Live plot · AISStream, with Digitraffic / Fintraffic as fallback
Live AIS map
Positions of vessels currently transmitting AIS, heard by a worldwide network of shore-based receivers. The plot refreshes as you pan and once a minute at rest. Coverage ends where the receivers stop hearing — dense along well-served coasts, thin elsewhere, and empty in mid-ocean. Global reach, not a complete picture.
- Source
- AISStream, fallback Digitraffic (Fintraffic)
- Licence
- Free use; Digitraffic CC BY 4.0
- Refresh
- ~60 s
Contacting the live feed…
Ship category—
Following
—
No longer being heard — it may have moved out of receiver range. The position below is the last one we received and is not current.
Measure
Click two points on the map.
Straight-line great-circle distance between two points. It is not a route, takes no account of land, traffic separation or depth, and is not for navigation.
Legend
- Arrow — heading, or course over ground if heading is not sent
- Circle — neither heading nor course reported
- Cluster — vessel count in that area; click to zoom in
- Coverage — where our receivers hear traffic, not where ships are
- Colour is the ship category decoded from the AIS ship-and-cargo type.
Live feed unavailable.
This is a feed outage, not an empty sea. Vessels are almost certainly moving; we just cannot see them right now. The vessel index still works from our own store.
Positions: AISStream.io, falling back to Digitraffic / Fintraffic, CC BY 4.0 · Basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by OpenFreeMap
What the plot currently shows
The plot is a canvas drawing and cannot be read by a screen reader. Once positions load, this paragraph describes the current view in words: how many vessels are drawn, how many were matched in the area, the busiest categories, the feed they came from and how old the fetch is.
Marker legend
Colour is the ship category decoded from the AIS ship-and-cargo type. Shape carries a separate fact: an arrow points along the vessel's reported heading, or its course over ground where heading is not sent. A vessel reporting neither is drawn as a circle, because a bearing we do not have must not be drawn as though we did.
Reading the plot
- Age matters more than position. The chip shows how long ago we fetched. A 40-minute-old dot is a 40-minute-old circle of uncertainty.
- A gap is usually range, or nobody listening. Vessels leaving the coastal band stop being heard, and stretches of coast have no receiver at all. See why ships go dark.
- Small craft are under-represented. Class B transponders are quieter and yield in congested water; the Digitraffic fallback feed also filters fishing vessels at source.
- Names and destinations are typed in. Position comes from the ship's own satnav receiver; identity comes from a text box. See how AIS works.
- Feed down is stated, not hidden. If the upstream feed fails we say so on the map. We never show an empty sea in place of an outage.