My students have seen this image ever since I found this on social media. I’ve used it as a way to help students assess the validity of online resources (wait, you mean that not everything on the internet is true?!?) We often find what looks like a great maps or resource online that don’t have any reference to the data, author, date, or any other type of metadata.
This map called the Valeriepieris Circle became famous about 9 years ago after garnering a ton of attention on Reddit. A cartographer did a deep dive into mapping the smallest circle around the largest percentage of the the global population. The result was dozens of maps, include the Yuxi Circle depicted below. This is such a powerful way to convey how uneven the distribution of global population actually is and opens the door to explore the consequences of population density.

SOURCES: Visual Capitalists, Stats Maps n Pix (deeper dive).

TAGS: cartography, mapping, density, population.

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