Every now and then you might come across something so beautiful that it takes your breath away. When you’re a GeoGeek it typically includes some sort of maps. It happened to me today when I accidentally saw this map. It’s amazing.

The visualisation has been created by a cartographer Dan Coe, based on the Lidar data captured by the Oregon’s Department of Geology. The image is a digital elevation model of the Willamette river valley, where the elevation heights have been represented by a range of colors from white in the lower elevations to dark blue in the higher elevations. Actually the elevation range is only 50 foot (15 meters) but the results are amazing. The map shows the history of how the river channels were changing in the course of the last 12,000 to 15,000 years.

Beautiful.