Ask how your lifestyle depends on shipping?
How important is transportation to modern lifestyles. At any point in time thousands of ships are transporting raw materials, intermediaries and finished goods across oceans and along coasts. Your breakfast can have fresh fruit from Chile, China, New Zealand, Brazil or South Africa. The price of a pint of fresh blueberries from Peru is at least to Canadians less than a quarter of the minimum hourly wage. The transport system, particularly that for time dependent food products is in many ways a miracle of modern organization – but also incredibly fragile in the face of any disruption to routes, ports, climate weather, or energy prices. The map below shows just how extensive the system is as the life’s blood of world commerce.
A New Map lets you visualize shipping traffic around the world. Interactive data visualization illustrates the incredible number of ships criss-crossing the world’s oceans at any given time.
See: https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/map-lets-you-visualize-shipping-traffic-around-world?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cgextranews for full article and other maps.
This incredible visualization of the world’s shipping routes was created based on UCL Energy Institute data. Filters on the website allow you to view routes, ports, and colour-coded types of ships. (Map: Kiln)
Thousands of containers of goods are shipped around the world every day in a global trading process so massive and complex, it can be hard to imagine.
To capture the enormity of the situation, Kiln, a London-based visualization studio, created the beautiful interactive map below:
Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute
On the site : https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/map-lets-you-visualize-shipping-traffic-around-world?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cgextranews is also an interactive map which allows you to follow ships globally and to zoom in on specific sites.
The Carbon Footprint of Shipping
Of related interest is the recent post by Gordon Kubanek on the CACOR-climate Google Group regarding the carbon footprint of shipping
Shipping has previously been excluded from climate agreements, but under the deal, emissions will be reduced by 50% by 2050 compared to 2008 levels.
One minister from a Pacific island state described the agreement as “history in the making”.
Shipping generates roughly the same quantity of greenhouse gas as Germany and, if it were accounted for as a nation, would rank as the world’s sixth biggest emitter.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43759923
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