Interactive visualisation of world shipping

April 25, 2016 3:12 AM

You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. There is a worthwhile introductory narration, then you can can "pan and zoom in the usual ways, and skip back and forward in time using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. "

(via @MaxCRoser)

posted by hawthorne (7 comments total)

I find maps like this fascinating, and wow; there really are ocean superhighways. Some points on that map appear hugely congested, until I realised the actual size of the dots compared to the size of the ships they represent.
posted by diziet at 3:53 AM on April 25, 2016

I recall that a Bloomberg terminal had the capability of tracking shipping in real time besides accessing other data. I would like to know how this compares to the data from a Bloomberg terminal from a data analysis and UI perspective.
posted by jadepearl at 4:52 AM on April 25, 2016

When I first clicked on this, I was annoyed that I had to sit through what was essentially a tutorial before I could get my hands on the map proper. But, once the narrator got going, I just wish that his speech had gone on three times as long. The combination of that voice, that music, and the beautiful data visualization is just entrancing.
posted by 256 at 5:10 AM on April 25, 2016

cool, is this just the ais data?

NRL has a nice tile server for different (non-classified) martime layers in the United States. It's more of a computer science exercise than a map--but it's very fast! And it also has the Pirate incidents, as well as the Mobile Drilling Rigs in their own layers.
posted by eustatic at 5:13 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

one thing i did notice was missing was a lot of the inland river shipping. there were some tracked in Russia, and some on the Amazon, but I didn't see any on the Mississippi.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:47 AM on April 25, 2016

it's not including tugboats. ships offload onto barges up until baton rouge, so it seems to go that far.
posted by eustatic at 3:49 PM on April 25, 2016

I like this site. https://www.marinetraffic.com/
posted by Jumpin Jack Flash at 8:33 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]