World Population Graphed By Latitude And Longitude | Hacker News Reader

World Population Graphed By Latitude And Longitude

chrisblattman.com

70 pointsTichy23 comments

http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/gpw/index.jsp

I posted this as a comment on that page, but it's worth showing here too. It's an interactive map of population on earth as a heatmap - basically both of those graphs mashed together, at very high resolution.

Looking at Europe, there seems to be much less data about Germany and the United Kingdom than France, Spain, Italy or Portugal. You can see this by the lack of contrast on the colours on the map.

Both India and China have vast areas of relatively high-density rural population. If a part of the raw material for economic progress involves the shift of people from rural/farming to urban/professional lifestyles, then there's a huge potential here.

Yes, that's been the primary source of China's economic boom.

Yes, but seeing how vast the stretches of high-density rural population are is quite amazing. (Other map from gp post)

Economic mobility != http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

Unfortunate choice of a histogram. Colouring the whole width in different saturation (or color) would have been a much better visualisation. Currently the upper graph suggests the population is in the US while the majority of that bump comes from India and asian countries.

original source: http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?histpop

I just went and found that too. Required a lot of clicking. It's a shame the people posting these blog posts don't dereference the intermediate pointers for us.

It would be more interesting to see this map corrected for land mass to see actual density.

How about by altitude?

In this article, http://www.pnas.org/content/95/24/14009.full the author may show this in figure 2a, http://www.pnas.org/content/95/24/14009/F2.large.jpg

It contains these tidbits as well:

As of 1994,… 33.5% of the world’s population, lived within 100 vertical meters of sea level… The median person lived at an elevation of 194 m above sea level.

That is cool.

There's even a little bump on the histogram especially for Mexico City (2300m, 25m souls). Other than Mexico it's monotonic all the way up.

I'm amazed how many people live in the lowlands. I've never been able to be happy outside the mountains myself. There's this whole vast majority of my human brothers and sisters who cluster on the seacoasts with the opposite preference. I'm in the tiny group with Tibetan shepherds and Inca campesinos. Those aren't people I usually identify with.

Except for the further spike at 4000m---what the heck is that?

Nepal.

The map viewer they use [1] is familiar, I've seen it on several other sites (same exact icons). Anybody knows if it's open source and what's the name of the project?

1. http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapviewer/

Obviously, the map portion itself feels a lot like earlier google maps iterations.

What sites have you seen the app on, specifically? They state in the help pane to have broken it into it's own self contained web-app to facilitate it's use by many different sites.

The latitude map is a nice visualization of how our species is clustered around the equator. Not surprising, but still neat to see the data.

Seems more like clustered around 30 degrees north.

Well, there's going to be much less space further from the equator, as parallels on both directions from equator are getting shoter and shorter. The equator is 40,000 km long, but the parallel I live on (50th north) is just 25,000 kilometers long (if I'm correct).

Actually around equator is mostly sea. And land space is rather irregularly distributed over the earth.

Well, I wonder if there is some specific latitude where there's more land than sea, of course, except Antarctica.

I love graphs like this that convey a lot of information in a very simple concise way.

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