20 ms·
Mapping 20k ships that sank during WW II
- shultays 2y ago<3 the scrolling implementation of this website. The browser scroll is as default, nothing is hijacked. It is just the background & images on webpage are updated as you scroll it creating those animations. You can use page down, space key, the scrollbar or whatever to scroll and it just works
- jksflkjl3jk3 2y agoIt's still bad. Just let everything load and scroll like a normal plain webpage. All these gimmicks make it annoying to read.
- shultays 2y agoI think the visuals are subjective (and imo think they are fine). I was mostly talking about how "custom scroll" and animations that reacts to scrolling is implemented. If one wants to implement one, this is an OK way of doing it in my opinion
- JohnMakin 2y agoI don't. Please stop making sites in this style - it isn't easy to navigate, especially if you're disabled. I find it extremely obnoxious and immediately exit this style of webpage.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoI think NY Times started long back and this style was kinda "cool" that goes well with the narrative. Then, there is https://pudding.cool https://pudding.cool that does this pretty well. Now, many just copy and tries without a meaningful treatment and is just there - kinda not working-out in most cases. Tip: Try reading with Reader Mode.
- layer8 2y agoReader Mode doesn’t show any pictures here (Safari).
- stilldavid 2y agoThe NYT did kick this off with Snow Fall and it won a Pulitzer the following year. https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html
- JohnMakin 2y agoIn the NYT story, it makes much more sense (also the way it's implemented is far less offensive). It makes sense because it was trying to tell a story, and the slide show gives more emotional impact to it. That's cool! I still don't like it and would prefer just the story, but I see why it makes sense here. however, when you're trying to convey information, this style of page is offensively bad and I doubt is really doing you any favors - inline images and videos do the exact same thing you're trying to accomplish here without all the obnoxiousness.
- metabagel 2y agoYou haven't explained why it's "offensively bad". I feel like the tight integration of text and visual content does an excellent job of telling the story. There's no confused looking around for what goes with what. It's all tied together into a seamless narrative, sort of like television documentary style. It seems like the issue you have is with scrolling down, but that's an advantage, because it means you can go at your own pace.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI have in the grandparent comment - it’s not easily usable to many types of disabilities, chiefly - and it does nothing to augment the information it is trying to convey. this site also renders poorly, as others have mentioned. Just adds absolutely nothing to the page, so it is offensively bad in that I want to read what it says but cannot/will not.
- metabagel 2y agoWhy isn't it easy to navigate? You only need to scroll down. You don't need to click any of the links in order to appreciate the basic content.
- JohnMakin 2y agoDo you understand disabilities exist? frame it in that light and it may make more sense. I’m not publicly disclosing my disabilities on this handle.
- metabagel 2y agoSorry, I had assumed you meant a physical disability, which probably wasn't a good assumption to make. (And I in no way say that in order to be rude. Most of us are limited in some way. I think you just find it difficult to process information in this format.) For what it's worth, you can probably get what you want here: https://ww2sunkenships.ca/ https://ww2sunkenships.ca/
- sonofhans 2y agoI’ve done a lot of UX work with and for people with various disabilities. I can make a few guesses about aspects of this site which are difficult, but I don’t know about you personally. It could be visual difficulties making the low-contrast hard to read, or the overly-controlled layout making text-zooming difficult. Perhaps it’s poor source order screwing up a screen reader. Perhaps attention or anxiety issues make the constant motion too much to bear, or concentrate through. Each of these has a different solution, or type of solution. Calling out any of those problems might be useful feedback for the site authors, or for industry professionals here.
- dredmorbius 2y agoIt works quite poorly on my e-ink tablet as well. And on desktop I'd not realised how much of the site was disabled under my default uMatrix configuration. I know about "Snowfall" and other infographics. I'd much prefer straight text and static visualisations to the maximum extent possible.
- layer8 2y agoNot a good experience here, because I scroll more quickly than the background stuff takes time to load, and it’s not clear if something is broken, or when loading is complete for the current part. It’s messy and distracts from the actual contents, and has no apparent benefit for the reader, compared to a normal fixed document layout.
- sorrythanks 2y agoFor the curious, this interaction is called "Scrollytelling". It's very enjoyable for some people. It makes me feel physically sick. But that's okay, I'm okay with the idea that not everything on the internet is aimed at me.
- radicalbyte 2y agoI came here to post the exact opposite. It's certainly the marmite of web design.
- dxdm 2y agoThe presentation feels like watching a movie through a drinking straw, but yeah, I guess the "straw controls" are not hijacked and I can point the straw smoothly to places that haven't fully loaded yet. :]
- aklemm 2y agoaka hoarding fishing spots!
