Ship Map

Can I embed this map?

Yes. You are welcome to embed this map. Please include a link back to Kiln somewhere in the text of your article. Use the following embed code for a fully responsive embed that will adjust to the width of your website. Feel free to change the height and/or give it a fixed width if you prefer.

What can I see?

You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).

What can I do?

You can pan and zoom in the usual ways, and skip back and forward in time using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. The controls at the top right let you show and hide different map layers: port names, the background map, routes (a plot of all recorded vessel positions), and the animated ships view. There are also controls for filtering and colouring by vessel type.

What the are types of ships shown?

The merchant fleet is divided into five categories, each of which has a filter and a CO2 and freight counter for the hour shown on the clock.

Why do ships sometimes appear to move across land?

In some cases this is because there are ships navigating via canals or rivers that aren’t visible on the map. Generally, though, this effect is an artefact of animating a ship between two recorded positions with missing data between, especially when the positions are separated by a narrow strip of land. We may develop the map to remove this effect in the future.