This Twitter bot uses erosion science to create a new fantasy world every hour

Pop quiz: how many elaborately detailed, scientifically generated topographical maps have you created in the last day or so? Chances are the answer is "none," unless you're writing or publishing a series of old-school fantasy novels. Those kinds of novels were the inspiration for glaciologist Martin O'Leary, who created a Twitter bot named @UnchartedAtlas that generates a new map every hour, complete with cities, mountains, rivers, valleys, country borders, and other features. As O'Leary says in his public notes on the terrain generator:

I wanted to make maps that look like something you'd find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often...