Whenever I want to avoid work, Google Maps is my go-to. The point is not to hunt for a bite to eat or plan a trip—it’s pure entertainment. I glide over a digital rendering of the Earth, spin it like a globe, and zoom in. Cities and rivers and streets and businesses begin to come into focus, colored with millions of user-uploaded images and reviews. It’s a bit like Where’s Waldo?, but at the world’s scale. Among the treasures to discover are blurry photographs of late nights in dive bars, ratings of obscure colonial-American-life museums, and selfies on a mountain I’ll never visit. There are the juiciest one-star restaurant reviews, such as this one from a café in my neighborhood: “totally unwarranted douche energy from ownership, expired motor oil passed off as coffee, and price-gouged food that is prepared and sourced as terribly as their coffee.” Brutal. In Ecuador, I found half a dozen businesses that appear to be Simpsons-themed.

Google Maps’ main purpose is to enable people to get directions and look up businesses. But along the way, it has become a social space too. Sort of. To fill out the world map it created, Google invited people to add snippets to all the digital places. You upload your photos; you leave your reviews; you look at the artifacts others have left behind. The pictures of a restaurant on Google Maps are often a mismatched succession of interior-design shots, flash photos of messy plates, and outdated menus. There’s plenty of detritus too: irrelevant photos, businesses that don’t exist, three-star reviews without an explanation.

The result is random and messy in a way that is different from the rest of the social web. Instagram and TikTok, after all, are dominated by hyper-curated influencer content, served through feeds geared precisely to specific tastes. Sometimes, pulling up TikTok’s “For You” page and getting sucked in by the app’s selections feels amazing. But especially as algorithmic content has taken over the web, many of the surprises don’t feel fresh. They are our kind of surprises. Google Maps offers something many other platforms no longer can: a hodgepodge of truly unfamiliar stuff that hasn’t been packaged for your taste or mine.

Not that Google necessarily deserves any praise for the delightful weirdness of Google Maps. The platform has become a refuge from the internet that Google itself had a heavy hand in sculpting. By turning its search engine into the internet’s front page—and deciding what appears on it—the company may be the culprit most responsible for ending unexpected encounters. Algorithms are also part of Google Maps: It does plenty of window dressing in its depictions of places, using its Your Match score to present establishments it anticipates you’ll enjoy. “It’s trying to match you with things that it thinks you’re going to like,” Kath Bassett, a sociologist at the University of Bath, in England, who studies map-based media platforms, told me. But “you can get past that.”

Because zooming out and scrolling around are so easy, you can bump into little treasures at every turn that would never land on an Instagram feed. Exploring Google Maps for kicks is not especially common, but I’m not the only one who does it: A community of people keen on these digital impressions has existed for some time. And GeoGuessr, a game in which players are dropped into a random location on Google Maps’ street view and try to guess where they are, has garnered a cult following.

Hopscotching around Google Maps unleashes surprise after surprise. According to one reviewer, the second-largest Union Jack in the British empire is at a museum called Cupids Legacy Centre, in Newfoundland, earning the facility four stars from the user. For only $6, one reviewer claims, you can “take in a tour of the local archeological dig site.” Seems like a steal. Several clicks away is the Tashkent Television Tower, in Uzbekistan’s capital, where scores of users have posted photos from the observation deck, some 300 feet up. The tower is well rated, but the café inside is not. “The service was slow. Our seats were wet,” wrote one visitor.

Thousands of miles west, in the Albanian town of Elbasan, a man in purple poses coolly—hands pocketed, sunglasses activated—by the coat rack at “Supermarket Koli.” A moment later, I am out in the Delaware Bay, many miles away from land, where the Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse juts out of the ocean. A few people have been kind enough to upload images of the 136-year-old haunted metal hulk; how else would I possibly encounter this thing? The strange moments you dig up are typically encased in blandness—drab photos, anodyne reviews, useless information that bores—but that contrast is what gives the weird little bits their value, like a diamond enshrined in stone.

