Geography
World atlas
Choose a base map and layers. Drag to rotate the globe, scroll or pinch to zoom. Hover for data, click a country for details.
About the layers
- Country data
- The colour of a country shows the value of the selected indicator. Numeric data use seven classes with roughly the same number of countries (quantiles), so very different values remain comparable. For categories (languages, religion…) the three most common groups are coloured; click others in the legend to highlight them.
- Relief and sea floor
- NASA Blue Marble satellite mosaic with shaded land relief and ocean depths – mid-ocean ridges, deep-sea trenches and continental shelves.
- Climate zones
- The Köppen–Geiger climate classification by temperature and precipitation: A – tropical, B – arid, C – temperate, D – continental (snow), E – polar.
- Vegetation zones
- A simplified distribution of the main biomes derived from climate types – the natural vegetation the landscape would have without human influence.
- Tectonic plates
- Plate boundaries from the PB2002 model: divergent (plates move apart – ridges, rifts), convergent (they collide – subduction, mountain building) and transform (they slide past each other).
- Volcanoes and earthquakes
- Volcanoes active in the last 12,000 years (Smithsonian Institution) and earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 and more in the past week (USGS), loaded live. Notice how they follow plate boundaries.
- Ocean currents
- The main surface currents, schematically: warm (red) carry heat towards the poles, cold (blue) cool coasts and help deserts form.
- Day and night, time zones
- The night shadow moves with the real time. Time zones are drawn as ideal 15° bands; real zone borders follow countries – each country shows its local time.
- Night lights
- NASA Black Marble (2016) from the Suomi NPP satellite: settlements, cities and highways, but also oil extraction and fishing fleets.
Data: World Bank (World Development Indicators), UNDP (HDI), Pew Research Center (religion, approximate), IANA (time zones), mledoze/countries (country names, ODbL), NASA Earth Observatory (Blue Marble, Black Marble), Kottek et al. 2006 (Köppen-Geiger), P. Bird 2003 – PB2002 (plates), Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program, USGS (earthquakes, live), Natural Earth (rivers, lakes, glaciers, borders), Wikidata (UNESCO, national parks), GeoNames (cities and populations, CC BY 4.0). City, UNESCO site and national park names are shown in Czech transcription. Borders may not match internationally recognised borders.