Geography Resources

Geography Resources

Maps and demographic information (statistics and/or data on people, places and things) for the United States, with a major section on California.

A commercial site that puts up links to information on cities and coutries. Seems to be able to connect with quite a bit of useful information. Includes the CIA World Factbook, plus links to additional data.

Check here to find estimated current population of U.S. areas, and a whole lot of other information estimated from the U.S. Census data.

Library Map Collection, at the University of Texas at Austin, holds more than 230,000 maps covering every area of the world.

The maps which are listed here have been selected because they are thought to be reasonably useful and/or interesting. They are categorized by geographical region although there are a couple of thematic categories such as Interactive Maps which both highlights the potential of the WWW and are also fun to use. Note that there is some overlap in geographic coverage between these categories.

With Earth viewer you can view either a map of the Earth showing the day and night regions at this moment, or view the Earth from the Sun, the Moon, the night side of the Earth, above any location on the planet specified by latitude, longitude and altitude, or from a satellite in Earth orbit. Images can be generated based on a topographical map of the Earth, up-to-date weather satellite imagery, or a composite image of cloud cover superimposed on a map of the Earth.

This geographical service uses the University of Michigan Geographic Name Server to find the latitude and longitude of two places, and then calculates the distance between them (as the crow flies). It also provides a map showing the two places, using the Xerox PARC Map Server.

Declassified satellite photos, from the U.S. Government, are accessible from this site.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map of the world is worth a thousand pictures. Maps help create our world view. They tell us who we are in relation to the other peoples of the earth. In trying to understand the world we live in, it's important that we use a map whose purpose is to give us a geographically accurate image of the world. The Peters Projection was created in 1974 by Arno Peters to address some of the problems of existing maps, without reproducing existing distortions and biases of other maps. The importance the of Peters Map goes beyond its portrayal of sizes and proportions, it leads us to a new view of the world.

This site offers a selection of outline maps for use in the classroom or at home. Feel free to print or download any of these maps for your personal use in activities, reports, or stories.