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by hardlianotion 832 days ago
I had no idea shipping lanes were so densely populated.

EDIT - thanks all. I'll read it next time ...

6 comments

Here's a site that does live tracking of ships:

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:1.7/center...

"Since December 2004, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) requires all passenger and commercial vessels over 299 Gross Tonnage that travel internationally to carry an AIS transponder that include a GPS receiver which collects the vessel's position and movement details."

Counting across the longest segment of ships at the narrowest point of the English Channel in the feature article I see about 18 ships. In the live image from marinetraffic I see about 8. So even though the feature article is a composite image, the English Channel is indeed pretty crowded.

Yes, you can still see the shipping lanes very clearly.
Outstanding link; thanks for sharing.
These are composites, although it's not clear exactly how many images are composed to build the final view.
To quote the article:

> Inspired by some similar images shared by Tim Wallace in 2020, we’ve created a series of black-and-white composite renderings of some of the points of flux in the global energy system. Created in Google Earth Engine, these pictures are effectively annual timelapse images based on Sentinel-1’s radar, consisting of multiple snapshots taken by the satellite across 2023.

Not sure if the wind farm images are also composites (wouldn't make a lot of sense), but those of shipping lanes definitely are...

Those are composite renders, integrating over time, not a snapshot.

> Created in Google Earth Engine, these pictures are effectively annual timelapse images based on Sentinel-1’s radar, consisting of multiple snapshots taken by the satellite across 2023.

You can look at Marine Traffic to get a better sense of now versus the composites in the article.
The English channel is apparently busiest shipping lane in the world, so it’s not surprising that it looks so busy on these images.