I’ve been reading Randall Munroe’s What If before bed lately, which, in addition to even more bizarre than usual dreams, gives me mappy sorts of ideas. Recently I read the chapter about draining the world’s oceans via a hole in the Mariana Trench. Coincidentally, I’ve been playing with using additive opacity rather than deepening color to represent water depth. I’ve also been tinkering with a way to label maps via a blending mode rather than a standard text color with a halo thing. There’ll be steamy details on those nerd experiments later. In the meantime, the resulting maps were too fun not to share.
Here is a map of what the deepest part of the ocean would look like if the water was to evaporate away, right on down to the Challenger Deep, borrowing heavily from the unknowable depths of Randall’s mind…
Here’s a twitchy animated version of the Challenger Deep area. Nevermind the jumpy arrow. Just don’t mind it.
Data
The hill-shaded seafloor comes from an ArcGIS data service called, appropriately, TopoBathy Hillshade, available to browse at the Living Atlas.
The bathymetric polygons come from Natural Earth.
Adventures In Mapping 