Beyond the Sea

Our local Bostonographer and Maptime Boston co-host Andy Woodruff has been working for a while on mapping what is across the ocean from where you stand. His latest "flowing and exploding" version is quite fun to watch,

or interact with by pointing your mouse and seeing where it goes-here.

If the results are unexpected it is because the lines go perpendicular to the coastline, rather than following a specific latitude. We are conditioned to think that "across" means the same latitude on the other side. As children going to the Jersey shore we imagined that we were looking at Portugal on the horizon-because we were geography nerds. However the shore is angled in a northeasterly direction so you are actually looking southeast, towards either South Africa or in some areas missing that continent entirely and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, reaching all the way to the west coast of Australia. That would be the case for most of the shoreline, but any bay or other odd turn in the coast and you may be looking at Norway, Nova Scotia, Morocco or Brazil.

If you are more interested in latitude, there is a nice map series from the Washington Post, showing the continents color coded by what's across the way. Here is Africa, for example.

 This one shows that Portugal is across from the Jersey shore but to see it you need to look at an angle.