The brightest spots on the planet at night are transformed into luminous, towering structures.
The eastern United States with cities as mountains. By John Metcalfe March 6 at 11:54 AM Thousands of mountaineers have conquered Everest. But how many have climbed into the thermosphere to summit a peak of raw, incandescent light?
Cities loaded with street and building lights stretch like radiant citadels as “high” as 53 miles. Poorer-lit regions, including normally imposing mountain ranges, look as flat as the ocean floor.“Perhaps it was an underlying thought to get people thinking about the effects of our urbanized areas on our nighttime environments,” says the cartographer, who along with fellow mapping whiz Sarah Bell runs the geoviz site Petrichor Studio.
“I am exaggerating the ‘elevations’ by multiplying by a value I settled on after visual trial and error,” Wasilkowski says. “The luminescence of each pixel ranges from 0 to 1, and then I multiply by 85,000.” The Washington metro area. Welcome to the new topography of the American east, where the only mountains visible are metropolises styled like lava-vomiting volcanoes:
Cities of the western United States appear to be tall, distant mountains. Not every brightness cluster represents a city. The decidedly nonurban northwest sector of North Dakota is hot and bumpy because of all the infrastructure, temporary housing and gas flares from oil and natural-gas exploration of the Bakken shale formation:
Since creating “Earth at Night, Mountains of Light,” Wasilkowski has collected some nice shout-outs from his cartographer comrades, and also added the option to toggle to a daytime version because “I sort of like how wacky it looks,” he says. “I think it helps illustrate how real-world mountains get flattened in favor of urban areas.”
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