The Closest Match Beyond Its Surroundings
A place's twin is the cell whose embedding points most nearly the same way, among cells more than about 100 km away. Without that limit, almost every place's twin would be the cell next door.
Most Twins Lie Just Beyond the Limit
Half of all twins lie within 142 km, just outside the excluded disc. For most places, the distance to the twin is set by the disc more than by the place.
Far-Apart Mutual Twins
Two places are mutual twins when each is the other's closest match. Of the 23,267 mutual pairs, 441 lie more than 1,000 km apart. The gallery under the map is a hand-picked set of those far pairs, chosen to cover different kinds of ground. Click anywhere on the map to find that place's twin.
How this was made
Twins come from AlphaEarth Foundations' 2018 embedding at 6 km. Far twins are weaker matches: the median angle to a twin is 8° over all cells and 12° for mutual pairs more than 1,000 km apart. The satellite views are current imagery, not the 2018 scene the embedding saw.
A cell counts as sea when Natural Earth's 10 m land polygons put no land in it, so a cell on a large lake counts as land. All-sea cells are left out of the gallery. On the map, cells that touch the sea take their inland neighbours' colour, because a coastal cell mixes land and water and its own colour draws a fringe along every shore. That is display only: every twin is found from each cell's own embedding. Place names: GeoNames, CC-BY.