The Average Earth

I’m kind of a map nerd — I love projections and renderings and different wavelengths and physical features and geopolitical boundaries and buildings and roads and oh my goodness! Just for example, after a trans-UK bicycle tour a few years ago, I got obsessed with the total linear measure of dry stone walls in the country, because they were all over the place on the bike ride. Took me a while, but it turns out that the Dry Stone Walling Association thinks that 193,000 kilometers is about right.

Anyway:

The person who tweets at @cartocalypse has posted an amazing set of Earth images, collected from a variety of satellites. He (I am pretty sure it is a “he,” as the web site uses the first name “Hannes”) took daily images from all of 2020, and combined them to create a single picture of the average Earth. There are regional frames available as well.

It’s not clear whether each pixel is the mean, median or mode of the pixels from all the days — the post just says “most typical” — but the result is honestly just stunning. For at least a little while, you’ll be able to download the raw imagery, if you want to nerd out yourself.

Code and links helpfully provided!