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Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!

It was very tempting to make this week’s newsletter entirely about a certain ongoing space voyage you may have heard about. But there’s lots happening in the world, so we also have some charts on the strait of Hormuz, Melbourne’s seasons and more.

But first … is it still ‘space’ if it’s full?

To kick us off with a story from a different part of space, my UK colleagues have visualised the 32,000 objects currently orbiting Earth.

But perhaps even more alarming than the sheer number, is how fast this has grown – from about 7,000 objects in the 1970s and 20,000 in the 90s. The real map is animated – making it far more terrifying – and there are a bunch of other cool charts in here that you should check out.

Back in Australia, Andy Ball and I have been tracking the fuel crisis, including this animated map showing the (still) hundreds of service stations that are out of one or more fuel types:

That page is being updated regularly with the latest fuel prices across major cities, outages, shipments and the country’s fuel reserves.

Julian Fell and Casey Briggs at the ABC are using similar data to estimate fuel prices by capital city and regional classification. Julian also had a neat story about how the variation in fuel prices has reduced as margins get squeezed.

Four charts from the fortnight

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1. And then what happened?

Reuters has a brilliantly designed interactive asking people to guess what has happened since Trump’s tariff “liberation day” last year, by drawing and dragging on some charts:

We actually did a very similar interactive a couple of years ago, asking whether things had gotten better or worse. But ours didn’t have any interactive bar charts. Very jealous of Reuters’ bar charts.

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2. That’s just too many

How many seasons does Melbourne have? As an unwilling Melbourne resident I’d say it has two – cold and colder. But software developer Max Craigie has built a very cool app that suggests there are actually seven:

The methodology page on this app is fascinating – even using cosine similarity to match season names with weather data! Max also notes that the Wurundjeri and other Kulin Nation peoples have long recognised seven seasons in Melbourne, although this drew on cultural practice and knowledge of plants and animals, rather than just weather.

I tried to investigate whether Melbourne’s famous “four seasons in a day” is true a few years ago, and wound up making a quiz to help you find where to live.

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3. A very detailed map

There’s been a lot of brilliant maps made of the strait of Hormuz, but this incredibly detailed one by the New York Times really helped me get my bearings. It shows the scale of the Persian Gulf, and helps you understand where important sites like Kharg and Larak actually are.

This was another great map piece from the NYT, showing the scale of the war. And the ABC mapped Israel’s destruction of bridges in southern Lebanon.

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4. A ‘double shock’

My UK colleagues created this great/horrifying visual guide to the fertiliser blockade, and who it will affect. It included this map that stacks wonderfully on mobile:

There’s also a lovely Sankey chart in here. Very underrated chart, the Sankey.

Bookmarks

Off the Charts

I really wanted to show you this ABC interactive visualising the journey of Artemis II. Unfortunately I couldn’t get permission in time for print newsletter-o-clock. But I really recommend you click through. It’s great.

I also liked this New York Times story that includes an animated timeline and some beautiful graphics of the ship itself:

Quick! Someone make a minivan-to-Sydney-Harbour-volume conversion calculator.

Bloomberg has some fun little animations and 3D in this Artemis II interactive. German newspaper Die Zeit’s version is absolutely gorgeous – worth it even if you don’t speak Deutsch.

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