A map of Mars. Every crater, cone and dune on it holds one of an estimated 781,343 people who died in the first year after the aid stopped.
In 2025 the United States dismantled its foreign aid agency. The model that tracked the shutdown — ImpactCounter, built at Boston University — was frozen at the one-year mark: 781,343 people dead in year one, 518,428 of them children. Pneumonia, malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, HIV, tuberculosis — medicine, nets and food programmes that simply stopped. The dashboard is retired; the dying is not.
The man who ran the dismantling wants Mars. So this is a map of Mars — all 385,049 of its craters larger than a kilometre; 250,381 pitted cones, small volcanoes of mud and lava scattered over the northern plains and mapped by machine in 2024; and 147,135 dunes of the northern sands, the largest of 646,134 measured one by one from orbit. In fifty years of mapping, only 1,240 of the craters have received official names. Everything else now holds one person from year one: adults in the craters, children in the cones, the smallest craters and the dunes — because most of the dead are small, and so are most places. Every one of the 781,343 has a place. A name can be proposed for a place by someone who knew its person; proposals are reviewed before they appear. The International Astronomical Union will never recognise any of it. That is the point. Mars doesn't belong to him either.
One imprecision, stated plainly: the public dune catalog gives each dune's position to the nearest 4 km — the window in which it was detected. Each dune is drawn somewhere inside its own window, not at its crest. Exact coordinates have been requested from the authors.
An honest caveat: the toll is a modelled estimate of excess deaths (frozen ImpactCounter snapshot, corroborated by a study in The Lancet), not an administrative count of named individuals. No list of names exists — most of these people were never individually recorded anywhere. That is part of what was taken. Each crater therefore holds a designation, not an identity: an adult or a child, and the disease, drawn faithfully from the model's own arithmetic.
Concept: Andri Snær Magnason. Prototype: ARK.
Deaths model: ImpactCounter (B. Nichols,
Boston University) · The Lancet (2025)
Craters: Robbins & Hynek Mars crater database (2020 release)
Cones: Chen et al., A Global Database of Pitted Cones on Mars (2024, CC BY 4.0)
Dunes: Rubanenko et al., Morphometrics of barchan dunes on Mars (2022, CC BY 4.0)
Relief: MOLA (NASA/JPL/GSFC) + HRSC (ESA/DLR/FU Berlin) blended hillshade via NASA Trek
Official names: IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (USGS)
Surface: NASA/Viking imagery via Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0)