Still, Google Maps hardly presents an entirely accurate depiction of our world. Fewer businesses seem to be indexed in rural areas and the global South, and Street View mode becomes more sparse. Reality is sometimes ugly, and to some degree, the platform moderates its content. According to its website, content reflecting more abrasive realities—bigotry, violence, anything sexually explicit—is pulled, often abetted by machine learning. In some cases, Google Maps itself affects reality: The platform has assumed so much power that its decisions about what to name neighborhoods can have major ramifications.

But as a repository of moments, it can offer depth that other sites, and even perhaps reality, cannot. Happenstance moments at my laundromat posted online aren’t the same as the ones I experience when I’m out of socks, but they give the place a greater dimensionality. It becomes more vibrant in my mind—even if by way of confusing, warped photos of rickety dryers. Other sites, such as Reddit and Wikipedia, are also full of odd curiosities, with devoted fans, but none lets such a random potpourri collect with easy visibility for users. Whereas Wikipedia has a base of meticulous contributors fleshing out structures of information, Google Maps is flavored by masses of people from everywhere throwing up ad hoc content—its ubiquity unlocks possibilities. More than 1 billion people use Google Maps every month.

Compare that with the rest of the social web: Any possible travel destination, for example, is now paired with an endless supply of TikTok videos and Instagram foodie listicles. Look and think no further; we have your Mexico City trip all planned out. Such a polished depiction of a place is sometimes genuinely helpful, but predicting what will resonate with us can be difficult. And what does might be too small or unconventional for selection by an algorithm or an influencer. Because it’s so huge, Google Maps has you looking under a lot of rocks for something good—more so than a “For You” feed delivering amusing content into your hands. But when you uncover something special on Google Maps, it’s like finding $100 on the sidewalk. You so easily could have missed it, but you found it. That kind of satisfaction is tough to replicate on social media today. Recently, I spent 20 minutes looking at this picture of a troop of Siberian teenagers in red berets watching an old man ambiguously stand next to an orange hazmat suit. What is happening here?

Most people won’t end up treating Google Maps as a form of unfiltered entertainment. But even using the platform in the most functional way can influence how you perceive the world. Looking up a pharmacy or the nearest rest stop, you can’t help but bump into off-kilter stuff other users have shared. Google Maps remains an open door to “strange places where all kinds of things are still happening,” Christian Sandvig, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information who studies algorithms, told me. “There was a period where everyone was excited about a kind of shaggier internet, where everyone could put stuff up.” For better or for worse, “it was this free-for-all. And it definitely feels like it’s going away,” he said. The site carries on the legacy of an earlier internet tasked with connecting the world to itself rather than pushing all of us into silos. It is among the internet’s last bastions of unfiltered weirdness.

On a recent Google Maps scrolling expedition, I ended up in Westernpark Nemesvita, a cheesy, artificial little cowboy town near the northern shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary’s largest body of water. There’s archery, a small trampoline, and an inflatable water slide labeled Grand Canyon. A peacock appears to walk the grounds. One glowing review reads, “If you are in Hungary you have to stop by there.” Maybe one day.

When Mya Breitbart heard that something was killing off sea urchins en masse, she thought: Oh, no, not again.

The long-spined sea urchin—a fist-size ball of black defensive spines—is a crucial and common part of the Caribbean’s coral reefs. In 1983, a strange affliction all but wiped them out. The urchins began behaving aberrantly, moving into dangerous open water instead of sheltering in crevices. Their spines, which they normally point at threats, became unresponsive and eventually fell off, making them easy targets for fish. Even if they weren’t attacked, they died within days of their first symptoms, as if they’d been eaten from the inside out. By 1984, up to 98 percent of them were dead—with disastrous consequences. By eating algae, which compete with corals for space, sea urchins allow reefs to flourish and expand. When they died, the algae gained the upper hand, and the corals receded. The urchin population was so badly hit that, despite active restoration efforts, they recovered by only 12 percent in the intervening 40 years. And no one ever worked out what originally killed them.

