Styling Ocean Depth Data in Mapbox Studio

How to obtain, process, and visualize bathymetry data

Vector map tiles are a state-of-the-art technology for building interactive map applications on the web, useful to have in the toolbox of any data viz practitioner. The advantage over raster map tiles is that they are dynamically rendered on the client, using a declarative map style configuration. It offers full design flexibility, such as easy customization or label internationalization, without sacrificing scalability. For a more detailed comparison, I highly recommend the blog post What are vector tiles and why you should care from MapTiler, one of the vector map tiles providers.

Another provider is Mapbox, which also provides a convenient online tool Mapbox Studio for designing custom maps. The quickest way to start is to copy an existing map style and customize individual layers. Alternatively, creating a new style from scratch involves selecting an existing data set or uploading a custom data set.

The vast majority of map applications naturally focus on the land features. However, about 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by oceans, which deserve more attention and a better visual look than just a solid blue color.

In the rest of this story, we are going to see how to access publicly available data…