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A Map Showing Every Cargo Ship
- namenotrequired 10y agoI expected this to be http://marinetraffic.com/ http://marinetraffic.com/ which shows current/recent locations. But I'm not sure if it shows every single cargo ship in the world.
- kirrent 10y agoEvery ship within range of an AIS receiving station. There are deadspots far out and see and behind obstructions.
- locusm 10y agoProbably not taking subscriptions from Somalia...
- reitanqild 10y agoThere is AIS sat or something(, we used to refer to it by that name.) It scans the entire (?) globe every few hours. I think accrss to those observations is one of the benefits of a paid AIS subscription.
- tyldum 10y agoThere are many satellites doing AIS these days. Some commercial and some operating for governments. It has a huge impact on coast guard activities as you can imagine. All vessels over a certain size is required to transmit an AIS beacon, and traditionally reception was from land-based stations with limited range. Coast guard can now correlate the information in the AIS beacon with satellite imagery and verify them, and can focus on vessels that does not emit the beacon or is falsifying it. It can also be used to find the culprit of oil-slicks.
- roshanj 10y agoYep, terrestrial AIS receivers can only receive messages from ships that are less than ~50 nautical miles off the coast. Further out than that and you need satellite-based AIS data. (I'm an engineer at Spire, we've launched a constellation of nanosatellites that does exactly that: https://spire.com/products/sense/ https://spire.com/products/sense/ )
- espadrine 10y agoThe website is extremely clear. I am wondering a few further things. What network design is used to communicate between the satellites? I presume that they don't all go at the same speed in the same direction, so the network layout must be flexible, right? Also, what is their size? You called them nanosatellites, can they really be a hundred nanometers big? How are they powered, and how are they put out of commission?
- roshanj 10y agoCorrect, our constellation uses several different types of orbits to achieve global coverage. The satellites don't communicate directly with one another but rather through a globally distributed network of groundstations. When a satellite passes within view of one of our groundstations we are able to downlink the AIS data which then gets processed and delivered to customers. Ah yes! I think the term "nanosatellites" is a bit confusing--it refers to satellites between 1 and 10 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniaturized_satellite#Nanosatellites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniaturized_satellite#Nanosat...). Ours are 3U cubesats so they are about 30cm long. Much bigger than a hundred nanometers! They have solar panels which are used to charge batteries, and since they are in low-earth-orbit they will eventually de-orbit and burn up on reentry after several years. The FCC actually requires that cubesats re-enter the atmosphere within 25 years.
- hirsin 10y agoThis is endlessly fascinating, thank you. I'm sure there's fun work being done by commodities traders using this type of data - sure enough there's a pricing section for API calls to their service. I would be curious to see how well it can predict performance for manufactured goods though - for large-scale consumers like Wal-Mart it might be possible to say that rising imports to the US (more container ships incoming) point to increased demand by consumers, therefore invest in Wal-Mart.
- canjobear 10y agoI'm amazed to see ships navigating into Siberia up the Lena. I thought the deltas of the Siberian rivers were impassable.
- grendelt 10y agoI'm just amazed someone still gets content from Digg!
- throwaway1974 10y agoI thought they were dead myself, they really missed the boat in creating the original reddit type site
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- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoaww... look at you nerds having your fun... but gawker stalker was somehow immoral. enjoy your ISIS. you're all idiots.
- billforsternz 10y agoI don't know if it's a quirk of my desktop/Chrome setup but I cannot resize it to reveal possibly the most dynamic trade routes in the world around Japan and Eastern China. Disappointing.
- billforsternz 10y agoFor the record, I am an idiot who couldn't figure out how to click and drag.
- cjslep 10y agoA couple of observations I thought were interesting: Very few ships travel around the southern tip of South America A corrupted data point sends it flying across Russia and into Southern Europe. A lone ship travelling to Svalbard. Multiple ships travelling in rivers deep into Russia. Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.
