FIELD GUIDE · Earth & Maps
What Is a StoryMap? (And Why the Map Should Move While You Read)
A map shows you everywhere at once. So how do you get someone to look at the one place that matters?
Maps have a problem that has nothing to do with technology. A map shows you everywhere at once, which is exactly what makes it useless for telling you about somewhere in particular. Open a live map of the planet and you are handed the whole planet: hundreds of moving things, no starting point, no order, and no reason to look at one part of it rather than another. Most people spin the globe for fifteen seconds, feel mildly impressed, and leave.
A StoryMap is the fix. It is an article where the map is the page rather than an illustration on it. One live map stays fixed on your screen; the words scroll past it; and every time you arrive at a new chapter, the map flies to that place and switches on exactly the data that chapter is about. You never pan, never zoom, never choose a layer. You just read, and the view keeps up.
The format has a clumsy technical name — scrollytelling — and a very simple premise: the reader's scroll position is the only control the interface needs.
What it does that a static map can't
A picture of a map has to pick one view and live with it. If the article covers the whole Pacific and then a specific volcano in Tonga, a single image can serve one of those and not the other. The usual workaround is a row of small maps, which fragments the thing you were trying to keep continuous.
A StoryMap keeps one continuous map and moves it. That has three consequences worth naming.
Continuity. Because you watch the map travel from the last place to the next one, you keep your bearings. Flying from Japan to Tonga takes about two seconds, and in those two seconds you see how far apart they are and what lies between. A cut between two static images throws that away.
The right zoom for each sentence. A chapter about a 40,000-kilometre belt of coastline gets a view of the whole ocean. The next chapter, about a single eruption, gets a view a few hundred kilometres wide. Neither has to compromise for the other.
Layers as narration. Switching a data layer on at the moment the text mentions it is a genuinely different experience from finding a legend and clicking a checkbox. When a chapter about the seabed turns on the undersea cable routes, the point of the chapter appears under the words describing it.
How to read one
Scroll slowly. The map takes a couple of seconds to complete each move, and the chapter you are reading is highlighted while the ones above and below dim — that is how you know which stop the view belongs to.
Look at the small print on the map itself. The legend in the corner lists every layer currently drawn, who supplies it, and whether it is live. That corner is the part of the page doing the most work: it is the difference between "here is a beautiful picture" and "here is a specific dataset from a named organisation, and here is how current it is."
Read the figures with their footers. Each number in a chapter carries the body that published it and the date it refers to. A magnitude from 1960 says 1960. A cable statistic from this year says this year. If those two are jumbled together in your memory afterwards, the dates on the page will sort it out.
And take the exits. Every stop links back into the live tool it came from, because the StoryMap is a guided route, not a walled garden. The point of the journey is to hand you back the controls at the end, having shown you what is worth looking at.
The honesty problem, and how this format handles it
Guided narrative is persuasive, and persuasive formats are exactly where sloppy facts do the most damage. A confident sentence over a beautiful moving map is very easy to believe.
So the rails are built into the format rather than left to good intentions. A figure in a LiveEarthViewer StoryMap cannot exist without a named source and a date attached to it — that is enforced in the code that stores the story, not by an editor remembering. The LIVE tag comes from the layer's own definition, so a story cannot claim live data it isn't showing. And where a feed has nothing to show, the layer stays empty rather than being filled in with something illustrative.
That last rule matters more than it sounds. In our Ring of Fire story, the obvious move would be to draw the ring: a nice glowing horseshoe around the Pacific. We don't. The dots on that map are the real earthquakes of the last 24 hours, and if a quiet day means fewer dots, you see fewer dots. The shape they make is an observation, not an illustration — which is the entire reason it is worth looking at.
Where the format goes next
The obvious next stories are the ones where the geography is the argument: how a storm system crosses an ocean, why the world's shipping funnels through six narrow gaps, what happens to a country's electricity mix across a single day. Each of those is hard to explain in words and immediate on a moving map.
If there is a journey across the planet you would like taken, that is the useful thing to say. The engine is built. It just needs somewhere to go.
Frequently asked questions
What is a StoryMap?
A StoryMap is an article where the map does the moving. Instead of a static picture with a caption under it, one live map stays fixed on your screen while the text scrolls past. Each time you reach a new chapter, the map flies to the place that chapter is about and switches on the data layers it needs. You read; it travels.
Why not just put a map at the top of the article?
Because a single fixed view has to serve every paragraph, so it ends up serving none of them well. Zoomed out enough to show a whole ocean, you can't see the coastline being described; zoomed in enough to see the coastline, you lose the context. A StoryMap lets each paragraph have exactly the view it needs, without asking you to pan and zoom to find it yourself.
Is the data in a StoryMap live?
It depends on the layer, and the map says which is which. On LiveEarthViewer, a layer carries a LIVE tag only when its feed genuinely updates in real time — the earthquake layer, for example, is every quake of magnitude 2.5 or greater from the last 24 hours, fetched when you open the page. Layers like undersea cable routes or satellite ground imagery change over months, so they show their source but carry no LIVE tag.
How do I know the numbers in a StoryMap are right?
Every figure is printed with the organisation that published it and the date it refers to, right underneath the number. If a figure has no source it does not appear — the format is built so that an unsourced number cannot be added. Where a widely-repeated statistic doesn't hold up on inspection, the story says so instead of repeating it.
Does a StoryMap work on a phone?
Yes, and it's arguably the better experience. The map pins itself to the top of the screen and the chapters scroll underneath it with your thumb, which is the natural motion on a phone. No pinching, no hunting for controls, and no separate app.
SEE IT LIVE
Everything in this guide is on one real-time map.