
A live map of marine traffic - camtarn
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/centery:25.0/zoom:4
======
kasperni
While working as a consultant many years ago I started
[https://github.com/dma-ais/AisStore](https://github.com/dma-ais/AisStore)

It is an online high-available database (running on Cassandra) capable of
archiving multiple terabytes of AIS-data with an insert rate of > 100.000
messages/minute. Besides the archiving mechanism is features an export tools,
simple analytical capabilities based on time, geography and identity. In also
supports simple real-time (less than 1 second) queries based on small time
intervals, limited geographical areas, or single ships.

Besides AisStore there is a lot of other AIS tools in [https://github.com/dma-
ais](https://github.com/dma-ais) Unfortunately, the department I was
consulting for has been closed. So the projects are dormant.

Also happy to answer any questions.

~~~
blantonl
This is great work.

There are a lot of really impressive technology projects out there that focus
on crowdsourcing data like this. ADS-B (for aircraft), $this->AIS, ATCS
(railroads), radio communications etc.

What's even more amazing is how these project inspire new uses of the data for
media, intelligence, politics, investment analysis etc.

~~~
jimktrains2
Do you know one for ATCS? I've been looking this week and haven't found any.

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juskrey
I see a lot of startups popping up in this industry again. Gathering and
processing AIS data is a lot of fun. I was first and, for some time, lead
coder for one of them, Weft, until acquisition.

Drop me a note if you are seeking for help in this area, I'd be pleased to get
my hands on that again.

~~~
sails
Would you mind linking to a few of the startups you've come across?

Also, do you know of any databases of MMSI ship registration numbers or
similar? Presuming this should be open access, even if very static.

~~~
juskrey
I am not aware of any to any extent exhaustive open databases of MMSI or AIS
data. Sea register MMSI data is fragmented and generally not open enough.

Only commercial data providers can load you up with good historical AIS data
and registers, so you can create MMSI table or whatever.

This again depends of what do you want to achieve. Something like 3 months of
amateur worldwide AIS feed can give you a pretty good snapshot with MMSIs,
names etc.

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kawfey
Here's a live map of amateur radio traffic.
[https://aprs.fi](https://aprs.fi).

And of air traffic:
[https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html](https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html)

And of high-altitude balloons.
[https://tracker.habhub.org/](https://tracker.habhub.org/)

I love this sort of stuff.

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rocgf
Sort of off-topic, but I just wanted to point out the environmental impact
that these ships have one the planet.

According to Wikipedia, "maritime transport accounts for 3.5 to 4 percent of
all climate change emissions, primarily carbon dioxide." [1] Oil spills,
ballast water, sewage and other issues that they cause are NOT counted in that
3.5-4% figure.

There are plenty of other jaw-dropping statistics about maritime trade, but I
can't find bulletproof sources for them. For example, it is estimated that a
big cargo ship can produce as much pollution as 50 millions cars and it is
said that the biggest 15 ships in the world produce more pollution than all
the cars in the world combined.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shipping)

~~~
kasperni
Shipping is both the cheapest and most carbon-efficient method of cargo
transportation [1].

They do let out an awful lot of Sulphur though. Which causes a lot of
premature deaths. However, from next year an annex [2] to the MARPOL
Convention is coming into effect which hopefully will lead to a huge
reduction.

[1] [https://timeforchange.org/co2-emissions-shipping-
goods](https://timeforchange.org/co2-emissions-shipping-goods)

[2]
[http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-20...](http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2020.aspx)

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tmostak
This interactive and cross-filterable visualization of ~12 billion AIS records
may be of interest:
[https://www.omnisci.com/demos/ships/#/dashboard/1](https://www.omnisci.com/demos/ships/#/dashboard/1)

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tunnuz
Oil tanker in flames in Oman
[https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:42...](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:4275315/mmsi:538007007/vessel:FRONT%20ALTAIR)

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gloflo
I wish there was a community or even governmental service of this data with
_zero_ limitations. Some countries already provide data for their waters but
the rest is a weird mixture of commercial exploitation of community hosted
receivers.

~~~
juskrey
There are some amateur AIS receiver networks, but they cover only near the
shore areas.

Generally AIS data is open and free, but capturing may cost.

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PetitPrince
Random idea: superimpose this with a live map of air traffic.

~~~
sandermvanvliet
I seem to recall an idea to have ships listen for aircraft transponders and
relay that information by satellite to improve coverage in the middle of the
ocean for tracking aircraft.

~~~
blantonl
I believe there are a few projects where satellites are actually providing
this functionality directly from space.

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Ahmed90
Ahhh my father is a capitan I used to track his ship with this site like 8
years ago, it was very accurate

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andy_ppp
You should be able to predict the price of shipping things if you know where
all the ships are... or even slow down or speed up vessels to obtain a maximum
price at the next port. But if everyone starts doing this it will probably
just make everything worse.

~~~
juskrey
Major shipping lanes have strict and well known schedules. Of course not
without accidents of various nature. Most dull problems actually happen in
ports (customs etc)

~~~
andy_ppp
I'm surprised no-one has automated shipping yet, I was pretty surprised how
huge the margins were (usually 100% profit) and how big the shipping industry
is.

The right startup in this area could be very effective I think.

~~~
bennyelv
They actually kind of have... the crew on a big ship do very little “shopping”
and a hell of a lot of maintenance. The open sea is a very hostile place and
most of the work involved is keeping the ship healthy in that environment.

