Marine Traffic

There is a nifty application that we keep on our phone, and look at only occasionally, called Marine Traffic.

Most ships at sea use GPS not only to keep themselves on course, but to let others know where they are. Marine Traffic picks up those signals and maps the positions of the reporting ships. You can touch a ship's icon, and the program will tell you the ship's name, its speed, whether it's a tanker, a cargo ship, or whatever, where it started from, and where it's going.Very cool. 

The other day we took a look at what's going on in the Atlantic Ocean, and saw this:

Click on map for a larger view.

This is actually a "summary" picture. There are far more ships than this, as you discover when you zoom in to the picture. But even so, we found one thing to be rather startling:

Those purple ships? Those are yachts.

Now take a look at the Indian Ocean:

Click on map for a larger view.

The red ships are tankers. The ones that appear to be black are fishing vessels. Cargo vessels are green.

Just thought that was interesting.