South Sudan- A Work in Progress

The new Republic of South Sudan is quickly finding its way onto world maps but you may want to wait another week or two before purchasing your next wall map. Here is the new nation with it's name incorrectly specified on National Geographic's "Executive" Africa Map on my iPhone - it appears the same way on the wall map.

However, the classic map hasn't received the new nation yet.

Unless you have the iPhone app where it appears on the map but not yet in the list of countries:














 Good luck South Sudan. We'll get you on the map correctly soon-probably more quickly than any previous country.

Map of the Week-Recycled Africa

Anouk Zijlma is a travel writer who has lived in Africa and writes about it for About.com. She made this 4 foot high map of Africa from recycled tin cans. Her description follows:
 

The cans I used were specific to each country. I took into consideration team soccer colors, exports, favorite beers, and many of my personal experiences. The best oranges I ever tasted growing up came from South Africa. Nigeria drinks more Guinness than Ireland. Botswana exports diamonds and Zimbabwe exports flowers. The ocean was created from hundreds of Pepsi cans. All the cans are washed, cut and then nailed into wood. The only tools I needed was a hammer, small nails, a National Geographic map for accuracy, scissors, carbon paper and a friendly recycling plant.

Weekend Puzzlers

National Geographic has jigsaw puzzles on their web page. They're a great time waster at work or on a rainy/snowy weekend. I did this Africa puzzle at work in 8 minutes and 20 seconds while fielding a tech. support call!

 

The finished product:

Africa is really big, Vatican City is really small

The designer Kai Krause recently produced this infographic showing the size of Africa in relation to various other countries and regions of the world. Click on it for a higher resolution image.

 Here is a more detailed view of the map section.

Comparing countries to continents is a little like apples to crabapples (unless that country is Australia), but it is a very effective graphic and should help fight "rampant Immapacy", in the author's words.


Xefer made this graphic of the world's smallest country, Vatican City, inspired by Krause's work.

The Africa image lists the top 100 countries by size, while the Vatican one lists the bottom 100. Here is a closeup showing the size comparisons between the Vatican and the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Great Pyramid of Giza, the Ile de la Cite in Paris, Alcatraz, Rockall in the Atlantic Ocean and Boston's Fenway Park. 

The Great Green Wall

Eleven sub-Saharan countries in Africa are working together to create a "Great Green Wall" (La Grande Muraille Verte) of vegetation to halt the growing of the Sahara Desert. This will be a 15 km wide strip of various types of vegetation running the continent from Dakar, Senegal to Djibouti. Local and international organizations are working together to design the route and choose the most effective and useful species of vegetation. The wall's designers hope to help farmers and stem the exodus of environmental refugees.

MOTW #90

Algeria is building its first subway line-in Algiers. The line shown on the map is the first of three proposed lines. Unfortunately this is the best map I could find of the system. The map showing all the proposed lines is even harder to read.

MOTW #22

Map of Sudan from USAID. I just think there's a lot of interesting details here.