The world as dots

Every dot on this map is a fixed number of people, placed where those people actually live. Slide the control to change what a dot is worth: at one dot per million people the world is a scatter of embers; at one dot per thousand, the inhabited earth fills in and density reads at a glance — the Ganges plain, eastern China, Java, the Nile threading the Sahara, and the emptiness of Siberia, Australia and the Amazon. Zoom in on a region and slide down the people-per-dot value to see its local shape: cities condense, valleys and coastlines light up.

How it works

The population data is WorldPop’s 2025 global mosaic (the 1 km constrained, UN-adjusted release, R2025A, CC BY 4.0), aggregated here to a 0.2° grid of about 255,000 inhabited cells summing to 8.20 billion people. Each dot is placed at a random position inside its grid cell, so placement is exact to roughly 20 km and illustrative below that — zooming in past a whole region reveals texture, not addresses. The dots are drawn by a custom WebGL layer on the same basemap as the other maps here: Ordnance Survey vector tiles over Great Britain with OpenStreetMap elsewhere, in light and dark mode. One caveat the basemap brings: web maps use the Mercator projection, which inflates areas near the poles, so when zoomed out, high-latitude places look a little sparser than they really are. Everything else renders locally in your browser from a single 0.7 MB data file.

Some of the figures in the charts and tables on this page were compiled with the help of AI tools and may contain errors or be out of date. They are shared in good faith for general interest only (not as professional, financial, investment or purchasing advice) and should be checked against the cited primary sources before you rely on them.