- mwbajor 2y agoWe use this website for diving off the US East coast. https://www.facebook.com/p/Eastern-Search-Survey-100063552943247/ https://www.facebook.com/p/Eastern-Search-Survey-10006355294... ESS has mapped and imaged many ships off the eastern seaboard, some sunk by U-boats during WW1 and WW2. The images and data collected are excellent.
- runxel 2y agoOn a related note: Those ships are highly sought after. At some point there will probably a startup using this data to salvage all these ships. Why? Because it was before the nuclear bomb and all the other desasters that followed which actually permanently raised our background radiation levels. And because these ships were and still are underwater, they have been largely unaffected by this. It might not seem much but apparently the radiation difference is enough, so for things that go into your body (like after an operation) only this old steel is used. Or so I was told by a friend working in medical.
- ceejayoz 2y agoIt was a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel Since we've stopped nuclear testing, though, it's returned pretty close to normal, and such steel is no longer as sought after. > World anthropogenic background radiation levels peaked at 0.11 mSv/yr above natural levels in 1963, the year that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted. Since then, by about 2008, anthropogenic background radiation has decreased to 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.
- jprd 2y agoThis is also graverobbing, and very not cool. Most wrecks will have sailors/soldiers/merchantmen entombed. Parent comment is 100% correct, unfortunately this doesn't stop people from continuing to do it to this day.
- tadfisher 2y agoThere is nothing left of those remains. The flesh was gone between a few days to a year or so depending on the water temperature. Microorganisms feed on the collagen binding the inorganic matrix, reducing the bones to dust within 10 years at the most.
- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago[dead]
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoHonestly the loss of life is kind of horrifying. Especially when you consider the vast majority were unarmed transport ships of some kind. I cannot imagine slowly trawling along in some tanker when suddenly you're under fire from a uboat with no way to shoot back. I feel like we're 'sleepwalking towards war' today with China over Taiwan (many top military brass have said they expect a war later this decade), and to be brutally frank, it's kind of insane to me that the powers that be have decided a mountainous island and some computer chips are worth the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands or even millions of human lives. I hope sanity prevails.
- SoftTalker 2y agoBig wars are also historically how we (humanity) have gotten out of financial depressions.
- metabagel 2y agoSuperficially, it might look that way, but war is a drag on the economy. Generally, there have to be sacrifices made to support a war economy.
- llamaimperative 2y agoWhat would be the more sane version? Allow nuclear armed states to invade whoever they want whenever they want?
- jonplackett 2y agoThis comment comes from a misguided position of believing USA are in the position to allow or disallow. As this article shows, ‘disallow’ is not as straight forward as it seems.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoIt's not solely up to the USA. The larger question remains, how does the world prevent nuclear states from simply taking over their neighbors?
- zeitgeistcowboy 2y agoWhat a great example of an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym . This guy's last name is Heersink and he's finding out where all the boats sank.
- tmrtsmith 2y agoAnd Nominative Determinism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
- coryfklein 2y agoWow that article is full of gold: * Justice named Igor Judge * Lawyer named James Counsell * Lawyer named Sue Yoo * Weather reporter named Storm Field * Vicar named Michael Vickers * Orthopedic surgeons named Limb, Limb, Limb, and Limb
- polishdude20 2y agoReminds me of Andrej Karpathy. "car pathy" And he worked on Tesla Autopilot.
- BitwiseFool 2y agoSometimes I feel like the universe really is a simulation and these names are the result of QA testers having a little bit of fun keeping track of who's who.
- mkapoor26 2y agoInteresting thing is he spent eight years creating a comprehensive dataset of over 14,500 mapped records of sunken ships...why??
- dredmorbius 2y agoFor context, the contemporary commercial merchant fleet is about 80,000 ships, roughly a third of which are bulk liquid carriers (a/k/a oil tankers). As a percentage, that's actually down from the 1970s/80s when half of all commercial ships were tankers. Most of the growth has been in container ships. Relevant to WWII, oil tanker losses by the US alone were staggering. "A total of 129 tankers were lost in American waters in the first five months of 1942." (<https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/operation-drumbeats-devastating-toll-on-allied-shipping/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/operation-drumbeat...>). A consequence was the US government building the first long-distance oil pipelines, the "Big Inch" and "Little Big Inch" pipelines from east Texas to refineries on the Atlantic seaboard in New Jersey. They remain in use. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Inch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Inch> I've also realised that both whales and large-scale commercial shipping rely on similar circumstances: the ability to on- and off-board cargo (or food) rapidly, widely-separated ports (or feeding grounds), and no significant predators (or war / piracy hazards). Whales are a remarkably recent evolutionary development, with the large great whales dating back only about 5 million years. Similarly, bulk shipping required not only global markets but cargos which could be handled in aggregate, whether liquids (as with petroleum), dry solids (mostly ores), or containerised miscellaneous cargo, the latter being premised on standardisation. Canals, safe shipping routes, and quayside cargo handling capacity were also prerequisites.
