The Best Maps in Google's New Digital Atlas

Want to know the exact location of every baseball diamond in Alberta's capital city? There's a map for that. How about the layout of San Francisco's Chinatown in 1885? Or aquifers of alluvial and glacial origin in the United States? There's a map for that, too. And Google wants to help you to explore the data.

The search company launched its Google Maps Gallery Thursday, which will showcase maps from info-rich but generally inaccessible organizations from the government, nonprofits, and businesses. It builds off a project launched in December, Google Maps Engine, which helped these groups publish their maps online. Now Google's trying to make the graphics more accessible to the public with what it's calling an "interactive digital atlas."

At the moment, however, the gallery only features maps from a pretty random assortment of organizations: the World Bank Group, National Geographic Society, US Geological Survey, Florida Emergency Management, and the City of Edmonton.

Naturally, this is just the first batch—Google's open to including maps from anyone working for the public good and is currently accepting submissions.

But for now, in order to look at sweet maps all day find the best of the bunch, I browsed the collection and pulled out a few of the more interesting maps from the hodgepodge of visual knowledge. Call it cartography à la carte.

This is my favorite: A map of the Atlantic Ocean floor, from National Geographic. I love that we give everything names, even underwater. Like "Barracuda Ridge."

The US Census maps are always ripe for interesting trivia, though the most recent data available is from 2010. The map below is average age per state. There are a lot of old people in West Virginia.

This one of 19th century Chinatown in San Francisco is actually pretty interesting. As the map's corresponding information box tells us, it was the height of anti-Chinese hysteria in California, and the map's "color-coded to show every business, gambling parlor, houses of white and Chinese prostitution, opium 'Resorts,' joss houses, etc" in the neighborhood.

Here's where all the national parks in the US are, in case you want to count how many you've been to or something. Also look at that big blank space in the flyover states.

This map of Mars would be really boring if it wasn't, well, a map of Mars. There's also one of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon.

NASA's Earth at night map is beautiful. And telling. Look here's New York:

And here's Wyoming:

Last up, it's only right to include the map of Lewis and Clark's expedition, being pioneering cartographers themselves, which charts their route from the Missouri River, across the Great Plains, up over the Rockies to California.