For some reason the year doesnt match the flags which is a major problem for an atlas

What you're looking at is every territory making up the French Republic, drawn at the same geographic scale (not arbitrarily resized like most world maps do). Mainland France gets visually outweighed by the overseas territories — and that's the point.

The result: France spans 12 distinct time zones, more than any country on Earth.

Full breakdown:

- French Polynesia (Tahiti, Marquesas, Gambier): UTC-10, UTC-9:30, UTC-9

- Clipperton Island: UTC-8

- French Guiana, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon: UTC-4, UTC-3

- Mainland France + Corsica: UTC+1

- Mayotte: UTC+3

- Réunion + French Southern and Antarctic Lands: UTC+4, UTC+5

- New Caledonia: UTC+11

- Wallis and Futuna: UTC+12

For comparison: Russia has 11 time zones (single contiguous landmass), the United States has 11 (with territories), and China — despite spanning 5 geographic zones — politically uses a single Beijing Time across the whole country.

France is also the only country on the planet with territory in every single ocean (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, Southern). The old colonial-era saying "the sun never sets on the French Republic" technically still holds — somewhere in the French Republic, it's always daytime.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

A map I created

2011 census

So I've been falling down a cartography rabbit hole lately and I just need to talk about this.

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the entire Earth in 240 BC. No satellites. No aircraft. No computers. The man used *a stick, a well, and the angle of shadows* on a single day and got within 1-2% of the correct answer. He then projected that knowledge onto a map of the known world. Bro was running geometry on the planet with a pointy rock and vibes.

And it somehow gets more unhinged from there.

Medieval Arab cartographer Al-Idrisi spent 15 years compiling traveler accounts, merchant routes, and geographic observations for the Norman King Roger II of Sicily. The result — the *Tabula Rogeriana* (1154) — was so accurate that modern geographers still reference it. This man essentially crowdsourced a world map using nothing but letters and interviews. No field equipment. No standardized units. Just "okay so you traveled east for 40 days and passed a big river? Got it."

And can we talk about the *portolan charts* sailors were using in the 1300s? These were hand-drawn nautical maps so precise that modern GPS comparisons show Mediterranean coastlines within just a few kilometers of accuracy. They made those with a compass and by watching stars off the back of a boat. In a storm. While also trying not to die.

The thing that gets me is the *patience* and *trust* required. These people were building a picture of the world from second and third-hand accounts, traveler stories, and personal observation across entire lifetimes. No way to verify. No way to zoom out and check. Just an iron conviction that the world had a shape and you were going to figure it out.

We open Google Maps and get annoyed if it takes 4 seconds to load.

These guys were mapping continents they'd never seen, oceans nobody had crossed, and mountains nobody had measured — and they were doing it *correctly*.

Built different doesn't even cover it. These people were load-bearing pillars of human civilization and most of us couldn't name a single one of them.

Anyway. Go look up Al-Idrisi. You're welcome.

Sources of population ethnic data: Arnold Toynbee's & James Bryce's "The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16" (page 661) and David Gaunt's "Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I" (page 406), as well as the Russian census of 1897.

A site that calculates the spot on Earth farthest from anyone currently reading the page. As readers arrive and leave, the empty point shifts. This was my antipode.