Alex Tingle has put together a Google Maps mashup in which the user can see what land areas would be flooded with an increase in sea water levels. Places like the Netherlands are suddenly inundated but so are places like the Dead Sea valley between Israel and Jordan. The premise behind Tingle’s mashup assumes that anything currently below sea level will be flooded with a rise in water levels which, of course, isn’t necessarily the case. The Dead Sea won’t automatically expand and neither will the Netherlands necessarily be flooded - it all depends on how high the barriers to the oceans are.

Ask.com has a physical map of the world that unintentionally does what Tingle’s map does - that is, show areas that are below sea level as flooded. The cartographers (?) who put together Ask.com’s elevation map forgot to include a hypsometric tint for areas below sea level. The result is an unfamiliar map of the world, especially in places such as the Netherlands, the Dead Sea, North Africa and Death Valley.

By way of webmapper