The Loneliest Islands visualizes the qualities that render a place lonely.

Inspired by Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, this map features the fifty loneliest islands on Earth.

The loneliest of all is the uninhabited Taongi Atoll—a mere 3.2km² of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 3,750km from Hawaii.

A scoring system evaluating four factors of ‘loneliness’ is used to rank each island: the number of inhabitants, the island’s land area, its proximity to other land, and the population of this closest land. By this ranking system, the least lonely is Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. With 1,402 inhabitants, it is certainly not the most populated of the fifty. The island scored highly as it is only 350km from Java, an island inhabited by 60% of the Indonesian population.

Information Design Structure

The fifty islands are mapped on a base-grid of fifty concentric circles, each encompassing an island. The center-most circle holds the least lonely island, and the outer-most circle holds the loneliest island. As the concentric circles grow in diameter, a visual metaphor for loneliness comes into play, as the islands appear further away from each other.

This circular grid is divided into a pie chart of the five oceans: Antarctic, Arctic, Atlantic, Indian and Pacific. Each island is mapped according to their relative geographical location in relation to either the Equator (North to South) or the Prime Meridien (East to West).

To visit all fifty lonely islands, follow the blue line which connects the two closest islands by geographical distance.