Topologies
An interactive atlas of global infrastructure across 20 lenses — from submarine cables to chip fabs to power grids — with path tracing and cross-lens dependencies.
Topologies is an interactive atlas of the hidden infrastructure that runs the modern world. Pick one of 20 lenses — submarine cables, internet exchanges, BGP routing, cloud regions, datacenters, chip fabs, power plants, critical-mineral supply chains, shipping lanes, maritime chokepoints, airports, satellites, and more — and see it drawn on a world map or as a force-directed network. Click anything for its data sheet, trace the optimal path between two points, and follow how one layer depends on the next.
Explore it live → worldlenses.janneparkkila.com
Why I built it
What looks like a borderless global internet is really a stack of small-N systems: 13 logical DNS roots, a handful of chip fabs, a few dozen cable landing hubs, a short list of atomic clocks that define what time it is. Switching lenses makes that concentration visible — and shows that a failure, sanction, or conflict at one layer ripples through the rest. I wanted a single tool that makes those dependencies tangible for students, researchers, and the merely curious.
What it does
- Two views, one language — every lens renders on a MapLibre world map (Geo) and as a d3-force network (Topology).
- Path tracing — shortest / most-reliable / highest-bandwidth routes between two nodes (Dijkstra + Yen's k-shortest paths), optimisable by latency, bandwidth, cost, or hops.
- Cross-lens dependencies — click a datacenter and follow it to the cable that feeds it, the IXP it peers at, and the power plant it draws from.
- What-if simulation — remove a node and watch the cascade across lenses.
- Time, filters, stats, compare — scrub a lens through history, filter by any field, see distributions, or pin two lenses side by side on synced maps.
- Dark + light — a brass-on-graphite “cartographic instrument” theme, with a daylight variant.
Honest data
Every node and figure carries a confidence level — verified (public records / operator data), estimated (derived or interpolated), or mocked (a structural placeholder, never a fake statistic). Data comes from open sources — TeleGeography, PeeringDB, OurAirports, the Global Energy Monitor, USGS, IEA, TOP500, CelesTrak, root-servers.org and others — each under its own licence, all credited on an in-app Licenses & Disclaimer page. ~3,700 nodes across the 20 lenses.
Built with
React 19 · TypeScript · MapLibre GL · d3-force · Vite · Bun. Static SPA, deployed to Cloudflare Pages with automatic builds on every push via GitHub Actions.