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Huh, just yesterday I tried something like this, but lacking elevation data for NY I settled for most of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/b7h3ulR.jpg (I downscaled the resulting 198'000x126'000 image to 4'950x3'150.)

And some more high resolution ones, e.g. Salt Lake City https://i.imgur.com/R352z2l.jpg

Using an extremely fast tool built by coworkers.

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It's really cool to see the natural borders of countries in much higher contrast than a regular elevation map. Especially the Alps walling off Northern-Italy from the rest of the continent and the way the Carpathian basin is surrounded by terrain that made it hard to invade. Makes sense that it was such a heavily contested area around the 9th century.

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