Skua

For those wondering why these borders don’t match up: England’s county system is actually the butchered remains of several iterations stitched together in a manner that would appal Dr Frankenstein. This image shows the historic counties, but those basically only exist for cultural reasons today and have not been used for governance since the 70s. They don’t quite match the post - see, for example, Yorkshire being one massive thing in this image but split into four in the post. Even though one of the four is called “east third”. The post’s border also don’t match the modern counties though, so I’m not quite sure what exactly is being shown, but it could be older borders or just whichever borders had the most interesting set of names

That one is basically still understandable in modern English too

Eckert IV is mine, which is quite similar visually. It has the upside of being equal-area, but the downside of squashing the poles a bit more. Sadly both of us suffer the injustice of being excluded from that one xkcd comic

This is 100% amateur guesswork, but maybe the geography is part of the answer here? Norway is a bunch of extremely jagged coastline opening on to the fairly cold and empty North Sea, and most of the rest of it is equally jagged mountains, so it was probably easy for communities to be relatively isolated most of the time and therefore wind up speaking a little differently to the guys in the next fjord over. The Maghreb, on the other hand, is right on the Mediterranean, which has been one of humanity’s busiest and most travelled areas for thousands of years

OP has actually posted an update that (indirectly) explains it! https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/f2a9b56e-f915-4932-a35a-d4c3a6e472c9.webp

The equator is actually the less-salty bit in between the two high-salt bands. You’ll see the note that says that the less saline areas around the equator are the tropical latitudes that get a lot of rainfall. Because the equator is the most consistently-warm latitude, a lot of water evaporates there and is carried upwards, then falls back down as rain. That air can’t keep going up forever though, so it spills out to the north and south. By this point the water has fallen out of it and it has cooled, so it sinks back down and creates dry areas either side of the equator. We can see this as the two yellow bands on the map, and you’ll notice that the land in line with those is where we see deserts like the Sahara, the Kalahari, Arabian desert, and central Australia. And also lots of salt at the surface of the ocean, apparently, because there’s no rain falling on it.

The Nile’s average volume is not actually all that big. The Amazon puts more than 70 times as much water into the ocean, apparently. Although the Amazon is quite an outlier in that regard, being about as big as the 2nd through to 7th largest combined

Islands have been done separately from the mainland when they’re part of the same country on this map. Look at Canada, where Vancouver Island and Newfoundland end up far away from the rest of Canada

It is in the most timezones of any country, so I expect that that’s the idea they were half-remembering

Here’s a way to do it https://i.imgur.com/YULx0sg.jpeg

East Africa and the Balkans took a little bit of figuring out

Edit: and sure enough, there’s actually a mistake in East Africa. DR Congo and Tanzania shouldn’t be the same colour. I think it can be fixed with the following changes:

• Eritrea, Somaliland, and Kenya > green
• Djibouti and Somalia > blue
• Ethiopia > red
• Tanzania > cyan
• Zambia > blue
• Mozambique > red
• Malawi and Eswatini > green

Who’d have thought that Isidore of Seville was actually a topologist fifteen hundred years ahead of his time

Maybe it’s just considering de facto control? Israel currently controls the whole Egypt-Palestine border, so there’s no land controlled by any form of Palestinian government that has a border with Egypt

Edit: or it’s an artifact of the “exclaves have otherwise been ignored” part, if the West Bank is considered the core and Gaza is an exclave of that

This post is probably a rare instance of the reverse of that comic, right? People go where there’s good soil, rather than the other way around

This soil quality scale measures suitability for growing crops rather than pollution. Pollution impacts that negatively, of course, but there are plenty of natural reasons why an area might be bad for agriculture.

The north of Scotland is also red on this map, and it’s definitely not because of human pollution. It’s sparsely populated and generally one of the most unspoilt areas of the UK. The soil just happens to be pretty bad for crops. That’s part of the reason it was sparsely populated in the first place. I expect Finland could be the same.

They are actually there in the report… but barely. They’re much lighter than every other border. It doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere so I assume it was just a mistake

This is obivously not the actual point of the map, but why have a bunch of countries in Central Africa merged? It looks like Angola, both Congos, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea

It’s kind of a shitty name to insist upon given our history with Ireland though, isn’t it? Like, regardless of what it was called, we can call the archipelago “the British and Irish Isles” or something if we want to.

Personally I reckon we should call it Maughold’s Isles. “British and Irish Isles” is fine, if a little wordy. “Islands of the North Atlantic” is one I see floated every so often, but it’s miserably generic and even longer. So I suggest we use the patron saint of the Isle of Man. It’s in between Britain and Ireland and technically not part of the UK. Maughold himself was a pirate who tried to play a practical joke on St Patrick, so he’s a bit of a scoundrel, and it’s exactly the kind of silly trivia that we like so much here

Oh neat, I have a book by the creator of this but had no idea about their website