This is weirdly beautiful, like the maps of undersea internet cables that frequently come up here as well.
You can clearly see:
1) oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf from the Middle East to China
2) ships waiting to get through the Panama and Suez Canals
3) why people talk about “shipping lanes”. There are some obvious tracks everyone follows, because it’s the cheapest way from A to B (e.g. cape of good hope to straight of malacca).
4) why Singapore got to be such an important global hub.
5) why the houthis and the Somali pirates could cause such havoc
6) nobody goes in the southern ocean! (Why would they? Unless you’re bringing supplies to Antarctica…) a few ships drop down to go around Cape Horn but that’s it.
and so much more. I wish it included more up-to-date data…
> 6) nobody goes in the southern ocean!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties
“Below 40 degrees south, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God.”
There's currently a 100-ft foiling trimaran in the southern ocean that is racing the clock around the world attempting the around the world record.
They've averaged about 34 mph (30 kn) for 22 days now. Crazy stuff.
https://sodebo-ultim3.sodebo.com/
The red boat on the tracker is the world record track from 2017.
Although interestingly, as that wikipedia article also points out, people did go down into the 40s quite a bit during the Age of Sail (the famous clipper route), because the strong prevailing winds meant it was the fastest way to get around the world. This comes up quite often in the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian.
If you're not a sailing ship, you don't benefit from the winds, so those latitudes are pretty empty nowadays.
I hiked Torres del Paine around 51 deg south about 12 years ago and the winds were no joke. On plains or in mountain passes it was absolutely howling. It felt like you could lean into it at a 60 deg angle and not fall over. Sometimes when the trail went close to a steep edge with nothing to break the wind I felt like I needed to crouch, ready to get on the ground, in case a gust caught me.
> Below 40 degrees south, there is no law
Apparently, the current US administration thinks international law does not exist, no matter the latitude/longitude.
I posted this as a top-level comment, but for up to date info you might try this:
I have no affiliation with that site, I just enjoy it.
Another good one is: https://www.marinetraffic.com
On 3, Traffic Separation Schemes (TSS) will be making things look tidier (and safer) for many of the more organized flows.
In a TSS, you have to drive on the right, and if you're crossing one, your heading (not your track) must be as close to 90 degrees, to minimize your exposure time. When you're sailing this can be a big pain. The anti-collision rules are altered in a TSS.
> why Singapore got to be such an important global hub.
Without the the location, of course Singapore wouldn't have been able to be so important. But the location isn't everything --- Singapore manages to outperform Port Klang and Tanjung Pelepas despite the similar geographic advantages of the Malaysian ports due to much better execution.
> This is weirdly beautiful
Until you notice the carbon emissions on the top left.
It's depressing to note that air travel accounts for similar total yearly emissions but is up to 50x more polluting on a per unit of cargo/people transported.
> 4) why Singapore got to be such an important global hub.
Thailand is still dreaming of building a canal to create an alternative option.
My favorite: near the Bering strait you can see the distortion of the map - obviously ships go in straight lines on a sphere but in a curve on the map.
> nobody goes in the southern ocean! (Why would they?...)
For the fish — plenty of trawlers in the Southern Ocean.
There's currently a guy, Jari Saario, rowing across from South America to South Africa. Lots of icebergs indeed. https://www.instagram.com/jari_saario/
the weather & tides are terribad down south
Try this one. Real-time global view of all registered ships. You can click on any little triangle or type in a ship's name and see it's location:
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-37.3/cent...
It's not completely real-time unless you pay to get satellite tracking included. The free version only has data from shore based AIS scanners plus a few scanners placed on ships. So close to shore it's pretty accurate, but in the middle of the ocean you only get position and vessel type (unless there's a ship with an AIS scanner nearby).
This is so cool, what I was hoping/expecting the post to be like
this is much better and informative.
TIL the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal. Thanks
Side note you can watch timelapse videos taken of ships crossing the oceans, the night stars look great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHrCI9eSJGQ
Stunningly beautiful.
The time-based zoom interaction is clever - slowing down time as you zoom in makes the data feel more tangible. I've been working on a similar real-time globe visualization and learned a few things the hard way:
1. Throttling updates is critical. We went from per-event updates to 5-10 second batches and cut our WebSocket costs by 90%+ while the UX barely changed.
2. For the "ships crossing land" artifacts people are noticing - interpolating between sparse data points on a Mercator projection will always create these. On a globe (orthographic), great circle interpolation looks correct, but on flat maps you need to detect ocean crossings and handle them specially.
