunteers plowed through 61,000 buildings in an 1857 atlas of Manhattan. Now the library has set them loose on an 1855 atlas of Brooklyn. *Image: NYPL*
10NYChenge
Twice a year, the setting sun lines up with the street grid of New York City's Manhattan, creating an incredible show and a free-for-all for amateur photographers. The phenomenon is known as Manhattanhenge, but the map above, dubbed [NYCHenge](http://nychenge.com/) and made by [Javier Santana](http://javisantana.com/) shows when and where the show can be caught all across New York City, any day of the year. *Image: Javier Santana / [CC ShareAlike 3.0 license](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/)*
11Dialect Maps
This map shows where people call "the miniature lobster that one finds in lakes and streams." The red areas prefer crawfish, the blue zones use crayfish and the green is where people say crawdad. The map is part of a project by Joshua Katz of the North Carolina State University's Department of Statistics that looked at [how a huge number of different terms are pronounced throughout the country](http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jakatz2/project-dialect.html). From "soda" vs. "pop" to "you guys" vs. "you all," the maps are incredibly fun to sift through -- and consequently [took over the internet](http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6) for a several days in June. *Map: Joshua Katz*
12Solar
The interactive map above, unveiled in May, is designed to help property owners assess the costs and benefits of installing solar panels. Type in an address, and you get a map of the solar energy potential of your neighborhood or building, along with estimates of how long it would take you to recoup your investment and how much planet-warming carbon dioxide you'd be keeping out of the atmosphere. The project, called Mapdwell, is a collaboration between MIT's Sustainability Lab, the design firm MoDE Studio, and the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In December, Mapdwell released a second solar map -- for Washington, DC. *Image: screenshot, Mapdwell solar map of Cambridge*
13Koana Islands
In his spare time, an Australian train driver imagined, [documented and mapped an entire fictional island](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/08/fictional-koana-islands-maps/) nation in detail you will not believe. The maps of the Republic of Koana Islands look very, very real. The country also has a rich history, a high standard of living, excellent public transportation and three baseball leagues. *Map copyright Ian Silva*
14Rumsey
David Rumsey scanned and uploaded 11,502 maps and cartographic artifacts from his magnificent collection in 2013. They included this comparative view of the world's rivers originally published in London in 1817 (see a [zoomable version](http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~240564~5512293:Comparative-View-of-the-Lengths-of-) on Rumsey's website). The accompanying text describes the Missouri River, recently navigated by Lewis and Clark, as "extremely devious." Other interesting maps Rumsey uploaded this year include an [infamous 1885 map of gambling and prostitution](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/1885-map-san-francisco-chinatow/) in San Francisco's Chinatown, and a 1948 freeway planning map of the city, which is featured in [a new exhibit](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/sfo-david-rumsey-map-exhibit/) of his collection at San Francisco airport. *Image: [David Rumsey Map Collection](http://www.davidrumsey.com/)*
15American Futures
Journalists continued to get more creative with maps this year. The [American Futures Project](http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/american-futures/) is one nice example. Journalist James Fallows and his wife have been traveling across the U.S. by small plane to report on how communities across the country are bouncing back (or not) from the financial crisis for *The Atlantic* and the public radio show *Marketplace*. Readers can follow Fallows's travels on his "[geoblog](http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/american-futures-geoblog)." Based on a story map template developed by Esri, the geoblog combines maps, text, and images to complement Fallows's reporting. Another great example: this [interactive map](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/space/mars-curiosity-rover-tracker.html?_r=0) of the Curiosity rover's travels on Mars made by *The New York Times*. *Image: The American Futures Project/ESRI*
