Fast company logo
|
advertisement

IMPACT

This mesmerizing map lets you follow the path of a drop of water anywhere in the world

Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the world, and River Runner shows you where it ends up. It’s an illustration of how connected our waterways are—and how far pollution that enters our rivers or streams can travel.

[Image: River Runner]

BY Adele Peters1 minute read

If a drop of rain falls in Chengdu, China, it will flow nearly 2,000 miles away to the East China Sea. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, rain flows through multiple rivers to the Amazon in Brazil, eventually reaching the Atlantic Ocean more than 3,000 miles away. Rain falling in Custer, South Dakota, travels 2,600-plus miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Euphrates River in Turkey [Image: River Runner]
A mesmerizing new map calledRiver Runnerlets you choose a spot anywhere in the world and take a bird’s-eye-view path through the local watershed, down streams and rivers that wind through mountains and fields. It’s a global version of atool released last yearthat initially focused on American watersheds.

Data analyst Sam Learner built the project using data from the U.S. Geological Survey with help from the USGS’s water team and the Internet of Water, an organization that works on water data. (The back-end data needed to route the path of water globally didn’t exist in the right format, so the team had to build it.) Learner spent weeks tweaking the design to make navigation smoother; the tool is still in a beta version, with some names missing from streams and rivers.

The Canadian Rockies in British Columbia [Image: River Runner]
It’s fascinating to explore. “There’s something really interesting about ending up in little pockets of the country or world that you don’t know about at all, in interesting terrain,” Learner says. It’s also a clear illustration of how interconnected we are. He adds: “What we put in a river or stream ends up in someone else’s water.”

Pollution from New Delhi ends up in the Bay of Bengal. Fertilizer from farms in Minnesota and Montana ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it contributes to dead zones, areas where algae grows and chokes out oxygen, killing fish and other marine life. Plastic “nurdles” (pellets used in manufacturing) flow from factories to rivers and lakes. Trash dropped on a hike in the Austrian Alps might wash into a stream and end up in the Black Sea.

Aoraki/Mount Cook in New Zealand [Image: River Runner]
The same back-end data used to make the map, Learner says, could also be used to make another tool that would show everyone who’s upstream from a particular point, so people can better understand where water pollution is coming from.

ModernCEO Newsletter logo
A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Privacy Policy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a senior writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to climate change and other global challenges, interviewing leaders from Al Gore and Bill Gates to emerging climate tech entrepreneurs like Mary Yap. She contributed to the bestselling book "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century" and a new book from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies called State of Housing Design 2023 More


Explore Topics