Strange Maps

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A vintage map illustration showing the Arctic region, including parts of northern Europe, Greenland, and surrounding seas, with radial lines converging at the North Pole.
White text on a light grey background reads "Strange Maps" in a large, serif font.
The world, seen sideways.

Most maps show the world as something to be navigated. Strange Maps reveals the worlds humans have imagined.

Since 2006, Frank Jacobs has been collecting and interpreting maps that do more than chart geography or political borders. These maps — often obscure, beautiful, funny, and deeply revealing — each tell a story, usually one that’s more about how we see ourselves than where we are.

Published as a book in 2009 and a Big Think column since 2010, Strange Maps draws on a steady stream of reader submissions and rare discoveries. Together, they offer a way of seeing the world from unfamiliar angles, where cartography becomes culture, argument, and art.

with

Frank Jacobs is a journalist whose work explores how culture, history, and imagination shape the way we see the world.

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strange maps
Ghost map: Europe’s first glimpse of Tenochtitlan shows a city already destroyed
This 1524 map of the Aztec capital was a window into an exotic otherworld — and largely a fiction.

by Frank Jacobs

Historic map illustration of the city of Tenochtitlan, surrounded by water, with labeled features and detailed buildings, from the early colonial period in Mexico.
Everything Articles
A map of Australia showing probability of species presence with color gradients from low (blue) to high (red). Insets display detailed regions. Arrows indicate the Northern and Southern entry points.
Strange Maps
The first Australians were Lévy walkers
A new method of mapping migration factors in erratic movements and changing climate.
Frank Jacobs
A map with various yellow and brown faces showing different emotions, representing different regions.
Strange Maps
Chernoff faces: The data-rich maps that stare back at you
50 years ago, Herman Chernoff proposed using human faces to represent multidimensional datasets. It was a good idea in theory — but a disaster in practice.
Frank Jacobs
Map of the world showing tropical cyclone tracks from 1985 to 2005. Paths are marked with lines indicating storm movement over time. Dense clusters appear in the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.
Strange Maps
Hurricanes never cross the equator. Here’s why.
Thanks to the Coriolis force, hurricanes never cross the equator.
Frank Jacobs
Line chart showing body mass index (BMI) trends for various countries. Lines are labeled by country, with silhouetted figures for normal, overweight, and obese categories on the left.
Strange Maps
How is France dodging the global obesity trend?
Waistlines are expanding in most countries, except for a skinny list of nations bucking the trend.
Frank Jacobs
A Venn diagram depicts the overlapping groups of Nordic countries, Scandinavia, Danish Realm, Baltoscandia, Finno-Ugric, Baltic countries, and Balts, with the flags of respective countries.
Strange Maps
Baltoscandia: The geopolitical ghost that may just have a future
Because of their large and unfriendly neighbor to the east, the Baltics would rather be Scandinavian.
Frank Jacobs
A fictional map of a continent named eneropa, showing various regions like tidal states, ccsr, and solaria with topographical details and a scale.
Strange Maps
Europe remapped: What the energy utopia “Eneropa” would look like in 2050
A radical proposal reimagines Europe as a carbon-neutral continent where national boundaries are replaced by regions defined by renewable energy capabilities.
Frank Jacobs
World map illustrating various countries color-coded by their happiness levels with symbols indicating the most and least happy countries in each region.
Strange Maps
Mapped: The highs and lows of the world’s happiness landscape
The Gallup World Poll reveals regional peaks and valleys of happiness across all of the continents.
Frank Jacobs
A graphical representation of network connections superimposed on a dark map, highlighting major nodes with bright orange and yellow lines.
Strange Maps
The Enlightenment had its own internet: The Republic of Letters
Digital analyses of Enlightenment-era letters are teaching us a thing or two about Locke, Voltaire, and others.
Frank Jacobs
A composite image of the milky way galaxy showing colorful interstellar dust and gas with star fields.
Strange Maps
New map reveals the Milky Way’s magnetic heart
This first-of-its-kind image offers a detailed look at the magnetic fields within the Central Molecular Zone.
Frank Jacobs
Do you live in a new desert?.
Strange Maps
America’s news deserts are growing
Most counties in the U.S. have only one local newspaper, often one that publishes weekly instead of daily.
Frank Jacobs
Map of the united states indicating earthquake epicenters and areas where people reported feeling at least weak shaking, highlighting a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in central california on september 28, 2004, and a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in central virginia on august 23, 2011.
Strange Maps
East Coast quakes are felt farther than West Coast ones. Here’s why.
Across the subterranean United States, not all rocks were created equally.
Frank Jacobs
Strange Maps
Dewey Decimal: The sorting system that revolutionized libraries
This map samples some of the digits that make up the DDC system, invented by the brilliant but flawed Melvil Dewey.
Frank Jacobs
Historical map illustration depicting a planned city layout with a circular central area and radiating streets.
Strange Maps
Ohio’s Circleville ditched the grid system. Then it got squared.
A small Ohio town tried to escape America’s addiction to rectangular grids. It didn’t last long.
Frank Jacobs
A map showing the route of a voyage from sweden to norway.
Strange Maps
Was the “Odyssey” originally set in the Baltic?
The Trojan War was fought in Finland and Ulysses sailed home to Denmark, says one controversial theory.
Frank Jacobs
A map of antarctica with the word west antarctica.
Strange Maps
Westarctica: The micronation with a real-world purpose
The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 prohibited nations from making new land claims on the continent. But it never mentioned claims from private individuals.
Frank Jacobs
A map with a circle and a circle in the middle.
Strange Maps
CERN proposes accelerator 3 times as long as Large Hadron Collider
The $21.5-billion project could involve tunneling hundreds of feet under Lake Geneva.
Frank Jacobs
A map of the united states showing the number of abortions.
Strange Maps
Why are America’s oldest and youngest states 13 years apart?
Economics and religion help to explain the gap.
Frank Jacobs
A graph showing the death rate on everest.
Strange Maps
Mapped: The deadly geography of Mount Everest
The world’s highest mountain is also the world’s highest cemetery, with some bodies serving as creepy landmarks for today’s climbers.
Frank Jacobs
A map showing the location of the arctic sea.
Strange Maps
In case you missed it: America just effectively got much bigger
No shots fired. No flags raised. And no dry land gained. Still, the U.S. effectively grew by the size of about two Californias in December.
Frank Jacobs
A map of europe with many orange dots.
Strange Maps
Europe’s busiest airport? Heathrow and Istanbul battle for the title
London’s busiest airport seems to be rebounding well from the pandemic — but Istanbul has better prospects in the long run.
Frank Jacobs
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