6 ms·
Watch the path of a raindrop from anywhere in the world
- tetris11 2y agoIf you drop a pin anywhere in south london, it takes several "unknown river"s which on the map are stated clearly as the River Wandle. The US drops seemed a lot cleaner
- steve_adams_86 2y agoSame with British Columbia, Canada. There are a lot of unidentified waterways. In Victoria, BC, virtually everything ends up going down a small inlet called "the gorge". It's not quite correct to consider it a stream, river, creek, etc. Still a really cool idea, and when it works well it's good fun. I can see there being great practical applications if it was more accurate too (though I'm sure the people who could put it to use already have good data)
- brazzy 2y agoThe river Isar through Munich, Germany, which is one of the larger tributaries of the mighty Danube, is also "unknown". The data outside the USA is definitely lacking in that regard. I guess the names are taken from an underlying hydrologic dataset, and Google (or whoever) maps used purely for visualization.
- PopAlongKid 2y agoPosted just a few months ago, the comments point to prior postings in last five years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41752052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41752052
- johann8384 2y agoSo?
- darth_avocado 2y agoDupe?
- dredmorbius 2y agoNot with only three comments and two votes, which is well below the "significant discussion" threshold. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9416150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9416150>
- darth_avocado 2y agoThere has been significant discussion like the grandparent points out? 2022 (790 points, 115 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29841737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29841737 2021 (887 points, 128 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27297689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27297689
- dredmorbius 2y agoHN's rules on dupes: - No reposts within a year, unless ... - Posts within the past year have not had "significant discussion", a value left provocatively vague by dang, but I figure as roughly >= 20 comments. Reposts after 12 months or if there's been no significant discussion within the past 12 months are both perfectly OK. You're welcome and encouraged to read the guidelines and FAQ (both linked on every HN thread and comment page) and/or see dang's many, many, many previous comments on this topic: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20reposts%20are%20ok&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
- 0x1ceb00da 2y agoDoesn't account for lakes
- decatur 2y agoDropped into Gulf of Mexico. Response: Finding downstream path from Unknown Territory
- wizzwizz4 2y agoIt does that for all ocean.
- singleshot_ 2y agoI believe we call that the Gulf of Authority now.
- xanderlewis 2y agoThe Gulf between the Two Ears.
- culebron21 2y agoYou mean Danish Gulf?
- bagels 2y agoIt doesn't work for me, but I'm going to assume the model does not include evaporation or ground water?
- imyerf 2y agobroken now, just spins
- ninju 2y agoHN Hug of Death :-)
- fourteenfour 2y agoIf you just want to look in the US, their other similar project seems to be working OK. https://river-runner.samlearner.com/ https://river-runner.samlearner.com/
- psunavy03 2y ago"Unable to find a flowpath from that location, try something else." And that's most of greater Seattle.
- returningfory2 2y agoMy favorite fact about raindrop paths/watersheds is that they determine most of the political boundary between Argentina and Chile. If the rain at a point ultimately flows to the Pacific Ocean, that point is in Chile; if it flows to the Atlantic Ocean, it is in Argentina. This is article 1 of the original boundary treaty [0] from the 19th century. The treaty was made before the Andes were fully explored, and so it doesn't handle some interesting edges cases like the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. The field has the property that when rain falls there, it freezes and goes nowhere! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Treaty_of_1881_between_Chile_and_Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Treaty_of_1881_betwee... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Patagonian_Ice_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Patagonian_Ice_Field
- dredmorbius 2y agoWatersheds and rivers are often key determinants of pre-industrial borders, if only because they served (variously) as obstacles (wide, fast rivers) and facilitators (narrow / slow) to navigation. Until the development of steam-driven railroads and internal-combustion-driven vehicles, if you wanted to move any considerable quantity of goods or people, your best option was a ship over either a (reasonably) calm sea, or inland rivers, lakes, and canals. Ice ran a close second, and ice roads remain vital transport routes in Siberia and Alaska. Where run over rivers and lakes, those tend to be (near) level terrain, and frictional losses are minimised. China built over 1,000 km of canals 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. Inland travel within England and Great Britain was revolutionised by the development of canals. The US opened up its interior with the Erie Canal, on which a single mule could haul an 80-foot barge laden with 40 tonnes of goods or people. Not only was the travel efficient (in terms of motive power and drovers) but it was comfortable. A four-foot-deep ditch (the Erie Canal) was immune to the rutting and mud of a road, and though the speed of travel was low, in a matter of a few days people could travel in great comfort across New York from the Hudson to Lake Erie and from there to points inland via the Great Lakes, Chicago, and Mississippi / Missouri / Ohio / Red, and other, rivers. I'd realised the political boundaries aspect looking at a map of European watersheds created by Robert Szucs: <https://www.seattlepi.com/local/science/article/Viral-maps-show-all-U-S-Europe-river-basins-in-10159099.php https://www.seattlepi.com/local/science/article/Viral-maps-s...> (Europe is in the carousel at the top, third image, isolated here: <https://s.hdnux.com/photos/54/21/22/11605137/3/960x0.webp https://s.hdnux.com/photos/54/21/22/11605137/3/960x0.webp>) It's not that national borders are specifically identified as watersheds, but in large part you can patch together current state boundaries out of watersheds and rivers, or find internal divisions (e.g., UK counties, German states, French provinces) out of watersheds. In regions in which borders were more arbitrarily assigned, as with the inland US, Middle East (o hai Sykes-Picot), and Africa, the artificiality of imposed borders is highly evident, though regional affiliations become clearer. South American countries are, as you note, more closely aligned with watersheds. It's also more evident why the north-eastern region of South America is so politically divided: it's largely composed of non-contiguous watersheds which have become their own polities. <https://s.hdnux.com/photos/54/21/22/11605136/4/960x0.webp https://s.hdnux.com/photos/54/21/22/11605136/4/960x0.webp>
- vekatimest 2y agoBackend seems to be unresponsive currently.
- sour-taste 2y agoTangentially related are lakes that flow out to two different oceans. Lake Isa in Yellowstone (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isa_Lake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isa_Lake) is an example. Even more interesting the different sides of the lake flow to the 'wrong' oceans: the eastern side of the lake flows to the Pacific and the western to the Gulf of Mexico.
- restlessdesign 2y agoNeat!
- notcrazylol 2y agoDamn this is soo cool! I tried it at a random place and it worked like magic! But when I tried it near my house, the website broke :D I think it doesn't handle unidentified rivers.
- martini333 2y agoFirst try ends up in something called "Gulf of Mexico", what is that?
- quicklime 2y agoA place in Oceania. Might be called something else in Newspeak though.
- pmontra 2y agoThe animation is cool but I'd like a way to disable it and just be able to see the path on the globe, then tap to another place and see that other path too. It would be OK to reload the page to clean all paths. No need to have a way to share them if there are more than one path.
- kaskakokos 2y agoI tested it on a peak we have in Spain called 'Pico Tres Mares,' which translates to 'Three Seas Peak,' and it was nice to see that depending on which side you drop the raindrop, the water flows to the Bay of Biscay, the Atlantic, or the Mediterranean. Nice.
- stewarts 2y agoVery similar named peak in Glacier National Park - Triple Peak Divide. Water can flow to the Pacific, Atlantic, or Arctic oceans.
- longbrass 2y agoTimbuktu in Mali only travels 444 km!
- Doxin 2y agoIt doesn't quite always manage to reach the ocean, even when it claims it does[0]. Though I suppose in this domain The Netherlands would be the edge case of all edge cases. I've also noticed it'll often not start the raindrop anywhere near where you click, so it's not quite anywhere in the world. Definitely most places though.