Painted Ships on Painted Oceans: an Accidental Map of the Doldrums

Take millions of data points, each one a geolocated entry plucked from a digitised collection of 18th- and 19th-century ships’ logs (1), pin them all on a blank canvas, and you get this extraordinary world map.

This map may have been featureless to begin with, yet we can clearly discern the contours of the continents. That is the cumulative effect of significant numbers of coast-hugging vessels, generating enough data points to reveal the length and breadth of the land

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This map may have been featureless to begin with, yet we can clearly discern the contours of the continents. That is the cumulative effect of significant numbers of coast-hugging vessels, generating enough data points to reveal the length and breadth of the land.

I would have thought the continents are in stark relief because of their lack of data points.
Anyway I’ll read it in more depth at my leisure.

A nice map of the doldrums, but I question the completeness of the maps.

The 1850 and 1860s were the period of Australian Gold Rush. Melbourne and Sydney harbours were crammed with sailing ships, but they’re almost completely missing from the map.

mollwollfumble said:

A nice map of the doldrums, but I question the completeness of the maps.

The 1850 and 1860s were the period of Australian Gold Rush. Melbourne and Sydney harbours were crammed with sailing ships, but they’re almost completely missing from the map.

By crammed, you mean a lot for Australia.. ? A single ship could carry a huge fortune in gold.

I see the problem. The traffic on east coast USA seems so heavy BECAUSE these logs were taken only from American ships. Most ships weren’t American.

On the other hand, the ship that brought my ancestors (father’s father’s father’s …) to Australia during the gold rush was American, so it’d be interesting to know if its track is on the map. It didn’t pass through the doldrums but made the trip faster than modern surface mail.

The main purpose of this research by ICOADS was to use ship log entries from 1784 to the present day to map sea surface temperature, air temperature, wind speed, sea level pressure and cloudiness as functions of time.

Such data would be extremely useful in evaluating global trends associated with climate change. For instance, average sea surface temperatures increased a lot between the 1810s and 1850s and then were roughly steady, actually slightly declining, from 1854 to 1940, then suddenly jumped up to modern values in 1942.

As the article says, this is purely based on a US database.

dv said:

As the article says, this is purely based on a US database.

heya deevs. hows it hanign?

Bump.

Like a sheep on a hook.