Then, in January 2022, urchins at St. Thomas island began dying again in the same gruesome way. By March, the affliction had spread to nine other islands. When reports reached Breitbart, who is a microbiologist at the University of South Florida, she feared that history would repeat itself. “It’s not that one dead sea urchin strikes fear in the heart of scientists, but corals are being assaulted and diseased on so many fronts that losing the urchins felt like another big blow to the reefs,” Breitbart told me. “I thought, We can’t let this one go.”

Breitbart quickly assembled a team of 48 scientists from 12 countries, including Ian Hewson, who had studied a similar degenerative disease in starfish, and Christina Kellogg, an expert on corals and their microbes. “Everyone dropped everything” to work on the case, Breitbart said, because they knew how quickly corals can suffer when urchins disappear. But they also knew that such mysteries usually take years or decades to get solved—if they ever are. At first, it looked like this case would be similarly frustrating: When the team collected tissue samples from urchins across the Caribbean and did a thorough genetic analysis to search for disease-causing microbes, they couldn’t find any of the usual suspects. No viruses or bacteria were responsible for the urchins’ plight. The only organism whose genes were present in the sick urchins and not the healthy ones was something unexpected—a previously unknown species of ciliate.  

Ciliates are microscopic, single-celled creatures that swim using a coat of beating hairs, or cilia—picture a furry, turbo-charged amoeba. They’re found almost anywhere there is water, including in the bodies of marine animals such as urchins. Ciliates are usually harmless, but there are a few documented cases of them acting as parasites, causing diseases in corals and even sharks. And one of those miscreant species is a close relative of the new one that Breitbart’s team found in the dying Caribbean urchins.

Still, a ciliate seemed like such an unlikely mass murderer that Breitbart wasn’t fully convinced. Fortunately, while the geneticists were working, team members Yasu Kiryu and Thierry Work were independently examining the urchin tissues under microscopes. Both investigations culminated at a single meeting, and when Team Gene announced that they had found the telltale sequence of a ciliate, Team Microscope pulled up their slides to reveal clear images of ciliates infesting the spines and bodies of the urchins. Both groups had independently identified the same unexpected suspect—and to seal the case, they grew the new ciliate in the laboratory and showed that it could kill healthy urchins within a week.  

That the researchers not only found the urchin killer, but did so in just three months, is an unprecedented feat. Stony corals in Florida and the Caribbean have been plagued by disease since 2014, and the perpetrator is still unknown. The same goes for sea stars in the Pacific Northwest, which have been hit by a degenerative illness for roughly the same amount of time. Breitbart credits her team, experienced members such as Hewson who had learned how to efficiently study these kinds of die-offs, and a “not insignificant amount of luck.” “I had a brand new graduate student working with me,” she said, “and I kept saying, ‘This isn’t the way it usually goes.’”

Many questions still remain. If the same killer ciliate was responsible for the 1983 die-off, why did it stay dormant for almost 40 years before striking again? If it’s a newcomer, where did it come from, and how does it spread? And perhaps most important, what can be done to stop it? Kellogg has also been looking for possible treatments that would kill the ciliate but spare the urchins, and she has some promising candidates.

Hewson thinks the team’s success bodes well: Every time they investigate a die-off of this kind, they get a little better at it—and they’ll need to be. Mass-mortality events among wildlife are becoming more common. Climate change is forcing animals to move to new ranges, allowing species that never previously coexisted to trade pathogens. Meanwhile, climatic upheavals and environmental degradation are also subjecting animals to more stress, weakening their immune system. “Things that maybe weren’t related to mass mortality in the past will start to cause new diseases,” Hewson said. The urchin die-off may not have started in exactly this way, but it’s still a harbinger of events to come. “I’d fully expect us to see more of this kind of thing in the future,” he said.

But 40-plus scientists can’t drop everything to investigate every new epidemic; there simply isn’t enough funding, expertise, or person-power to go around. In this case, doing so was clearly worth it, because the long-spined sea urchin is a keystone species—ones that play a disproportionately influential role in holding their ecosystem together. In this age of epidemics, such creatures may get triaged while others are neglected. “It’s going to be a matter of prioritizing, which is very hard,” Breitbart said.