“Watch the path of a raindrop from anywhere in the contiguous United States…”

Fast Company – This map lets you fly along the path of a drop of water from any place in the U.S. “Click on any spot or enter an address, and it will show where the water is likely to flow. Good for both learning how pollution and plastic spreads, but also for an aerial visual ride of the country’s waterways….A new map called River Runner lets you trace the long path of water throughout the U.S.: Click on any spot or enter an address, and it will show where the water is likely to flow. Data analyst Sam Learner started working on the project after thinking about how water travels from the Continental Divide. “I though that journey would be really interesting,” he says. “If we start at the top of a mountain on the Continental Divide, just watching this split—one journey a few hundred miles to the Pacific, and another to the Gulf of Mexico. As I started digging into the data, I realized that the scope of it could be much bigger…Using data from the United States Geological Survey, and with help from the USGS’s water data team, he mapped the flow path of water from every location in the U.S. Though it illustrates the idea that a drop of rain will follow this path, it’s worth noting that some water might evaporate, or end up in a water treatment plant, or go into groundwater, or otherwise not make the whole journey; Learner is now working on another project that tracks how water is pulled out…”