
It is a stunning visualisation of just how busy the world's oceans are.

Researchers have created an amazing interactive map showing every merchant vessel that travelled on the ocean in 2012.

The map was created by data visualisation firm Kiln, and is based on data from the UCL Energy Institute.

Use your mouse to explore the map

The interactive map shows every merchant vessel that travelled on the ocean in 2012, and its creators boast is has over 250 million data points. It also shows just how much CO2 they are emitting.

HOW IT WORKS You can pan and zoom in the usual ways, and skip back and forward in time using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. The controls at the top right let you show and hide different map layers: port names, the background map, routes (a plot of all recorded vessel positions), and the animated ships view. There are also controls for filtering and colouring by vessel type. Advertisement

The team say they created the map to show just how much the oceans are used.

'You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric mapm' they say.

'You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).

The map shows five types of ship, from containers to tankers.

Its creator say while it is almost perfect, occasionally ships do appear to cross land.

'In some cases this is because there are ships navigating via canals or rivers that aren’t visible on the map,' they explain.

'Generally, though, this effect is an artefact of animating a ship between two recorded positions with missing data between, especially when the positions are separated by a narrow strip of land.

'We may develop the map to remove this effect in the future.'

The map is also incomplete for the first few months of the year: roughly January to April.

THE SHIPS IN THE MAP The map shows five types of ship, from containers to tankers. Each colour represents a type of shipment, and the type of ship used. This map shows the routes taken by each type Container (e.g. manufactured goods): number of container slots equivalent to 20 feet (i.e. a 40-foot container takes two slots) Dry bulk (e.g. coal, aggregates): combined weight of cargo, fuel, water, provisions, passengers and crew a vessel can carry, measured in thousand tonnes Tanker (e.g. oil, chemicals): same as dry bulk Gas bulk (e.g. liquified natural gas): capacity for gases, measured in cubic metres Vehicles (e.g. cars): same as dry bulk Advertisement

The map also reveals the shipping routes used around countries, such as this one of the UK

Removing the map and showing each dot even reveals the Earth's continents.

The create the map, Julia Schaumeier & Tristan Smith from UCL took data showing location and speed of ships and cross-checked it with another database to get the vessel characteristics, such as engine type and hull measurements.

This allowed them to compute the CO2 emissions for each hour.