globaltraffic.earth

About globaltraffic.earth

What it is

globaltraffic.earth shows the planet’s trade on a 3D globe: the sea, air and land routes between countries, how much the goods on each one are worth, and where the industrial and wealth hubs are. The globe is free and needs no sign-up.

Besides the globe, the site has reading pages built from the same data: every country (what it exports, what it imports and who it trades with), every product (who sells it and who buys it), trade between pairs of countries, the maritime chokepoints that trade goes through, and each country’s trade dependence.

Who makes it

It is an independent project by Gabriel Maglia, made in Argentina. For data errors, press or licensing, please use the contact page.

How the data is built

Trade between countries. It comes from CEPII BACI (V202601), a database that reconciles what exporters and importers report, by product and year, from 1995 to 2024. It weighs several gigabytes: it is processed offline and the browser only receives summaries (the main flows for each year and each product section). Amounts are in current US dollars.

How it travels. BACI does not say whether a shipment went by sea, air or land. The split by transport mode is our own estimate, and the site labels it as an “estimated mode”.

Sea routes. We draw them on our own navigation network, derived from the World Bank’s map of shipping traffic density, between each country’s ports. Each route is an estimate, not an observation of real ships: we do not track vessels. Where there is no route, the arc follows the shortest path over the sphere.

Maritime chokepoints. What goes through Suez, Panama, Hormuz or any other chokepoint is also an estimate: we cross BACI trade with that route network. It is not a count of ships or of cargo measured at the chokepoint.

Trade dependence. It is measured by HS4 heading (about 1,200 product families). A country depends on a supplier for a heading when that supplier sells it more than half of what it buys of it. These are recorded exports and imports, not production.

Industry. The dots and models in Industry mode are Climate TRACE plants and basins that emitted 1 Mt of CO₂ equivalent or more in the year, in six sectors: power, steel, cement, aluminium, chemicals, and oil and gas.

Wealth. The towers in Wealth mode come from the gridded GDP of Kummu et al.: GDP cells grouped into large hubs. They follow population and economic activity in general, not industrial production.

How we do it

These are the main decisions behind the site and why we made them.

We process BACI outside the browser. The full database weighs several gigabytes. Loading it into a page would be slow and would make the site unusable on a phone. So we process it beforehand with our own programs and publish only summaries: the main flows for each year and each product section.

We built our own sea-route network. We evaluated an existing tool, SeaRoute, and dropped it because the license of its route network is not stated. Instead we derived a navigation network from the World Bank’s map of shipping traffic density and use it to calculate the route between each country’s ports.

We label every split by mode and every chokepoint as an estimate. BACI does not say whether a shipment went by sea, air or land, nor which chokepoint the cargo crossed. What we show comes from crossing trade with our route network. We prefer to write “estimated” rather than pretend to a precision we do not have: the site labels it, and each chokepoint page has its own method section.

We choose sources by license. We only use sources whose license allows commercial use. That is why we dropped UN Comtrade direct, whose plans are all for internal use, and OEC, and work with CEPII BACI, the World Bank and Climate TRACE, among others. Before adding a new source we read its license.

This is how we check the texts. We do not write each page by hand: the sentences are generated from the data with rules that have automated tests. Those tests look for the absence of value judgments, for example on the dependence pages, and for a section’s highlighted figure never being a number the page does not show.

How it is updated

The data is processed offline with our own programs and published together with the site. When CEPII releases a new version of BACI, the globe and every page are recomputed; each page states the year of its figures. Satellites are shown at a position computed in your browser from the published orbits.

Sources and licenses

Each source, with what it provides to the site and its license:

The data we build ourselves (totals, rankings, series and estimates) is published under CC BY 4.0. For ads, cookies and consent, see the privacy page.