Every Tanker on Earth
How 4GB of GPS data revealed a world in flux
At the end of 2022, Russian oil exports to India were rising. Could we make that visible with tanker traffic?
Spire Global passed along 4GB of raw GPS data — a position for every oil tanker on the planet, every 12 hours, over two years. Millions of points. We reconstructed traffic from the year before the Ukraine war and the year after.
The dataset was far too large for browser-based rendering. So we built a canvas pipeline that renders every frame individually, outputting high-resolution video rather than struggling with SVG or D3 state management. We extended the GeoJSON schema to add timestamps as attributes, then wrote custom animation logic — tracks that glow bright and fade into the background, paths that accumulate over time.
The result: small multiples comparing before and after. Trans-Atlantic routes redirecting. Persian Gulf traffic adjusting to sanctions. North Sea production finding new markets. Surging volumes to India and China. The slow restructuring of global trade, made visible.
Above: Desktop view of the Suez traffic comparison; global tanker routes before and after the invasion; mobile interface showing the animated small multiples.
Mobile-first, no compromises
Each map was designed as a square — landscape arrangement on desktop, stacked vertically on mobile. The same data, the same story, optimized for how people actually consume news.
Most readers experience the work on their phones first. Mobile isn't a compromise — it's the primary experience.
“It’s important not to allow your mobile version to be a compromise because most of your readers are gonna experience it first.”
What the data revealed
The graphics surfaced something unexpected: vessels spoofing their locations. Anomalies we couldn't believe at first turned out to be real — and led to further investigations by the WSJ team.
Domain experts from the oil industry reached out, blown away by what the data showed. When people who live inside a system can see it from the outside for the first time, you know the visualization worked.
Video as delivery format
One editor asked afterward: "Can you do it in code next time?" Missing the point. We did do it with code — but delivered it as video. More stable. More archival. Any resolution you need.
This pipeline — canvas rendering to high-quality video — has become core infrastructure at DGFX Studio. It powers everything from 5K animations to immersive experiences that would never work in a browser alone.
Capabilities
Here is how we did it
GIS
Mapbox
Javascript
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