- sitharus 10y agoThe southern tip of South America is known as Cape Horn (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Horn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Horn). It's an unpredictable and dangerous area, hence the popularity of the Panama Canal. Russia is huge, hence a lot of river shipping. Control of the seas would bring a lot of influence, hence the British control of Gibraltar and the complex history of the Suez Canal.
- ChoHag 10y ago> Control of the seas would bring a lot of influence, hence the British You can stop there.
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- jcranmer 10y ago> Very few ships travel around the southern tip of South America The latitudes between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula are the only latitudes that have no land (barring the area around the North Pole, which are usually locked in sea ice). As a result, there is a very strong current and very strong winds that make shipping dangerous. Note that most ships prefer the Straits of Magellan--a cramped, dangerous corridor, to passing the open water south of Cape Horn, which should tell you just how dangerous the area is. > Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller. The Strait of Malacca is the real chokepoint, not the South China Sea. The concerns about the South China Sea are largely related to natural resources that may lie in the area. It should come as no surprise that Malacca was traditionally the worst area for piracy--before they started cracking down on it in the early 2000's, it was pretty much as bad as the Somali hijackings that gripped press (and those made press largely because the hijackings had spread from the Gulf of Aden, a consistent pirate menace as far back as Roman times, to the Indian Ocean off of Somalia).
- gorkemyurt 10y agoWow Singapore, Istanbul and which I believe is Rotterdam has crazy traffic. And basically all of Japan and China :)
- mmel 10y agoThere seem to be a consistent route of ships travelling overland from Tunis across the top of Algeria.
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- Aelinsaar 10y agoThe constant exchange between the west coast of the US and Japan is so regular!
- sandworm101 10y ago>> The map is built from data showing ship locations in 2012, so it's not exactly what things look like today, but it's a pretty close approximation. What were oil prices then? What are they now? What is the state of piracy then? What is is now? Interesting, but I suggest that the really interesting details aren't to be found on this map.
- cdevs 10y agoSweet data eye candy, I would love to have a near live version on a screen on my wall.
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- enraged_camel 10y agoIs there a way to make the map fullscreen?
- cromulent 10y agohttps://www.shipmap.org https://www.shipmap.org
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- akhilcacharya 10y agoDumb question, but what's the term for the moving marker? Or are they just 2x2 px leaflet markers?
- cvarjas 10y agohttps://www.shipmap.org/ https://www.shipmap.org/
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago"Burning massive quantities of bunker fuel. The result is a huge amount of CO2...commercial ships produce more than a million tons of CO2 every day." Narrator is unnecessarily alarmist here, and sounds like we should be concerned about the contribution of cargo ships to the greenhouse. I would say we should celebrate the shipping industry for being so much more beneficial to humanity per unit of CO2.
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoI don't see how it's alarmist to note the fact that they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group. I think they could do better, and we wouldn't pay that much more as consumers for a lot of the goods, unless the biggest overhead really _is_ with shipping.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago"they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group." Wrong. Shipping is the most efficient transportation of mass-distance per unit of CO2. Shipping's CO2 contribution is only %3-%4 of total CO2 produced by humans.
- draggnar 10y agoBut in terms of particulate emissions it is very significant. Upwards of 60% of total sulphur emissions and accounts for over 60,000 deaths per year. At room temperature you can walk across the surface of the fuel. It is nasty stuff and the scale is quite large.
- newscracker 10y ago> they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group Not sure what you mean by "group", but animal agriculture beats all transportation (road, sea, air) combined when it comes to greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect. There are a few different sources from the UN on this (plus some other sources with even higher numbers).
- phantom_oracle 10y agoCan someone explain the logic of why ships in the Pacific sail in an upward-curvature between Japan and the USA? (they move upwards and then down)? Or is that just a flaw of 2D-mapping?
- lionyo 10y agoYes, here's a picture & explanation: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6822/why-is-the-straight-line-path-across-continent-so-curved http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6822/why-is-the-strai...
- EliasJorgensen 10y agoPirates are gonna love this.
- dalke 10y agoPirates already know about AIS. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24586394 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24586394