3. The biggest perf win was hybrid rendering: static heatmap for historical data + WebGL particles only for "live" movement. Trying to animate everything kills mobile.
Would love to see this with more recent data. The 2012 snapshot is fascinating but comparing pre/post-Suez blockage or COVID disruptions would be incredible.
This is my favourite of the visualisations that Duncan and I made back in the Kiln days. It's lovely to see people are still enjoying it all these years later.
Thank you!
This is pretty amazing to watch!
I did just watch a dot go through the Great Lakes, to Chicago, then take to the air and make a bee line straight to the Gulf of Mexico. Probably some weird artifact but made me chuckle.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption.
Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
That is a real route though - The Great Loop, although I'm sure tankers aren't taking it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Loop
> Assuming a boat ("Looper") begins in Chicago, either take the Chicago River and Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, or the Cal-Sag Channel to the Des Plaines River. The waterway passes Joliet and soon becomes the Illinois River. The Illinois River travels west, through several locks, then southward, through Peoria. At Grafton, Illinois, the Illinois River joins the Mississippi River.
Of course you could start in the some Great Lake or the Erie Canal or anywhere else on the east coast.
kind of neat, but major problems with accuracy. I'm watching a signficant volume of traffic navigating the mountain ranges of northern BC, the Yukon and Alaska. I think something is messed with the browser rendering based on zoome level, and the map interactions.
I saw a few take a straight line across Africa from the west coast to the mediterranean.
I wonder what influences the decision for some ships to take that direct route between Hokkaido and Vancouver through the Aleutian islands while others veer South on no apparent lane. Maybe vessels lacking sophisticated enough navigation equipment to navigate through the islands?
Not a captain, but I'd guess it has to do with the seasonal wind direction and strength variations. The North Pacific gets pretty wild in winter. Here's a visualization: https://www.deepzoom.com/s/20260107-r4y6xdifH4
A lot of people have called out some interesting things - one thing that I notice is how the cold water ports shut down in the winter (in the northern hemisphere). It's one of those things I've always heard and known about, but to see it visually conceptualized (and the implications on economy and national interests) is very cool
One of the notable seasonal events here in Minnesota is the last barge of the season before the Army Corps of Engineers closes the locks on the Mississippi River. Then again, each spring, the first barge though is celebrated when the locks open again.
It's not earth-shattering, but it generally makes the news ;-)
Something that will change in the next century. I'm curious how that will affect shipping. I'm imagining it won't have much impact on container shipping but natural resources probably?
> Something that will change in the next century. I'm curious how that will affect shipping. I'm imagining it won't have much impact on container shipping
No, on the contrary! The effect on container shipping will be absolutely massive with the Northeast Passage opening up. It's going to cut thousands of miles off shipping routes, since its the much shorter route from American East Coast ports and the Euros to Asia.
It appears to cover only the year 2012.
Live data is shown here: https://www.marinetraffic.com/
This is very cool.
Some years ago I was on a small (12-passenger) boat doing an 11-day photography tour in the Svalbard archipelago. One evening, we were at 82' north latitude and I was on the bridge talking to the captain. He said, "we might be the northernmost people on the planet, aside from naval subs" - looking at this map, it's possible he was right.
sort of a floatradar24
OSINT tooling to figure the shadowfleet?
It was made in 2016, I think. The company that made it also made Flourish, which you can use to pretty much recreate it if you have the data: https://flourish.studio/blog/animated-point-map/
Yeah my first thought was to view what changed, if anything, during peak COVID or the later issues.
This is still wonderful.
I was thinking the same.
One of my favorite youtube channels right now is What's Going On With Shipping, hosted by a former merchant mariner. Here's a 101 primer if you are learning too:
The seasonal closure of northern ports is particularly striking in this visualization. What's really interesting is how it reveals the economic implications - not just that shipping slows seasonally, but how companies plan infrastructure investments around these natural bottlenecks. The cold-water port shutdowns create cascading effects throughout global supply chains that we rarely discuss explicitly.
It would be fascinating to see this data overlaid with commodity prices and exchange rates during those seasonal transitions. The interaction between maritime logistics and commodities trading is largely invisible to most people, but it fundamentally shapes everything from energy prices to agricultural commodity costs in ways that filter down to consumers.
In the North Atlantic most paths are slightly curved to take the most efficient route (taking curvature of the earth into account). There is one prevalent route from Gibraltar to Florida that is straight as an arrow though. What is up with that?
Is it using the wrong projection for the map? A lot of the tracks don't line up with the ports or channels that they are obviously using. The ships that look like they are going to and from Southampton, England are too far west and a little too far north. The same applies to the Thames and also to those in Oslo fjord.