- OJFord 2y agoSo before then they shipped it around South America? Why not trains I wonder? Seems like a natural precursor to a dedicated pipeline.
- dmoy 2y agoThey shipped it from the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida/ Cuba, and up the coast to the eastern US. (And there was a lot of Mississippi river <-> ocean traffic too) And some of them got torpedoed by German submarines around there. (E.g. off the coast of Louisiana) No rounding South America involved. > Why not trains Way cheaper to ship by boat up the coast.
- benbristow 2y agoBattleships: Hardcore Mode
- anymouse123456 2y agoWould love to learn more, but hard pass on scrolljacking sites.
- bane 2y agoIf there was ever a map that showed the global scale of the war, this is the one if you consider how much of the Earth is Ocean. Clicking through the years also shows very clearly the tides turning, the war contracting around the axis powers, and the amount of absolutely destruction.
- bloopernova 2y agoIf you're interested in how some of the wrecks got in Ironbottom Sound, read Neptune's Inferno by James Hornfischer. Then read The Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors by the same author. Because it's an amazing book about some astonishing bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.
- phist_mcgee 2y agoI just finished Tin Can Soldiers. It's an incredibly powerful book. Highly reccomend.
- mkapoor26 2y agoSome didn't liked the site but I liked it, don't know seems impressive. Btw, the name is really a coincidence. like paul heersink (here sink) man finding the ships that sank. Found this video of him on YouTube guess he helped in mapping cache maps. Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oxT9Ud834Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oxT9Ud834Y Transcript: https://yttranscripttool.com/transcription?video_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D0oxT9Ud834Y https://yttranscripttool.com/transcription?video_url=https%3...
- abbbi 2y agothis site rocks wtf, your completely drawn into a nice story. Never had such an urge to dig deeper since a long time i opened a site.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- piqufoh 2y ago> But by 1943, the tides had turned in their favor. > There is a clear inflection point around March 1943: From this point onward, the Allied forces sank more ships every month than they lost. Any idea what what happened early 1943? Was there a specific event that changed the direction, or is the balance point of slow attrition?
- hermitcrab 2y agoThings went pretty badly for the Allies for the first few year, then: Battle of Midway - June 1942 Allied Victory at El Alamein - November 1942 German surrender at Stalingrad - February 1943 It was all downhill for the Axis powers after that.
- bloopernova 2y agoI would add to an already great list: Guadalcanal - August 1942 onwards. The Japanese were turned back here, both their army and navy.
- bjornlouser 2y agohttps://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-019/h-019-4.html https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/di...
- nathancahill 2y ago4-rotor Enigma was broken in Dec 1942.
- dbreunig 2y agoIf you look at the Pacific Theater, the inflection point is later, really amping up in late 1943. I'd imagine a one contributing factor is fixing the ridiculously buggy Mark 14 torpedo, which cleared up right about that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo Here's a great video on it: https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I?si=_1ujGsLQumraKz1Q https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I?si=_1ujGsLQumraKz1Q
- 2y ago
- hermitcrab 2y agoThe linked page is very impressive, as is the work that must have gone into the database. I once scuba dived on SS Thistlegorm, which was sunk by German aircraft while waiting to enter the Suez canal. It was quite eerie to see the trains and other vehicles still onboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Thistlegorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Thistlegorm
- neutered_knot 2y agoWhat was fascinating to me was that the first US commercial ship sunk by Germany was sunk on the south side of Australia! I found that by accident clicking around. Truly a world war, I suppose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_City_of_Rayville https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_City_of_Rayville
- defrost 2y agoAlso of interest are the two dots off the mid point of the west coast of Australia, one green for "non combatant merchant" one red for "armed warship". The reality is that the heavily armed "merchant ship" Kormoran was a stealth convert by the German Navy and generally referred to as the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran. The Kormoran was approached by the RAN warship HMAS Sydney for signaling and inspection, figuring that its game was up it unloaded everything it had fatally damaging the Sydney and taking on terminal shelling in the process. https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/hmas_sydney https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/hmas_sydney
- dmix 2y agoThis site crashes ios chrome if you scroll too fast
- xpe 2y agoLook at 1942. You'll see a large number of Allied ships were sunk in the Atlantic, not that far from the US coast. I'm not expert on WWII history, but I would not have expected that.
