A chart of four measured water records drawing themselves from 1800 to the present: Lake Mead surface elevation, global mean sea level, Great Salt Lake elevation and the Caspian Sea. Every value in the atlas is available as text on the globe, plan and section views.
Water Atlas Globe
Seventy-one percent of this planet is ocean. Almost everything else about it - every river stage, reservoir pool, tide record and desalination plant, is a number somebody measured. This is an instrument for reading them all at once, with the sources still attached.
01 · The Planet
Water is the one dataset that touches everything: power grids hang off reservoir elevations, grain prices ride river stages, and whole cities audit their futures in millimeters of sea level. Yet the record of it is scattered across a hundred agencies, formats and datums.
The Water Atlas gathers that record into one navigable object, a globe where reservoirs, lakes, gauges, dams, desalination plants and cloud-seeding programs share a single stage, and where the honest answer to “how full, how high, how fast” is always in view.
02 · Time
The atlas is timeline-first. Scrub from 1900 to the present and watch the planet’s plumbing change state: Hoover closes its gates in 1936 and Lake Mead is born; the Aral Sea starts to vanish in 1960; satellite altimetry switches on in 1993 and suddenly the whole ocean is a gauge; the Colorado megadrought pulls two decades of water out of the West.
38 documented events, commissionings, droughts, floods, record lows and data-regime changes, are pinned to the scrubber, so the line on every chart comes with its history.
03 · Trust
This is not a dashboard that launders data into vibes. Each feature carries a source registry, a confidence score, and a value class - observed, modeled, interpolated or derived, and when two sources disagree, the atlas shows you the disagreement instead of hiding it: the magnitude, the timestamps, and why one reading is preferred.
Coverage is honest, too. Where the record is thin, an unmetered basin, a contested gauge, a program that publishes sorties but not yields, the atlas says so, plainly, instead of inventing a value. 20 registered sources, ranked primary to inferred, from NOAA and USGS to satellite altimetry and Landsat-derived surface water.
04 · Human Scale
A reservoir elevation in feet above a 1929 datum is a fact, and facts this shape slide off people. So here is the same record, converted into things a body understands: a waterfall, a sheet of paper, a country, a room. Every magnitude below is computed from the curated points at page load, and every card shows its own arithmetic, which two readings, which two years, so you can check the claim instead of trusting it.
Horseshoe Falls at Niagara drops about 51 m. Lake Mead has lost more than that off the top of its pool.
The white band on the canyon wall is the receipt. Forty million people drink below it.
The short edge of a sheet of A4 paper is 210 mm. That much water, added to every shoreline on Earth.
It sounds small until you multiply it by every coastline, every storm surge, every high tide.
Denmark covers about 43,000 km². The Aral gave up more surface than that inside one human lifetime.
Once the fourth largest lake on Earth. The fishing fleet is still there, in the sand.
Greater London covers about 1,570 km². What remains of Lake Chad is roughly that.
Tens of millions of people across four countries still farm, fish and water herds on its edge.
A two-storey house stands about 7 m. The lake dropped that far between its modern high and its record low.
A falling terminal lake does not just shrink. It hands its bed to the wind.
About the height of a room, taken off the surface of the largest lake on the planet.
Five countries share this shoreline, and the shoreline is moving.
05 · The Instrument
Globe for the cinematic whole, layers you can switch, features you can fly to. Plan for the analyst’s flat map, rankings, anomalies, side-by-side comparison. Section for the cut-away, basin profiles with the waterline drawn where the record says it is, and the delta from baseline made visible.
Coda
The planet is not making more water. The same ocean that fell as rain on the first forests is the ocean in the glass beside you, borrowed for a while and handed on. What changes is not the amount. What changes is where it sits, how fast it moves, and who can reach it.
That is the whole argument for measuring it carefully. A reservoir elevation is not a statistic, it is a city’s next decade written in feet. A tide gauge is a hundred years of somebody walking to the harbor at the same hour to read the same staff, and then handing the notebook to the next person. This atlas exists to keep those notebooks legible: to show the record, name the source, admit the gaps, and let you see the shape of the century for yourself.
Go look. Start anywhere. The water is patient, and the record is waiting.