About the Relief Maps
All our relief maps, including the free Mercator relief maps, originate from our
database of world land surface elevations at 1 km intervals. These elevations are converted by
software into raw maps, according to the area, projection, and other parameters that we specify.
We then check features on the maps against reference sources (atlases, Google Earth) and make
corrections and improvements where necessary.
The relief maps are generally offered in a choice of styles, plain and shaded relief.
Because the difference is hard to spot on small thumbnail images, we generally use the small plain relief
thumbnail to represent both styles, with adjacent links to larger thumbnails, where the difference
is more apparent.
Major lakes feature on the maps. River valleys also evident, particularly on the shaded
relief maps, but not the rivers themselves.
View a comparison of plain and shaded relief styles
View a height legend for the relief maps
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