Found a map where Texas is actually an island off the coast of Africa

Ngl I was scrolling through some random cartography forum last night and this one map had Texas literally floating near Ghana with a dotted line connecting it to Louisiana. The whole Gulf Coast was just gone, like someone erased it with a bad tool in Photoshop. Has anyone else seen maps that just move entire states across the ocean for no reason?

2 comments

2 Comments

riverwhite7d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, the "dotted line connecting it back" part is a dead giveaway that someone was messing around in GIS software and forgot to delete the connector line. I've seen this exact kind of thing so many times. If you ever run into a weird map like that, the first thing to do is look at the border lines - if Texas has a straight southern border instead of the Rio Grande curve, it's a copy-paste job from a different projection. Also check if Houston suddenly has a beachfront property, that's always a tipoff. For real though, that specific map sounds like someone was testing out the "move tool" in QGIS or something and just published it by accident.

butler.shane7d ago

Is that dotted line thing really that common though? @riverwhite I feel for you man, I've seen some truly BIZARRE maps in my time too. Like I remember one where they moved Alaska right next to Hawaii, no joke. It was probably some intern trying to make the map fit a page layout and just dragging stuff around. The Texas border check is genius, I'm gonna use that from now on. Its wild how much junk gets published because nobody bothers to look at the final output.