I rediscovered the maps and work of Alasdair Rae this morning. (He has appeared on this blog before in posts like this one here.) Alasdair works in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield and is author of the blog, Stats, Maps n Pix. Recently, he’s been publishing maps showing population densities around the world. He also gets into the details of how they’re made. They are pretty cool to see.

Here are the Great Lakes.

a little bit more mopping up of this thread, just to share a few final outputs – first up is a map of the eastern Great Lakes, this time with some labels – I didn't add labels to any of the others but I may do in future pic.twitter.com/TfjAvF08CQ

— Alasdair Rae (@undertheraedar) May 9, 2020

And here is Brazil, as well as a map of the world (without any land shown). Canada and the United States barely register on this second one.

and, as a little experiment, I did one with just spikes – no land. I think this makes it easier to see some places – e.g. check out New Zealand or Hawaii, or even Reykjavík if you look closely. pic.twitter.com/qKxSLd120i

— Alasdair Rae (@undertheraedar) May 9, 2020