🤖 Nobody is driving this

Every flash is an autonomous float rising from two thousand metres, reporting what it measured on the way up, and sinking again. Ten days of the global Argo array, late September 2026.

🔵🟠 Blue floats measure the physics, temperature and salinity through the water column. Orange ones also measure biogeochemistry: oxygen, nitrate, pH, chlorophyll, particles. About a quarter of the array now carries that second set of sensors, and that proportion is climbing fast.

Since the 1980s, growing concern over greenhouse gases pushed scientists to start breaking down exactly which human activities were driving emissions, sector by sector: Energy, Agriculture, Industrial Processes, Waste, Land Use Change and Forestry, and international Bunker Fuels (aviation and shipping).

This animation traces how each sector has evolved from 1990 to 2023, the most recent year with available data. One striking result: emissions from the Energy sector alone in 2023 exceed the combined emissions of every sector put together in 1990.

Every station in the World Ocean Database that sampled to at least 100 m depth, flashing at its exact place and time. From HMS Challenger through isolated national expeditions, to the transoceanic collaboration of the postwar decades, to Argo's drifting floats.

It starts with HMS Challenger (1872-76), widely considered the voyage that founded oceanography as a scientific discipline. For decades after, exploration stayed fragmented: individual nations running their own campaigns, mapping the waters off their own coasts, largely working in isolation from one another.