Twitter’s data visualization scientist Nicolas Belmonte wanted to display the billions of tweets ricocheting around the world at any given point in a more inventive way than has been done before.

We’ve seen Twitter maps, interactive 3D Twitter models, and Twitter photo browsers.

But how about a 3D topographical map of billions of tweets, visualized across cities around the entire world?

Belmonte took every geotagged tweet ever recorded to create a virtual landscape of tweets.

The mountain ranges below are not natural geography, but the virtual topography of Twitter – with the peaks representing where the most tweets are sent from. Here’s an example zoomed in on New York City:

And here’s San Francisco:

You can explore different views, elevations, and angles in the interactive version.