This is really cool, but is it jumping around for anyone else? I zoom in and pan around to an area of interest, then after a few seconds the view is changed to somewhere radically different for no apparent reason. It also randomly toggles the various overlays when it does this(routes, ports, etc).
Why do ships sometimes appear to move across land?
In some cases this is because there are ships navigating via canals or rivers that aren’t visible on the map. 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.
1st of Nov, 2012 - A ship goes up between USA and Russia, seems to dock, then joins up with another boat that seems to have been just hanging around for ages above Siberia, then they head off to Europe.
Perhaps one ship was stuck in sea ice and the other helped it along? It looks like the extent of the ice ends about the same place those two ships separate over Siberia[1]
