Map: The Gulf Oil Spill on Top of San Francisco, Rome, D.C.

Here's an interesting look at the size of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in comparison with various metropolitan areas. A Google Earth API has been jiggered to layer a current image of the spill so its scope can be compared to places with which you might be familiar.

In related news, efforts to cap the leak in the Gulf failed over the weekend: "After the cofferdam was lowered onto the leak site, a slurry of methane crystals formed on the inside of the dome’s surface, making it bouyant and clogging the outtake at the dome’s roof. The giant box has been moved 200 meters from the disaster site, and is sitting on the sea bed. BP had anticipated that methane hydrates could form within the pipework from the dome to the surface, but not within the dome itself, especially at such a rapid rate."

The Most Comprehensive Map of Earth's Elevations Ever Published

A new map from NASA offers the most complete view of elevations on Earth ever presented:

"The Global Digital Elevation Model was created using nearly 1.3 million images collected by a Japanese camera on board NASA's Terra spacecraft. It is made up of a giant grid of 23,000 tiles, with each height point spaced 98ft apart. It shows a detailed representation of the planet's land mass. In this colorized version, low elevations are purple, medium elevations are greens and yellows, and high elevations are orange, red and white. 'This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world,' said NASA scientist Woody Turner. It is a large improvement on the previous best topographic map, where 80 per cent of the planet's landmass was surveyed during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission."

Click to enlarge.

In related news, scientists predict New Orleans and much of the Mississippi delta will be completely underwater by 2100.

The Earth as Facebook Sees It

A program that visualizes various types of Facebook activities by its users around the globe was developed by Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der and Dan Weatherford during a Facebook Hackathon event last month. Facebook is considering making the app official. Hackathons are events where programmers get together to collaborate and share ideas.

Check out Project Palantir, as it is called, AFTER THE JUMP...

Google introduces Flu Tracking Map

Google has introduced an interactive flu map which tracks the spread of influenza across the U.S.:

"Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading...Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service."

Origin of AIDS Pandemic Pushed Back to Late 19th, Early 20th Century

Gene fragments from the wax-embedded lymph node of a woman in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire have helped scientists determine that the HIV virus was around much earlier than the mid-20th century, and began spreading among humans in sub-Saharan Africa around the turn of the centuries as modern cities began to form:

"Researchers think the growth of cities -- and high-risk behavior associated with urban life -- may have helped the virus to flourish. There is no cure for AIDS, which is most commonly transmitted through sexual contact.Prior estimates put the origin of HIV at 1930. But Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson now believes HIV began infecting humans between 1884 and 1924."

What's that map at at the top?

It's something I discovered completely independently of the news about HIV/AIDS but it's related.

It's part of a fascinating new book called The Atlas of the Real World, which visualizes maps of the earth using software to depict the nations of the world, "not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects."

The map above features information about AIDS: "The size of each territory shows the number of people aged 15 to 49 with HIV. The highest prevalence exists in Swaziland, where 38 per cent of 15 to 49-year-olds carry the virus. More than a fifth of people in Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia, within this age range, carry HIV."

Here are a bunch of different maps on various topics.

Drifting Above the Planet

You may have seen those scary maps of the United States that show thousands of aircraft over the country at any given time. Check out this page for a series of quicktime movies of flight pattern visualizations — a must for map lovers or stats addicts. They're part of a larger project called Celestial Mechanics. This was presented in 2006, so it's not new, but it's new to me.

This visualization, set to music, is particularly tranquil and hypnotic. If only that could be said for real air travel.