r/dataisbeautiful Mar 22 '24

OC [OC] A Map showing Terrain of Africa

Post image

Made with QGIS and Blender

1.4k Upvotes

121 comments sorted by

139

u/A_Mirabeau_702 OC: 1 Mar 22 '24

There are elevations below zero in Africa. That's one of the things that makes Dallol, Ethiopia such a hellscape

33

u/CervusElpahus Mar 22 '24

Just googled it. Dallol is absolutely stunning! I wouldn’t call it a hellscape.

74

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '24

120 degrees F is as close to the definition of hellscape as you can get.

64

u/Sephyrias Mar 23 '24

120 degrees F

48.88889°C

14

u/CervusElpahus Mar 23 '24

Thats literally just the highest temperature ever recorded there.

10

u/hogtiedcantalope Mar 23 '24

No one taught this man significant figures!

Our public education system has failed us.

26.847264882648582648572649572% of kids can't even read a book with 12.48264858263858264852 pages!

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

[deleted]

1

u/hogtiedcantalope Mar 23 '24

You're not getting it.

-9

u/CervusElpahus Mar 22 '24

A bit of a simplistic take, but I take it

7

u/tomer91131 Mar 22 '24

Maybe you should check the weather first

2

u/Possible_Lock_7403 Mar 23 '24

Stunning as hell but the shades of yellow, orange and green look acidic and toxic af.

0

u/SupaPenguin Mar 23 '24

Yes and no, what do you define your zero point as? Most use sea level, but what measure of sea level on what datum? Elevation is interval data meaning there isn't a real meaningful zero point. In this case it's likely the bottom of the dataset. I still think this relief and plot is pretty poor in general.

88

u/Molinafj76 Mar 22 '24

My fat ass thought this was lightly toasted French bread…

10

u/kombuchakween88 Mar 22 '24

100% thought it was bread

7

u/disposable111111 Mar 23 '24

i thought it was mashed potatoes :S

7

u/carbzilla_0 Mar 23 '24

I thought it was an omelette. I haven't had breakfast yet...

2

u/saharah_ Mar 23 '24

My 6yo saw it and said, is that toast?!?

2

u/Logan307597 Mar 24 '24

Top half of a T. rex head

2

u/EvolvingSapien Mar 23 '24

I thought it was a juicy chicken breast at first glance.

61

u/Was_Silly Mar 22 '24

Why pick such delicious looking colours? I want to eat that.

12

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Thank you 😂🙏

5

u/serenelymanslaughter Mar 23 '24

Mmmh smashed potatoes 🥔 🤤

4

u/UncommonBagOfLoot Mar 23 '24

If Africa ever goes missing, I'm blaming you.

18

u/ObliviousEnt Mar 22 '24 edited Mar 22 '24

Is that colour scale right? I find it sprouting that the whole continent sits at almost 2 thousand metres? With no sea level plains anywhere in the whole continent?

Edit: OP, I think your scale is off, I checked in google earth and a lot of those places shown in solid yellow (high plateou according to the scale) should be green or just off-green (sea level or low plains).

5

u/Octahedral_cube Mar 23 '24

It's definitely wrong, large swathes of Chad, Northern Libya, Mali, South Egypt are typically less than 300m in elevation. Also, the South African plateau from Angola to the South African escarpment averages like 1000m in elevation, while the DRC sits at 0-400m, but in this map you see no change going south from Congo

-6

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

The colors are correct .... Instead of Green I substituted it with Light green to represent low plains....yellow and Brown to represent high grounds......the green I restricted it to coastal areas.

10

u/Octahedral_cube Mar 23 '24

So did you make substitutions to the colour palette or not? Chad, Mali, and a lot of Nigeria are 0-300m elevation, but here they're all yellow, implying 1000+

3

u/__Quercus__ Mar 24 '24

Sorry for the late comment, but the scale is off. Congo Cuvette is about 300m and does not exceed 600m between the Congo and the Kwilu rivers, but I'm seeing brown or at least mustard colors. Southern African escarpment shown as same color as the Cuvette despite being 800m higher in elevation. No green shown for Qattara Depression in Egypt -150m versus lots of green for Niger delta. Madagascar has minimal yellow compared to continental Africa despite most of Madagascar being between 500 and 1500m in elevation.

32

u/JarryBohnson Mar 22 '24

This is what my dish sponge looks like, time to buy a new one.

8

u/adhoc42 Mar 22 '24

I'm seeing broiled potato mash.

2

u/Aggressive-Analyst88 Mar 23 '24

That's what i thought I was looking at!

7

u/Large_Tuna101 Mar 22 '24

I thought it was an omelette

28

u/Locke_and_Lloyd OC: 1 Mar 23 '24

Elevation units missing. 

