Our World
How people picture and share one planet Continents and Oceans · The Trouble with Maps · Countries and Borders · Cities · Where People Live · One Connected World. Every map you have ever seen is wrong — you cannot flatten a round planet without stretching, squashing or tearing it somewhere.
Ages 14–16
What's inside
Continents and Oceans — the big pieces of the planet
Look at Earth from space and the first thing you notice is the split: brown-green blocks of land floating in a vast blue of water. We carve that land into seven continents and that water into five oceans — but those neat labels hide a stranger, more connected truth. The pieces are all one system, always slowly on the move.
The Trouble with Maps — why every flat map lies
Here is a genuinely impossible problem: how do you draw a round planet on a flat piece of paper? The honest answer is that you can't, not perfectly. Try to peel the surface of a globe and lay it flat and it will crack and gape. So every single flat map ever made cheats — and the way it chooses to cheat quietly shapes how you picture the entire world.
Countries and Borders — the invisible lines we agree on
If you flew over most borders you would see nothing — no line painted on the ground, no wall, just fields or a river that carries on regardless. A border is one of the most powerful things in the world and yet it is almost entirely an idea: a line that exists because enough people agree it does. Understanding where those lines come from, and why they so often cause trouble, is understanding a huge part of how the modern world works.
Cities — where humanity crowds together
For almost all of human history, nearly everyone lived on the land, growing food. Then, in a blink of historical time, we became a city species. Somewhere around 2007 the world crossed an invisible line: for the first time ever, more people lived in cities than in the countryside — and today, humanity is crowding into cities faster than at any point in history.
Where People Live — eight billion, unevenly spread
Eight billion is an almost impossible number to feel. But the truly surprising thing about all those people is not how many there are — it's how astonishingly unevenly they are spread. Humanity is not sprinkled smoothly over the globe. It is bunched into a few dense clumps, leaving vast stretches of the planet with almost nobody at all.
One Connected World — how the whole planet links up
Pick up any everyday object — your phone, your trainers, a banana — and you are holding the end of an invisible thread that stretches around the world. Geography isn't only about how the planet is divided; it's also about how astonishingly it is joined together. In the last century, humanity has woven itself into a single, tightly connected system, and understanding that web is understanding the modern world.
Keep exploring
Other languages
Loading LeoNes…