~~~
Workaholic_87
Agreed. Nowadays the majority of the crew's time is spent either doing
maintenance or filling out paperwork to satisfy regulatory requirements - very
little involvement with cargo operations (w/ the exception of some specialty
liquid cargoes)

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Cthulhu_
I'd like to see a timelapse of this map / the data behind it, just see the
flow of transportation is quite satisfying (like in certain games, Transport
Tycoon and Cities Skylines come to mind).

~~~
tomgp
on this site... [https://www.shipmap.org](https://www.shipmap.org)

"You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012,
overlaid on a bathymetric map."

~~~
flurdy
Shows if you control Gibraltar and Singapore you have a lot of power over the
worlds ship lanes. Guess the British knew that...

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DigitalTerminal
Cool site, anyone else notice the huge void of no ships around Somalia?

~~~
mannykannot
At the default setting, there is a noticeable absence of ships in the Atlantic
to the west of the British isles - where is the traffic between Northern
Europe and the Americas? I wondered if it was due to really bad weather (no -
it appears to be good), but if you zoom in, the traffic appears.

As far as I can tell, this is not a consequence of the filter settings - no
exclusions seem to be set.

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kerrsclyde
I can see the Atlantic from my window, great when I found this web site so I
can put name / destination to those huge ships on the horizon off the coast of
Cornwall, UK.

~~~
mmikeff
I just did the exact same thing, for the boats I can see in Falmouth harbour.

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nate_NL
Reminds me of a customer of ours, [https://econavis.io](https://econavis.io)
We built an entire API to fetch marine life data. If you're interested in
bundling / including this data in your api, I'd suggest to contact them!

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fnord77
what's with all the fishing vessels clustered here?

[https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-96.0/cent...](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-96.0/centery:-3.2/zoom:9)

~~~
Moru
I would guess a popular fishing spot since most of the boats in the area now
states "fishing". The location does not update very often, too far from land
and recievers most likely. The popup says location recieved by satelite
somewhere between 3 hours and 20 minutes ago.

~~~
raquo
I think it's just delayed to make this free preview useless for most
commercial applications. They sell this data after all.

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ebg13
One of my favorite projects OpenSeaMap
([http://openseamap.org/index.php?id=openseamap&L=1](http://openseamap.org/index.php?id=openseamap&L=1))
also has a marine traffic layer.

~~~
ablation
Fantastic map, thank you. I just wish I could click and interact with things
on the map to learn more! The key features quite a few 404 errors too.

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LoyCog
Where do they get this data from?

~~~
wiml
It's probably just logging AIS data (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_Syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System)
). Large ships are required to broadcast (like, on the radio) their position,
heading, and so on. Anyone with a radio receiver can collect this data for
ships within radio range. Anyone with a large number of internet-connected
radio receivers can collect this data over a large area.

~~~
juskrey
Amateur AIS receiver networks are only covering near-shore areas, for obvious
reasons.

Covering deep sea/ocean areas (often the most interesting part) requires some
paid subscriptions.

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cyborgx7
Seeing all those water routes in Germany, made me want to get a house boat.

~~~
Aromasin
I've been debating this for years. Partly because it sounds like a fun life,
partly because the only way I'm getting affordable housing in London is if
it's floating in the Thames.

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matt_the_bass
Marinetraffic is the industry standard for this service. I use the paid
version at work. It’s great! Their database is very extensive.

I think they do a good job for the free version too.

~~~
chappi42
> I think they do a good job for the free version too.

They did but, imo, no longer do. Features like passage details are now
restricted with a link to paid plans (which are absurdly expensive for
occasional recreation usage).

~~~
matt_the_bass
I’d love to hear more about your recreational uses for passage details.

~~~
chappi42
\- If I click a vessel and then "Past track", a line appears with the voyage
but I cannot see details like e.g. speed. There is only a message: "Try the
voyage data service...". For pure curiosity the prices are much to high:
[https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/online-
services/plans](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/online-services/plans).

\- If I wanted to see where a vessel has come frome, I would need last 30 days
minimum as recreational boats often do pause at marinas/anchor.

Prices are much too high for occasional 'curiosity' looking. Maybe I'd pay up
to 80/y, but not 140 and certainly not 470. The latter would be needed for
voyage data older than 3 days. Nautical map overlay would be great, maybe I'd
pay 50/y for this in addition.

Wonder if the service could distinguish between commercial ships and
recreational motor/sailboats? Or maybe use a traffic limit to differentiate
between professional/hobby usage?

~~~
matt_the_bass
Thanks! Can you share more about how you want to use that data?

~~~
chappi42
Personal information/pure curiosity. Not really important.

E.g. about a couple of sailing friends, how fast did they sail in comparison
to others? Or maybe in which anchorages or marinas someone was? The issue is,
that sometime you want to check this out one (or even a couple of) months
later.

Potentially also great for passage planing, e.g. density report and/or
nautical map layers. (Maybe one-off months could work for this but so far I
didn't try).

Satellite data would rarely be needed. For individual tracking 'YB Tracking'
seems better suited than AIS.

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CDokolas
Surprised to see people surprised of this site. It's been up for some years!

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tempodox
Wow, that is one cool map. Throngs of ships, each one identifiable.

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landcoctos
Why does it have a call for a script to google.cn (China)?

~~~
cheschire
My version of the site has no calls to there. Could be a CDN issue.

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lone_haxx0r
I don't know why I assumed it was (sub)marine Internet traffic.

