Wrecks — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is something that crashed, sank or was left where it stopped — a feature tagged `historic=wreck`, `historic=aircraft`, `historic=ship`, `historic=locomotive` or `historic=railway_car` in OpenStreetMap. 18,580 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot coloured by which of the five it is.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — who looks after it, where a mapper noted that. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

A shipwreck and a preserved ship are opposites

The colours matter more on this layer than on most, because two of the five classes mean nearly the reverse of each other and OpenStreetMap distinguishes them by a single word:

`historic=wreck` — a vessel that sank. The Lusitania off Kinsale, the Thistlegorm in the Red Sea, the ghost fleet at Mallows Bay. Drawn in deep blue.
`historic=ship` — a vessel preserved and on display. The Cutty Sark, USS Midway, the Vasa. Drawn in green, deliberately off the water colours entirely.

The other three:

Aircraft — 7,628 features, the largest class. A crash site, a memorial to one, or a preserved airframe on a plinth.
Locomotive — 2,443, and railway carriage — 1,490. Rolling stock left where it stopped, or kept as a monument. A warm pair in the legend, since anybody interested in one is usually interested in the other.

The layer is named for wrecks rather than for "preserved transport" because that is where the weight of it sits: shipwrecks and aircraft together are nearly three quarters of the features.

Places, not buildings

69% of this layer has no shape at all — the highest share of any layer on HueMaps. That is the honest nature of the subject: a wreck is a position on a seabed or a hillside, not a structure with a floor plan.

So the dots you see are mostly a single point somebody recorded, and they are drawn at a nominal small size rather than at the minimum, because a wreck that happens to have been traced is not a bigger event than one that was not — it is a wreck that somebody had the time to draw.

Where an outline does exist, the symbol is sized by its area in square metres measured on the globe, with symbol area proportional to that (radius to its square root). Among the 31% that have one the median is 115 m², which is about a large aircraft or a small coaster.

The largest features are stretches of sea

At the very top of the size range are not objects but marked areas: the final resting place of MS Estonia at 3.8 square kilometres, the Titanic wreck site at 2.2, the Mallows Bay ghost fleet. These are protected zones or debris fields drawn as polygons and tagged as wrecks.

They are legitimately tagged and are left in, but they are not the same kind of thing as a hull on a beach, and the size scale is capped so they do not set the scale for everything else.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge, diving records or aerial imagery; nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no hydrographic wreck database has been merged in.

Where they are

Moderately uneven by this site's standards. Counted crudely — features inside a bounding box, per million people — Germany has about 17, France 18, the United Kingdom 13 and Russia 14, against India 0.14. That is a ratio of roughly 130 to 1, well below the ambulance stations layer's 800 but well above the observatories layer's 90.

In absolute numbers the United States holds the most (4,216), which is a fair reflection of a large country with a great deal of coastline, a long aviation history and an active mapping community.

The obvious gap is underwater. A wreck is only mapped if divers, hydrographic charts or local knowledge put it on the map, and that coverage is very good off north-west Europe and North America and very thin almost everywhere else. Do not read an empty sea as an empty seabed.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a preserved ship that has since been scrapped may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.