Vertical extremes and sunken basins
Waterways that break the rules
Stone forests and painted mountains
Island oddities and invisible borders
Which iconic, red-sapped tree is native only to the isolated island of Socotra?
schopenhauer Drag bizarre features onto the map to discover Asia's strangest island oddities.
schopenhauer A tiny, inhabited Japanese island featuring a volcano within a volcano.
Which English naturalist identified the invisible biological boundary known as the Wallace Line in 1859?
What type of animals are found east of the Wallace Line, reflecting Australian evolutionary roots?
schopenhauer The Wallace Line
In Bali, wild macaques swing! (A-ha!) / But cross the deep strait, cockatoos sing! (Oh yeah!)
To which country does the geographically isolated and biodiverse island of Socotra belong?
Approximately how many residents live inside the volcanic caldera of Aogashima?
Dragon's Blood: Ancient people used the red sap of Socotra's Dragon's Blood Tree as a medicine, dye, and even as a varnish for Italian violins.
What is the average elevation above sea level of the Maldives, the world's lowest country?
A hypothetical boundary separating the distinct biological regions of Asia and Australia. In 1859, Alfred Russel Wallace mapped this faunal divide between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok.