Where every image comes from

The rules we hold ourselves to

• Real records only. Every image is a photograph or instrument record of something that exists. Where a diagram is genuinely the clearest way to show a number, it is drawn from published data and says so on its face.
• Nothing generated. No AI imagery, and no artist's impressions of Atlantis. The one thing this subject has too much of is convincing pictures of things nobody has seen.
• Self-hosted, never hotlinked. Images are served from our own origin, so visiting a page sends no request to any third party — the same rule the fonts follow.
• Copyrighted material is linked, not copied. The famous Cuban sonar scans belong to the discovery team and National Geographic. We point at them where they live rather than re-hosting them.
• Attribution is generated, not typed. The credit under each figure and each row below is read from the same machine-written record produced when the file was fetched, so it cannot drift out of step with the file it describes.

Maps and charts

The maps on this site are projected from Natural Earth vector data (public domain) with d3-geo, so every coastline is a real coastline and every marker sits at its true latitude and longitude. The depth chart is plotted from the published sea-level curve of the last glacial cycle, after Waelbroeck et al. (2002) and Lambeck et al. (2014). Where a position genuinely isn't known — the Cuba anomaly, whose coordinates were never released — the map draws a bounded area and says so, rather than inventing a pin.