Shipmap.org
shipmap.org
shipmap.org
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties
“Below 40 degrees south, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God.”
If you're not a sailing ship, you don't benefit from the winds, so those latitudes are pretty empty nowadays.
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.
Apparently, the current US administration thinks international law does not exist, no matter the latitude/longitude.
I have no affiliation with that site, I just enjoy it.
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.
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.
For the fish — plenty of trawlers in the Southern Ocean.
Thailand is still dreaming of building a canal to create an alternative option.
Until you notice the carbon emissions on the top left.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-37.3/cent...
TIL the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal. Thanks
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.
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.
Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
AIS is connected to a serial-to-ethernet converter. That allows me to get the AIS stream over TCP/IP. I wrote an application to consume AIS and do what they wanted with it.
The serial-to-ethernet converters are the magic ingredient. It allowed us to have tracking and telemetry regardless of terrestrial VHF stations in the area. The original setup also provided a feed from Transas but we stopped using it. We also use a private AIS VHF recorder as a backup source of AIS messages. We used that a lot more before Starlink due to terrestrial blockage of VSAT links. The backup source was a good compliment to the primary. They had the most infra in areas that were blocked most often.
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.
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's not earth-shattering, but it generally makes the news ;-)
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.
This is still wonderful.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Lovely site though. Mesmerising.
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.
(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). )
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 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.
Says WebGL is not supported..?
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!
There's a very nice effect where if you zoom in, time slows.