•The huge variations in the global state of sustainability research and maps.•Importance of integrating the contributions of the sciences and humanities.•Exploring innovative and integrative research beyond comfort zones. Advances in scholarly research are routinely associated with specific fields and traditional disciplines. New fields such as sustainability, climate change, gender studies and “green knowledge” emerge with inter- and cross-disciplinary subject matter, methods and techniques. Sustainability has emerged as an integrative research field on a global scale not only with contributions from the social and natural sciences in the past two decades but with contributions from the humanities and sciences. These breakthroughs present challenges to traditional fields and opportunities for better understanding of processes and impacts. The challenges facing geography include working with both visible and invisible worlds, going beyond “comfort zone” research boundaries, recognizing the importance of maps and mapping, and integrating politics in sustainability worlds at local, regional and global scales. Display omitted