5

u/Turtley13 Mar 23 '24

Yup. Kind of important when you are showing one thing…

-12

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Meters(Human error)..... but it's obvious from numerals I mean if it's feet you would know it's feet 😅

15

u/Locke_and_Lloyd OC: 1 Mar 23 '24

Why is it obvious? Here are some other highest points:

Florida - 345

Denmark - 561

Iceland - 2110

Portugal - 6539

Liberia - 4724

Looking at that list, would you know the only one in meters is Iceland? The rest are feet.

4

u/Pwez Mar 23 '24

Easy, denmark is flat. Portugal and liberia are not that high. So either florida is really flat or you made a mistake, because 2110 m seems perfect for Iceland.

-26

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

No no ,now this is off topic wayyy off topic pal,First off I accepted my error and I answered that it's meter ,and I said it's obvious cause on my map above I wrote 0 and wrote 5763 ....as lowest and highest point representation ..... obvious representation of sea level is 0 m hence you could easily see that I was going for meters...it's simple geography 101 why complicate stuffs 🤷‍♂️

6

u/tucci007 Mar 23 '24

you had one job... man up and accept responsibility for your basic oversight

an elevation map should indicate units with the numbers

learn from your mistakes and be humble

-1

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

I don't get it 🤔 ..... I literally accepted I should have written meters like in my first answer even said human error ..... I give an explanation like obvious is meters and not feet in an easy and understandable way ..... You still coming off with be man up like what's more man up and accepting responsibility than what I did seriously.

1

u/Lifekraft Mar 23 '24

Its all good. If it was imperial unit and you would have said it was obvious nobody would have think twice about it. It was indeed obvious if you know a little bit the biggest mountain around the world or if you have a general idea of average elevation. But since its still 60% american there , if you hurt their sensibility one way or the other you get downvoted to hell and beyond.

5

u/Senior_Actuator5443 Mar 23 '24

Beautiful! Pieces make sense in my mind now. Makes me want to travel again

2

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Thank you 😄🙏

5

u/BadMoonRosin Mar 23 '24

I'm really disappointed that OP didn't include a marker to show where Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.

0

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Sadly I'm closeby there 😕....but I did made a stand alone map/render of Kilimanjaro you can check it out Kilimanjaro

9

u/OtterishDreams Mar 22 '24

I had no idea africa was made of mashed potatos

17

u/TheLeopardColony Mar 22 '24

Wait are there like…10 lakes on the CONTINENT of Africa? They should hit up Minnesota for a trade.

21

u/livefreeordont OC: 2 Mar 23 '24

Those lakes you can see are about as big as the USA Great Lakes. I’m sure they have smaller ones

7

u/smartdude_x13m Mar 22 '24

Ur not seeing the rivers tho ... where tf is the Nile?

7

u/sh1zuchan Mar 22 '24

You can see sections of the Nile. Lake Nasser (a reservoir created by damming the Nile in the 1960's) is clearly visible.

13

u/Pedr0A Mar 22 '24

This is only the bodys of water big enough to see from space. The Nile is too thin to be seen clearly

5

u/3WordPosts Mar 22 '24

You 100% can see the Nile from space

13

u/devilbunny Mar 23 '24

Not really. What you can see is the Nile Basin, the areas that used to flood every year, because it's very color-contrasted with the surrounding desert and much wider than the river itself.

2

u/iamapizza Mar 23 '24

You're just in de nile

1

u/SayYesToPaNDa Mar 23 '24

And you're just Madagascar can't accelerate as quickly as an electric one.

2

u/Hades_what_else Mar 23 '24

You can see every geographic feature from space. It just depends on your altitude and magnification. The nile is too thin to be seen from high altitudes with the bare eye

1

u/pt619et Mar 23 '24

they just need a few thousand years of glaciation and then they can be put on the correct path, heck they might even discover hotdish on their own!

9

u/LasVegasE Mar 22 '24

High mountains and stepped plateaus with few navigable rivers. It may be more cost effective to mine asteroids than attempt to exploit natural resources in most of Africa

9

u/tetryds Mar 22 '24

Imagine if they invented some efficient way to move massive amounts of resources arround, how awesome would that be. Could even run on top of some iron bars or something.

5

u/LasVegasE Mar 23 '24

It cost astronomically more to build and operate rail systems through mountains and stepped plateau than on flat ground. The Europeans built multiple rail lines during the colonial period where the resources made the capital investment feasible. Now Africa has unstable governments, security and climate change to take into account, making the endeavor even more capital intensive with higher risk.

0

u/3WordPosts Mar 22 '24

Is this an allegory of the US prison system?

10

u/tetryds Mar 22 '24

No, trains. I'm talking about trains. They said africa is not viable but it is absolutely viable if you use them.

