2009-01-25

Map: world accessibility and world at night (& happy lunar new year)


This is the famous satellite map of "world at night" pasted together by a few shots by NASA.

It reflects the population density and economic development (manifested more specifically energy/electricity availability).

It is interesting to compare it with the traffic linkage maps, (via Thomas Barnett) which is colored by the number of hours it takes to travel from some major EU city to that point on earth.

2 comments:

yan said...

Actually, the second map seems to show the time it takes to travel from any major city (defined as a place with more then 50.000 inhabs or so) to that point on earth. That's why there are white spots even in Australia, which usually take more than a day to get to from EU. I think the map is flawed in assuming only 10 km/h as travel speed on tracks. This may be true for countries with a lot of wood or similar vegetation, I don't think this is true for steppe or desert areas where one can always open a new track when the old one is in too bad a shape.

Ant73.com said...

light
good
nice