MarineTraffic: Track the World's Ships in Real Time

MarineTraffic is a live map of global shipping. Every container ship, tanker, ferry, tug and fishing boat broadcasting its position, plotted in real time, each one clickable for its name, cargo type, destination and arrival estimate. It is the physical internet of world trade, rendered as thousands of slow-moving arrows.

Watching a ship crawl across the Indian Ocean at 14 knots is the most calming thing on the web. We stand by that.

What is MarineTraffic?

Ships are legally required to broadcast AIS, a short radio message containing who they are, where they are, how fast they are going and where they think they are headed. It exists so vessels do not hit each other in fog. It also happens to be a free, open, planet-wide firehose of logistics data.

MarineTraffic collects those signals from a huge network of coastal receivers, tops it up with satellites for the open ocean, and puts the whole thing on a map with color-coded vessel types. Green for cargo, red for tankers, blue for passenger, and so on. Zoom in on Singapore or Rotterdam and the screen turns into a traffic jam of arrows so dense you can barely see the water.

Then you click one, and it stops being an arrow. It is the Ever Given class of thing: 300 meters long, built in 2015, flagged in Panama, currently doing 12.4 knots toward Hamburg, arriving Thursday.

What can you do on MarineTraffic?

• Browse the live map. Pan anywhere on Earth and watch traffic move. The Strait of Malacca, the English Channel and the Bosphorus are the greatest hits.
• Click any vessel. Name, IMO number, flag, type, length and beam, year built, speed, course, draught, destination and ETA.
• See ship photos. Users upload pictures of vessels in port, so most ships have a gallery. That anonymous dot is a real object someone photographed in Hamburg last spring.
• Look up ports. Every major port has a page with arrivals, departures and expected vessels, plus a live view of everything currently at anchor.
• Filter by vessel type. Show only tankers, only passenger ships, only tugs. Watching the world’s tanker fleet alone is an education in energy.
• Check density maps. Historical traffic density layers show the shipping lanes as glowing highways drawn by millions of voyages.

Tips to get the most out of it

Look at the anchorage clusters, not the moving ships. Big blobs of stationary vessels outside a port mean congestion. It is the clearest real-time indicator of a supply chain having a bad week that any member of the public can see.

Turn on the density layer once. The historical traffic overlay draws the world’s shipping routes as light, and it looks nothing like the straight lines you would expect. Suez, Panama, Gibraltar and Malacca appear as glowing pinch points.

Search by IMO, not name. Ship names get reused and changed constantly; the IMO number is permanent and unique to the hull. It is the reliable way to follow one specific ship.

Watch a ferry route you know. Local ferries run on tight schedules and short hops, so you actually see the whole journey rather than a week of ocean. Great for checking whether your crossing is running late.

Remember free data can lag. Positions on the free tier may be a few minutes old, and open-ocean vessels update less often than coastal ones. It is a map of where ships were very recently, not a security camera.

Zoom into a canal. Suez and Panama transit convoys are wonderful. Ships line up, file through in order, and spread out again on the other side.

If you like MarineTraffic, also try…

• Flightradar24: the same fascination, several thousand feet higher and considerably faster.
• Windy: swell, wave height and wind for the seas those ships are crossing.
• earth :: nullschool: live ocean currents on a spinning globe, which explains a lot about shipping routes.
• OCEARCH Shark Tracker: tagged sharks pinging their positions across the same oceans.

More live-map obsessions await in our Maps & Exploration collection.