These heat maps show how Nelson Mandela’s death impacted the world

Last week, the world woke up to the news that former president Nelson Mandela had died. The news spread across the web and effectively transformed it. On social media there were around 10-million posts and tributes from all over the web, showing just how deeply the world felt the loss.

With help of the folks at Vertabox, a Twitter mapping platform, we’ve put together some heat maps of the social conversation around the former statesman. What’s cool about the maps from Vertabox is that it not only tracks the tweets but also highlights the media conversation rather just individual tweets.

We decided to track the conversations from South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom as these feature as some the top countries with the most social media chatter around Mandela.

The conversation heat map in South Africa

The map for South Africa shows that the bulk of the conversation around the Gauteng area and the time-lapse shows other sparks of conversation. The conversation around the country peaks between 10am and 4pm when the whole country is awake.

You can watch the animated map here.

The conversation heat map in the United States

The map shows the key tweeters and tweets from the United States and the media coverage around the late president. What’s really interesting is when you play the map you can track the hubs of conversation based on time from the one end of the country to the other.

You can see the animated map here.

The conversation in the United Kingdom

The bulk of the conversation the UK seems to be concentrated in the greater London area with the chatter peaking between 12 and 2pm.

Interestingly, most of the conversation in the UK is from media houses.

You can look at the animated map here.