We sure hear a lot about the north pole melting, but it’s a whole lot more useful to see how it’s happening. Despite the seasonal fluctuation, it’s clear from this Maps Mania featured map, that there are big changes happening.

More on the bright side—quite literally—is the Sunshine map also featured by Maps Mania, which allows you to view the number of hours of sunshine across the globe for every month of the year.

Some very clever researchers highlighted by Forbes took open data from over 343,000 news articles published relating to refugees this year and turned it into a series of maps, depicting the paths of refugees over the world in real time throughout 2015.

You may know that bird have a sort of internal compass to help them navigate, but what happens when you alter the magnetic field? These researchers did it successfully, no doubt to the birds’ dismay, for the last few years.

2015 has seen a huge acceleration towards driverless technologies. Big Think discusses, with visualisations, why we might soon be thinking that driverless cars are “too polite.”

We’re literally pulled towards it everyday thanks to gravity, but what does the interior of our Earth actually look like? Geoawesomeness featured the most precise 3D map of Earth’s interior to date to show you.

There’s no less than 14,000 satellites orbiting the Earth right now. But not all satellites move in the same ways, as this graphical Flight Club article shows.

It’s October, and that means Oktoberfest! Esri has created a platform to help you answer the question “Do you live in an Oktoberfest Town?”- however it seems it’s only celebrated in the United States…