Floods. Amazon deforestation. Earthquake destruction. Satellite maps somehow don't always help us to fully imagine the size of these disasters. Is there a better way to visualize the scale of destruction?

Here I've been playing with the ranges of various natural and unnatural disasters, pulling data from various media reports and the US Geological Survey.

Doing this immediately reduces the incomprehension of being told something is X square kilometres or Y million hectares. It also tells a different kind of story about the relative sizes of these situations. And unveils interesting comparatives - like how depletion of rainforests in Indonesia now approaches that of the Amazon.

The dataset contains extra information and other disasters and environmental situations which didn't quite fit the concept. Take a look at: http://www.bit.ly/scalesdev. Warning: scary numbers!

The colours in the graphic represent simple categories. I tried using the colour to represent different datasets (such as deaths etc). But none really worked. Do you have any ideas?

The Data

http://www.bit.ly/scalesdev

design & research: David McCandless

research: Miriam Quick

sources: Wikipedia, Science Direct, USGS

links: The BBC did something interesting and similar called How Big Really

About Me

I run InformationIsBeautiful.net, dedicated to visualising information, ideas, stories and data. Twitter @infobeautiful.

My book of infographic exploria, is called Information Is Beautiful. (HarperCollins 2009). In the US, the book's called The Visual Miscellaneum

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