- stoltzmann 2y agoIt's from attacks by German submarines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time
- hilux 2y agoWow. It's my dream to dive these wrecks. I guess I'd better get on it.
- Simon_ORourke 2y agoMy pop's uncle was one of those Atlantic dots, he got off the SS Santore in 1942 after it stuck a mine coming out of Chesapeake Bay, and I remember growing up with his stories of how the merchant marine took greater casualties than any of the armed services.
- j-a-a-p 2y agoSeeing 20,000 dots is humbling. My grandfather survived two dots on this map. It has settled as a profound family story.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoMy uncle was on a small gunboat in the pacific, which was sunken by a single Japanese plane. They were on extended patrol, supposed to be observing and reporting from concealment. But bored sailors will do anything, and what they did was fire upon a small plane (missing it). Which turned and strafed them, sinking their little boat and leaving my uncle with shrapnel in his butt for the rest of his life. His tiny experience in a vast planet-wide panorama of violence. This mapping project is a heroic undertaking! My hat is off to the people involved.
- alex_suzuki 2y agoGlad your uncle survived to tell the story!
- mapsterman 2y agoThanks for the shout-out!
- ayewo 2y agoFor a moment there, I thought you were the grand parent commenter's uncle :). Nice work on the mapping project, monsieur Paul Heersink.
- bloopernova 2y agoThank you for doing this, the wreck map is amazing and humbling. This map makes it easier to follow some historic naval battles; things like being able to locate where the Atlanta went down, so close to the runway on Guadalcanal that was the focus of so much fighting.
- mapsterman 2y agoThanks!
- kh_hk 2y agodata > maps
- harimau777 2y agoIt's surprising to me how few ships seem to sink out in the open ocean where it would be nearly impossible to ever recover or research their wrecks. Does anyone know to what degree modern ships tend to hug the coast on their trips? My understanding is that until relatively recently (maybe the last 500 years or so?) almost all sailing was coastal and it was mostly unheard of for anyone to venture out into open ocean. However, I don't know to what degree that's still the case. E.g. if a modern ship is traveling from from somewhere in Asia or Europe to South Africa do they plot a relatively direct route or do they tend to hug the coast?
- snypher 2y agoSomething like https://www.shipmap.org/ https://www.shipmap.org/ could help answer this, but without sounding too trite, it probably depends on where the ship's destination is.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThat's a really great visualisation, BTW, thanks.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThat's mostly a function of which ports ships travelled between, various choke points (particularly straits and canals), and Great Circle routes. As an example, shipping traffic between Long Beach (Los Angeles, CA, USA) and Shanghai, China, doesn't head straight out into the Pacific, but hugs the west coast of North America, the southern coast of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and threads through the Japanese archipelago, not because today's container ships fear the open ocean and cannot navigate across it, but because that is the shortest route, following a Great Circle from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Similarly, Atlantic traffic between New York and Britain travels significantly further north than one might expect. WWII saw little US-China traffic, but a great deal of US-UK traffic. Sea traffic generally would have been concentrated along major supply routes. US-UK, as noted, Japan-Indonesia, and along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe and North Africa. Venezuela was another major oil hub, and Japan was sourcing materials from occupied China and Indonesia. There's also logistics for attackers: it's militarily advantageous to strike within target-rich environments (where there's a lot of traffic), where the opponent cannot defend or strike back, where traffic tends to be concentrated (straits, islands, port mouths, around islands), within range of a home base or resupply network (the US's western Pacific operations are a solid indicator of just how robust the US logistics chain was, to permit operations over 8,000 mi (13,000 km) from West Coast ports), etc. Hanging out in mid-ocean waiting for the stray target to come into view makes little sense. Even today, many shipping lanes tend to follow or be shaped by coastlines, see for example: <https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapping-shipping-lanes-maritime-traffic-around-the-world/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapping-shipping-lanes-m...> That map doesn't do justice to the tremendous traffic from China via Suez to Europe, or the massive amounts of South China Sea traffic, though at least the general routes are evident. It also cuts the US-China route in two by way of the map projection.
- RecycledEle 2y agoGerman U-Boats sank many more ships in the Gulf of Mexico that was reported. The FDR administration lied about it then, and I see from the map in the article that they have never corrected those lies.
- samber 2y agowe can even see the Normandy landing beaches (June 6, 1944)