A similar but much more up-to-date and interactive version of this can be accessed via the Global Fishing Watch map: https://globalfishingwatch.org/map
Turn on the `Vessel presence` layer, which displays a vector-tiled view of all vessels up to a few days ago, not just fishing boats.
And something from my own blog which may be of interest: https://blog.datadesk.eco/p/sky-lapse-in-two-tone
My son loves trains. There are a couple of state parks near me that have tracks running through them and I once tried to find something like this / flight tracker for trains and learned their security / obfuscation around that seems to be on the same level of submarines? Why?
The British rail system releases as open data(JSON over AMQP) all train movements down to indidvidual signal blocks You can view some of the the live maps here: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps, but this is unique as far as I know.
I don't think it's really down to super-tight security as such, rather that there's no reason to release the data publically.
Ships and airplanes broadcast data because it's useful for collision avoidance and tracking. The international maritime and aerospace system is far too complicated and large that you could ever build a private network of every ship or plane operator sharing encrypted data, or that one company could set up receivers for the tracking data worldwide. A closed system wouldn't work.
Rail is both physically and legally a finite closed space. The network operator knows definitively where every train in their network is because they have sensors in the tracks. The network is responsible for preventing collisions, not the individual trains. They have contracts with every company which operates on their tracks and if these need their internal data they can get it. So there's simply no good reason why trains should be publically broadcasting their information, or why network operators would want to expose all their internal data.
And against the no positives there are negative sides - apart from a couple of famous cases I've not heard of it in Europe, but stealing from cargo trains seems to be big business in the US: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/los-ange...
In the UK the open tracking data also brought complaints from freight companies who feared competitors would use it to analyse their movements, figure out which traffic flows were the most profitable and use it for commercial advantage.
Probably because it's easier to rob a traveling train than a traveling ship.
Also, if you're a plane or a boat it's really important everyone knows where you are for general safety / rescue reasons. On a (consolidated and decently organised) railroad the railway operators can take care of all of that.
Used this when I moved internationally. Cool to watch your stuff moving around the world!
It seems like this only covers data from 2012, so probably one of the other live websites like marinetraffic?
Interesting that there is very little shipping traffic around Greenland, considering that is supposed to be so strategic.
It's strategic from a military perspective, not economic perspective.
Very little of anything actually goes on in Greenland. It has a population of less than 57,000 and a GDP of less than $5B. The US maintains significant military presence, including airbases, missile launch and intercept capabilities, and ensures the US controls the North Atlantic, instead of Russia.
with apologies to https://xkcd.com/149/ : "national security make me a sandwich"
Burning bunker fuel releases a lot of sulfur emissions and comparatively less carbon. SO2 has a strong cooling effect on the climate, both through directly reflecting incoming sunlight and by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. This increases the formation of reflective clouds.
Fascinating, but the dataset is obviously incomplete – there's barely any traffic in Europe until mid april. January-march looks as if there's been a zombie apocalypse.
Malaysia to South Africa is an interesting one, why is this route so prevalent?
TIL about the Welland Canal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welland_Canal
Great visualization.
IMO 2020 regulation unintentionally contributed to global warming while reducing air pollution. This rule drastically cut the amount of sulfur permitted in ship fuel, which improved public health but reduced the reflective effect of atmospheric aerosols that had been masking some global warming.
You'd think the people making the rules would try and look at all the impacts.
The cooling effect of SO2 was certainly known when the IMO regulations were decided upon. It was decided that the public health advantages outweighed the climate warming. One can certainly quibble whether this decision was correct or not, but it wasn't done in ignorance.
(My take would have been be to allow high sulphur fuel out on the high seas, where there's very few humans around (or flora and fauna in general). )
Interesting that no ships were recorded going thru the Northwest Passage -- perhaps in 2012 it was still generally impassable? It's getting to a point where freighters / tankers pass thru unassisted by icebreakers during the warm months.
Re: the website itself -- the Mercator projection is an artifact of paper maps, and it greatly distorts features near the poles. Could we please use a true globe when rendering interactive maps?
Flat maps have a lot of UX advantages over globes, and you can show the whole world at once.
Like interactive documentary, loved it!
Exactly! I really loved the presentation. An interactive map with voice over, and at key moments zooming in, zooming out, coloring etc. Beautiful design. At the same time, not restricting the user. I was immediately glued.
I'm thinking that this can be a good pattern for photography portfolio sites. Voice over from photographer talking about his inspiration, walking through key memories, while letting the user browser around.
I could swear I just saw a ship travel at high speed in a straight line directly across Britain. Some sort of giant catapult?
