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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.
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
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.
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...
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?
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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:
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?
TIL about the Welland Canal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welland_Canal
Malaysia to South Africa is an interesting one, why is this route so prevalent?
Used this when I moved internationally. Cool to watch your stuff moving around the world!
Interesting that there is very little shipping traffic around Greenland, considering that is supposed to be so strategic.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Doesn’t seem to work on mobile for me on ios18 and iphone12
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?
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.
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?
Like the sea version of FlightRadar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/45.15,-57.99/3
The scale of it is mind boggling.
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:
Is there a ship globe, too?
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.
'...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.
amazing website and the voiceover was also really good!!
Where would one get the dataset for this. This would be awesome to build in realtime.
An orthographic projection (globe) would be helpful to see e.g. new arctic routes.
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?
Container ships are the fastest!
This is really cool! Nice work
You don't always need background music during narration.
using 2012 data though? that was 14 years ago, mate
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…