The Islands of Seattle, the Sea of Orange County, Divisadero Harbor, and Haight Inlet are just a few of the new topographical features that Seattle mapmaker and urban planner Jeffrey Linn identifies, in a series of charts showing what U.S. cities would look like if all the ice caps melted.
Linn’s is one of several collections, including the Audubon Society’s interactive map of climate impacts for 314 bird species and a “strange dystopian disco-ball Earth” produced by the Global Weirding project, that Grist profiles in this year-end review.
“My very favourite maps of the year were the simple ones, because I still have a bias towards flat things that you can stare at,” Smith writes. “Some of them are pretty, but more importantly, all of them are informative.”