Lovely site though. Mesmerising.
Exactly. It’s quite impressive to watch from the ground and even more from the coast on landing (but be sure to wear a mack since you will get splashed).
I'm surprised more people don't know about the Northampton Canal
Is that the one that runs in a straight line directly east to west somewhere around the England/Scotland border?
https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/flight_stream/index.ht...
Something similar but for flights and in 3D.
12 years old now - might be fun to see what new data is out there - real time perhaps - and have another go
This is beautiful. I would love there to be a way to show this on a sphere instead of a flat map so I can find out how things might change in the next century with climate change. I haven't quite understood yet what the new shipping routes will enable us to do. I'm assuming this is partly what the whole Greenland thing is about?
It's beautiful, but... I'm confused by the role of the play button. Can somebody explain how it works? I click on it and seemingly random things happen.
Turn on your sound. There is voice over narration.
I see ships crossing land. Does that mean that they turned off their transponder or whatever after leaving port and turned it on upon arriving at the destination port? I suppose the software just shows the straight line path at the calculated average speed. Look at the Eastern US for May 3-4.
There needs to be an AIS receiver to pick up the ship's transponder, which is why most of the free ship tracking sites only work near the coast.
This seems unusual if you're used to ADSB tracking sites, since the line of sight goes much further due to elevation. There's also more receivers feeding them.
Quite a few routes on the heat map that appear to not be following great circle lines (i.e. "straight" lines from china to the west coast) - is that from seasonal currents allowing for more efficient transit with the tradeoff of taking a longer route?
The latest nav software will plot the most efficient course taking into account wind and current direction over the course of the trip.
The scale of it is mind boggling.
Like the sea version of FlightRadar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/45.15,-57.99/3
This is mesmerising!
Really well made and enjoyed the audio explanation.
It's a shame that it includes the now-mandatory discussion of how this shipping is actually bad because of carbon emissions. Seems to me the widespread availability of cheaper goods has been a great thing for humanity on balance!
This is beautiful but I really wish the land was green or some more obvious color. Zoomed out it is easier to tell but when it zooms in tightly I'm completely lost (maybe I'm just an idiot?).
This is beautiful and well done. For realtime shipping information, may I suggest this:
I used this when I took a sightseeing trip to the Soo Locks, so that I could plan the best time to see the ships. Pretty cool zooming in from a global view to a single ship sitting right in front of me.
Doesn’t seem to work on mobile for me on ios18 and iphone12
I'm getting "Please use a modern browser to view this content", but I'm running the latest version of Chrome.
Says WebGL is not supported..?
Interesting to see no ships in Hudson Bay, given its importance in early North American history.
It was only good as a way for the British to get into the north for fur trade, since the French controlled Canada/New France (and the St Lawrence/Great Lakes waterways)
Where would one get the dataset for this. This would be awesome to build in realtime.
amazing website and the voiceover was also really good!!
An orthographic projection (globe) would be helpful to see e.g. new arctic routes.
'...Some more than a quarter of a mile long...' Sorry this information is not for me, I cannot deal in those units, I have no clue how much that is.
There is a live version of this in the bloomberg terminal.
Even at 1 hour ticks am I assuming that these are moving far too quickly?
I thought that too but they're surprisingly fast. I tracked a dot across the Atlantic (US East Coast to UK) and it took around 4-5 days, which is about right.
There's a very nice effect where if you zoom in, time slows.
Is there a ship globe, too?
Container ships are the fastest!
This is really cool! Nice work
using 2012 data though? that was 14 years ago, mate
You don't always need background music during narration.
Kinda impressed that even this is ten years old it runs smoothly. These days javascript apps were much more sloppy.
This is very informative. How are the vessels tracked? Is this real-time tracking of specifically equipped vessels. Can any other vessels be tracked or only those with traditional maritime transponders? If real-time, it'd be cool to have vessel/point data be displayed upon hovering over with a mouse.
Ships over a certain size are obligated to report their position (and some other information) over AIS (similar to ADSB on airplanes. It's meant for other nearby ships and ports for navigational purposes. These are tracked from shore based scanners, scanners on ships and satellites. You can see partly real-time data on marinetraffic.com and vesselfinder.com
Thank you :)
It looks clean
It's interesting to think that as we approach a post-hydrocarbon world, not only will we extract less fossil fuels, we'll ship less too. Ironic to think about how much fuel is used to ship fuel. I know there's been speculation about shipping batteries, but I'd imagine that shipping traffic will decrease at a similar pace to fossil fuel usage after we hit peak. And the IEA estimate for that peak is 2030.