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EarthWindMap

Life in the 21st century doesn't mean being able to ignore natural disasters; 150mph winds, tsunami waves, and earthquakes will still mess up one's day. But living in what used to be the future does allow us to understand such phenomena. We can even simulate it, albeit poorly. Living in 2017 also allows you experience it vicariously, at a macro scale, live and at home. For years now, people have been collecting geotagged data and building online map layers, visualizing global shipping or air corridors. Scientific agencies publish data from satellite geosensors measuring land and sea temperatures. And we can use them to watch nature remind us of our place.

Take flight tracking. Yesterday, Jason Rabinowitz—@AirlineFlyer on Twitter—live-tweeted the progress of a Delta Boeing 737-900 that raced into and then out of Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Puerto Rico before Hurricane Irma made its presence known. The plane, flying JFK-SJU under the flight number DL 431, landed just before noon on Wednesday. In less than an hour, it had refueled, taken on 173 passengers, and then was back on its way to JFK. This time as DL302—which we noticed took off almost half an hour early—it was the last plane to leave the island that day.

Now DL302 has to climb out of SJU, and they're doing so between the outer band of #Irma and the core of the storm. Amazing stuff. pic.twitter.com/lOq9Te5DO6 — Jason Rabinowitz (@AirlineFlyer) September 6, 2017

Rabinowitz's updates showed the flight threading its way through the core of the hurricane and one of the outer arms. It took about 30 minutes to clear Irma's grasp, and my sympathies go out to any nervous flyers who went through that. By all accounts, the rest of DL302's flight to New York was uneventful.

Right now, sites tracking airplanes or ships offer a pretty vivid look at the disruption around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. There's a ton of air traffic around Miami right now, but if you look closely, it's almost entirely headed somewhere else as people scramble to leave Florida. But the most detached perspective on our current hurricane season is courtesy of EarthWindMap. The screenshots don't quite do it justice, as the site is animated, with white lines moving across the globe visualizing wind speed. Watching not one but three hurricanes spiral around my monitor in silence is both eerie and mesmerizing.

Just 50 years ago, this kind of geospatial awareness would have been far beyond even the most advanced of the superpowers. Today, you and I can access it all from a browser or smartphone.

Listing image by flightradar24