Atlas · methodology
About this atlas
An interactive reference for the world's strategic commodity flows — the producers, consumers, sea routes, and chokepoints that move 34 commodities across ~530 country-to-country trade pairs.
How to read the map
- Green countries are major producers/exporters of the selected commodity.
- Red countries are major consumers/importers.
- Arrow thickness AND glow intensity both scale with relative trade volume — a 10× larger flow renders ~3× thicker and noticeably more luminous. Flows without published volume figures use the commodity's mean weight as a placeholder and appear at average intensity.
- Yellow circles mark maritime chokepoints; they pulse orange for commodities that transit them.
- Arrow style indicates transport mode: solid+animated for sea, fine dotted for air, long dashes for land/rail, dash-dot for pipelines.
- Multi-mode flows (e.g. India→US pharma is 60% sea, 40% air) render as parallel arrows with thickness proportional to each mode's share.
- Multi-route flows (e.g. Brazil→China iron ore via Cape or Panama) also render as parallel alternatives.
- When a transport mode is filtered on (e.g. Sea), arrows of other modes desaturate to grey and lower their opacity so the active mode stands out cleanly without losing context.
Data sources
Per-commodity sources are listed in the table view (toggle via Show table). Primary references include:
- Energy: EIA, IEA, Energy Institute Statistical Review, JODI, IGU World LNG Report
- Metals & minerals: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, World Steel Association, Cobalt Institute, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
- Agriculture: USDA FAS PSD, FAO, ITC Trade Map, ICCO, ICO
- Health & biotech: ITC Trade Map, IQVIA, EFPIA, Worldstopexports, MARGMA
- Semiconductors: ASML / TSMC / SK Hynix investor reports, Counterpoint Research, TrendForce, AnySilicon, SEMI
Sea route methodology
Real ships don't sail in straight lines — they follow established shipping lanes through chokepoints. We approximate this by:
- Defining ~75 named corridors as ordered chains of waypoints (chokepoints + open-ocean midpoints).
- Mapping each (commodity, origin, destination) flow to one or more corridors.
- Smoothing the path through waypoints with Catmull-Rom interpolation.
- Where multiple real-world routes are substantial (e.g. Brazil→China via Cape or Panama), rendering both as parallel arrows.
- Air routes follow the true great-circle (geodesic) between origin and destination — not the same path as sea.
Corridor assignments are research-informed but should be treated as illustrative rather than precise: real ship routings vary by season, fuel cost, and political conditions.
Route verification
All 532 routes in the atlas have been individually researched and cross-checked. The verification process ran over five rounds:
- Initial sourcing — each route assigned at least one primary source (government agency, trade body, industry tracker, or major news investigation).
- Multi-source cross-check — flows with multiple cited sources were audited for consistency between sources.
- Single-source tightening — flows relying on a single source were audited to ensure the note's specific claims (volumes, rankings, company names, years) actually appear in the cited source. This round caught several material errors (e.g. Japan listed as #1 paraxylene exporter when Korea is #1; "Netherlands" listed as #3 PE exporter when the underlying source identified Belgium; a MEED article dated 2011 used for 2026-context claims).
- Geographic/corridor audit — the corridor token assigned to each route (which drives the visualization line) was cross-checked against the route's text description. Found and fixed 12 real mismatches — e.g. Saudi Yanbu (Red Sea side) routes that were drawn looping through Strait of Hormuz, US Pacific Northwest grain routes that were drawn detouring through Panama, Russia→China nickel/cobalt drawn through Sea of Japan when actual routing is the Northern Sea Route.
- Single-source caveats — where a note's specific number wasn't directly attributable to its sole cited source, the note was rewritten to stay within what the source actually claims, or a better-fitting source was substituted.
Each table-view row shows the specific sources for that route. Where you see only one source, treat the route's specific numeric claims as drawn from that single reference; broader context is from the editors' research.
Mode split methodology
Each flow has a default transport mode by commodity (e.g. crude oil = sea, semiconductors = air). Some flows have explicit overrides (e.g. Russia→China crude is partly pipeline). Where a flow is genuinely multi-modal (e.g. India→US pharma ~60% sea / ~40% air), we estimate the split based on industry sources and render parallel arrows.
~105 of the ~530 flows have explicit multi-mode splits. The remaining flows use the commodity default. Sea arrows follow the named corridor; air arrows follow the true great-circle. Splits are estimates, not measurements — real percentages vary month-to-month.
Limitations & caveats
- Volume figures are approximate annual aggregates; treat as orders-of-magnitude rather than exact tonnages.
- "Europe" is treated as an aggregate node (EU+UK) for most analyses; individual EU producers (France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, etc.) are broken out where they dominate a specific commodity.
- Source attributions are per-route in the table view — but the underlying data is whatever each source publishes, which may itself be an estimate, an aggregate, or a projection.
- Some flows (e.g. intra-EU rail, US-Mexico truck) are simplified to a single arrow even though they represent thousands of individual shipments.
- Air freight values for chips and biologics are based on industry estimates of mode-share, not direct measurement.
- Country boundaries are political (current); historical analysis would require shifting boundaries — out of scope here.
What's missing (planned)
- Country-focused view — pick a country (India, USA, China, etc.) and see every commodity flow in/out at once
- Interactive chokepoint closures — click any chokepoint in single-commodity view to simulate a disruption and see which importers are exposed (extends the scripted scenarios in Story mode)
- Embeddable widgets — single-commodity iframe views for blogs and classroom LMS
- Sankey / alluvial alternative views — proportional-ribbon view of producers → consumers per commodity
Story mode (guided tours through Hormuz/Suez/Ukraine/semiconductor scenarios) is already available via the Stories button.
Authors
Claude (Anthropic) — primary author. justtinkering.me — co-author and editor.
Citation
If you use this atlas in research, teaching, journalism, or any public-facing work, please cite as:
Data year: Most flow volumes reflect 2024 trade data (compiled May 2026). A subset of entries draw on 2023 (e.g., paraxylene, ethylene polymers, Saudi petrochemicals) or 2025–2026 figures (e.g., Plaquemines LNG ramp, INEOS Project One, China PP/PVC YTD reports, EIA Hormuz LNG 2024 published 2025). Each individual route entry in the table cites its specific source and data year.
License
© 2026 justtinkering.me. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 — you are free to share, adapt, and build on this work for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to justtinkering.me and link to the license. Commercial reuse requires explicit permission. The underlying source data remains the property of the original publishers cited in each route entry.
Feedback
Spotted a factual error, a broken citation, or a missing route? Have an idea for a new story? Want to use this in your classroom? Get in touch — every piece of feedback helps make the atlas more accurate and more useful.
✉
Send feedback
atlas@justtinkering.me