Design
It's Never Been This Easy to Find a Great Topographical Map
A new open-access tool from the U.S. Geological Survey lets you browse maps of any place, time, or scale.
The cartography arm of the U.S. Geological Survey has been on an open-access roll. First they send their constantly updating stream of satellite imagery to what's basically a public dropbox, so that anyone can use Landsat-8 photographs for free. And now they're introducing topoView, an online archival tool that makes truly accessible the agency's 178,000 topographical maps, dating from 1880 (shortly after the USGS started mapping the country) to 2010.
You could always get USGS maps by buying them in print or, as of 2011, by downloading digital images with the clunky text-query engine on their site. But that required a lot of guesswork, as Greg Miller at Wired laments: