Recent Data Graphics That Pull Their Weight — DataViz Weekly

Recent Data Graphics That Pull Their Weight — DataViz Weekly

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Home » Recent Data Graphics Pulling Their Weight — DataViz Weekly<br>Recent Data Graphics Pulling Their Weight — DataViz Weekly

July 10th, 2026 by AnyChart Team

A strong data visualization does more than display figures. It carries a real share of the explaining, turning a dataset into something you can follow and question. Every Friday, DataViz Weekly gathers a handful of projects that get this right. Check out our latest selection:

America’s might across two centuries — The Economist

U.S. national parks without crowds — Bloomberg

Homes without AC as U.S. heat peaks — The Washington Post

Double earthquake in northern Venezuela — El País

Data Visualization Weekly: July 3–10, 2026

America’s Might Across Two Centuries

The United States marks its 250th anniversary in 2026. It has the world’s largest economy at market exchange rates and remains a leading military and technological power.

The Economist charts the country’s long arc with a vertical stream graph of world GDP at purchasing-power parity, running from 1820 down to 2025. Each country or empire is a flowing band whose width is its share of global output. China and the British Empire dominate the early 1800s. The United States band is a sliver at first, then widens through the 20th century to become the largest, before China’s band swells again toward the present.

Other charts extend the picture across different measures of power. A line chart tracks GDP per person for countries with more than 20 million people. A stacked area chart breaks down global military spending by country and bloc since 2001. A pair of line charts compares U.S. and Chinese research spending alongside their shares of the world’s top 100 universities.

See the piece in The Economist.

U.S. National Parks Without Crowds

The United States national parks set a visitation record in 2025, with 323 million recreation visits. That popularity crowds the best-known parks, especially through the summer.

Bloomberg built a visual guide to 16 parks around the timing of a visit. It opens with small radial charts grouped by region. Each traces a park’s share of annual visitors week by week around the year, so the seasonal peak shows up as a bulge in the ring.

Every park then gets its own section built on a radial chart of concentric rings. One ring encodes the weekly share of visitors, another the average high temperature, and another precipitation, all wrapped around the calendar year. The best weeks to visit are flagged directly on it. A shaded relief map follows, marking and numbering the park’s trails and separating the most traveled routes from well reviewed but quieter alternatives. Together they point readers toward the windows and paths that skip the worst congestion.

Explore the guide on Bloomberg, by Gordy Megroz, Marie Patino, and Denise Lu.

Homes Without AC as U.S. Heat Peaks

In early July 2026, a heat dome pushed temperatures across much of the United States to dangerous highs. Air conditioning is one of the most effective defenses against heat like this. Not every home has it.

The Washington Post mapped where the two meet. A national bubble map layers two things. A shaded area marks where the forecast reached major or extreme heat risk. On top, each county appears as a circle sized by the number of homes without air conditioning, colored orange inside the risk zone and gray outside. The eastern half of the country carries both the heat and the largest clusters of homes without cooling.

A closer choropleth map zooms into the Detroit area. It shades neighborhoods by the share of homes that lack air conditioning, from under 5 percent to more than 20. The deepest shades fall across parts of the city itself.

Take a look at the article on The Washington Post, by Kevin Crowe and John Muyskens.

Double Earthquake in Northern Venezuela

In late June 2026, two powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela seconds apart. They measured 7.2 and 7.5 in magnitude and were unusually shallow. The affected region is densely populated and lies close to Caracas.

El País maps each shock as an intensity map, one for the magnitude 7.2 quake and one for the 7.5 that followed 38 seconds later. Both shade the ground shaking from light to intense, with the epicenters marked near Yumare and Montalbán and cities including Caracas plotted for reference. The bubble chart above sets the event against global earthquakes of magnitude 6 or more since 1976. Magnitude runs across the horizontal axis, depth down the vertical, and each bubble is sized by the number of deaths. The Venezuela quake sits among the shallow events, where the deadliest cases cluster.

Several more visuals follow. A horizontal bar chart shows the USGS estimate of how likely different death-toll ranges are. A color-coded...