It gives us a glimpse into an environmental crisis that isn’t even of this world. When the Dutch artists and designer Daan Roosegaard learned that there are about 18 million pounds of junk orbiting Earth–not working satellites, but actual junk, like detritus from old rockets, random spaceship pieces, and dead satellites–he decided to start a project called Space Waste Lab, which resulted in the visualization you can see above. This visualization by Erik Rood shows these connections with shocking clarity. From Disney to JP Morgan Chase, it’s all a tight network of friends that fuel corporate corruption and even economic crises, according to the Harvard Business Review.

The tangled web of corporate corruption ħ8% of the top 50 companies in the S&P 500 are directly connected through one or more board members. In short, it was a shockingly impactful glimpse of our planet in crisis. The comparison is apt: the viz shows the aerosols suspended in the atmosphere on a single day in August. The orange is black carbon smoke produced by fire and coal burning, purple is dust, and blue is ocean salt suspended in the air by storms. NASA’s Earth Observatory released a terrifying new edition of its Earth atmosphere map, complete with a new Mordor-style color palette. But this year, the cartographer Neil Kaye truly put that radically biased mapmaking in perspective–through this animation comparing how countries look on a Mercator map versus their actual geographic reality.

You probably already know that countries like Russia, Canada, the U.S., and even regions like Europe are smaller than they appear in the Mercator projection.

Best data visualization tools of 2018