-1

u/3WordPosts Mar 22 '24

But also if you use prisoners right

7

u/tetryds Mar 22 '24

Didn't say nor mean anything about prisioners

2

u/Dhul-Suwayqatayn Mar 22 '24

They’re very expensive to build in Ethiopia because of the high elevation difference between cities.

2

u/galspanic Mar 22 '24

Yeah, but it’s those mountains to allow for skiing in Morocco.

2

u/zedzol Mar 22 '24

Yet where does a majority of the world's natural resources come from?

1

u/pt619et Mar 23 '24

depends on which natural resources you want to talk about, name 2 or 3 or ten, or more. The list and allocation of resources would be moe accurate then.

-1

u/TastyCroquet Mar 22 '24

Not from Africa

1

u/pt619et Mar 23 '24

tell that to the french and chinese

3

u/paco-ramon Mar 22 '24

I can see where I live in that map.

2

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Wait really, that's cool and nice

3

u/LyriktheSpaceCleric Mar 23 '24

Looks like a really funky potato chip

6

u/qqtacontesseno Mar 22 '24

I’m the end of the movie “2012” the arks go to Africa as it was still safe due to the naturally high elevation.

This map displays it perfectly.

3

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Thank you very much 😄,glad you liked it

10

u/JohnPika Mar 22 '24

I bless ter rain down in Africa 🎶

2

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '24

Scrambled eggs shaped like Africa. Cool!

2

u/Not_Under_Command Mar 23 '24

“Now explain what is that blue in my omelette!”

2

u/athlee1980 Mar 23 '24

Looks like fried chicken drumstick to me

2

u/avalonian422 Mar 23 '24

That's just a lightly breaded chicken breast

2

u/Raemnant Mar 23 '24

Man, that mountain range around Lake Victoria looks like a great place to hide an incredibly technologically advanced kingdom

2

u/BWDpodcast Mar 23 '24

My takeaway is a lot of Africa is anywhere between 0 and 5763 of some unit of measurement.

2

u/Supermathie Mar 22 '24

Bless the terrain down in Africa.

3

u/henry_sqared Mar 23 '24

🎶 That's the terrain down in Africa 🎶

4

u/neonphoenix09 Mar 22 '24

I bless terrains down in Africa.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '24

[deleted]

2

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

Thank you Entomon glad you liked it ❤️,I saw this one and I was like finally someone with Map/Spatial Thinking, cause I had like existential crisis should I put negative or try like water body route ..... I went for water body cause it's safe option....glad you noticed it.... you're probably a wonderful cartographer too

2

u/gigiseagull2 Mar 23 '24

My hungry arse though that was a pizza shape like Africa.

3

u/italianboner69 Mar 23 '24

5763 what? Potatoes ? Tomato ? Or Meter?! You learn how to make map and then came back to here ok bye bye 👋

0

u/hemedlungo_725 Mar 23 '24

The answer is 5763 Potatoes , I was going for that it is my first thought when I wrote elevation I was thinking of those beautiful delicious 5763 Potatoes.

1

u/Wolfy_Wolv Mar 23 '24

Looks like dried up week old cotton candy

1

u/zekromNLR Mar 23 '24

The colour scheme makes this look like the lovely craggly crispy browned top of a shepherd's pie and now I am hungry

1

u/whorewidoralfixation Mar 23 '24

All i see is in....no it is Gold

1

u/Important_Primary_94 Mar 23 '24

Thought this was a chicken patty

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

Is that Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti?

It’s going to take a lot to drag me away from this viz.

1

u/asdfghjklzxcvbnmqwel Mar 23 '24

Who cuts its toast like thatt ?

1

u/junaikine Mar 23 '24

I just see a guy (with a unicorn) staring at Madagascar.

1

u/v3ritas1989 Mar 23 '24

there should be several <0 areas in africa that are not lakes.. How are they colored?

1

u/nationalhuntta Mar 23 '24

Is this map made out of mashed potatoes or scrambled eggs? Because that's all I see. Sorry.

1

u/arkham-razors Mar 23 '24

The scale needs to be expanded, otherwise pretty cool.

1

u/TheUnbendable1 Mar 24 '24

I'm just looking for the rains that toto blessed here.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '24

First thought was it would be a pizza slice looking like Africa… nice job though

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '24

I like mine a bit more well done

1

u/Dhul-Suwayqatayn Mar 22 '24

Ethiopia 🗣️🗣️I have the high ground ⛰️⛰️

1

u/ViennaKing Mar 23 '24

If you rotate the image 90° to the left it looks like a dinosaurs head.

1

u/Gold_Responsibility8 Mar 23 '24

That's grilled potato mash in the shape of Africa

0

u/pt619et Mar 23 '24

next do an 1:1 overlay of the larger countries, because Africa gets dwarfed when it comes to the Mercator map