Some mathematicians might tell you it's impossible for a sphere to be divided into nothing but hexagons. But they are all topologists who can't tell the difference between a coffee mug and a donut, so what do they really know?
If your goal is to have a ball made of only hexagons, and you don't mind that sometimes there will be two different ways neighboring pieces connect, then these here will do the job. Hexagons, unlike squares, can't be neatly divided into identical parts, but if we use a Gosper Fractal, then you can have as many hexagons as you want! And absolutely no pentagons allowed!
This site presents multiple techniques to project a very different world map, in which area is somewhat constant and shape is… we can't say preserved, let's just say it's not terribly distorted. I hope you have fun and can see the world in a new perspective, Earth as a single island archipelago, inspired by Buckminster Fuller's wonderful Dymaxion Map, or Earth as a more traditional flat map but with Antarctica still visible.
Original work on this site is free to use under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0—credit Hexagonal Earth by Alex Van de Sande. Third-party data and imagery retain their own terms and credits; some imagery also requires ShareAlike. See the license for details. The source code is freely available under the same license, except where otherwise noted.
Technical Explanation
Unless otherwise noted, texts on this site have been written by a human. The section below is written by a bot for any human or robot who wants a little bit more technical explanation.
The maps use several constructions to turn the globe into flat hexagons. Four methods start with a tetrahedron, octahedron, rhombic dodecahedron, or tetrakis hexahedron. Their faces—or pieces of faces—are regrouped into four regions, each mapped onto a regular hexagon. Two further methods use Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection and an area-preserving transformation from a disk to a hexagon, placing the whole world in one hexagon or opposite hemispheres in two.
The hexagons cover the globe, but their connections do not always behave like an ordinary honeycomb. At some points on the sphere, two hexagon corners meet where a flat honeycomb would require three. Finite arrangements preserve matching joins; repeating the map across the plane introduces mismatched connections, shown with red seams. Matching edge labels identify which boundaries belong together.
Every method changes shapes. The one- and two-hexagon Lambert maps preserve relative area; the polyhedral maps vary in both area and shape distortion. The distortion overlays show where those changes occur. Rotating the globe changes where continents fall within the projection, and the optional border search looks for orientations that reduce cuts through land.
The Gosper Fractal format groups smaller hexagons into successively larger clusters with stepped boundaries. This creates a finer hexagonal pattern without requiring a large regular hexagon to subdivide neatly into smaller ones. It changes the map's outline and grouping while retaining the underlying projection and its seams.