Realistic Earth Map with Maritime Routes
Global Maritime Engine

Navigating the
Open Sea.

While land has roads, the ocean is boundless. ArgoRoute is the intelligence that calculates the safest, most optimal path through the world's waters — and tells you how much to trust it.

See How It Works

The Architecture of the Ocean

While powerful routing engines exist for fixed land networks, maritime equivalents remain scarce and much weaker. The boundless ocean requires a radically different spatial approach. Here is how we solved it.

ArgoRoute isobaths across the Cyclades: Syros, Mykonos, Paros, Naxos and Milos, with the 500 m basins between the islands and the shallow shelves around them
The ArgoRoute graph over the Cyclades — Syros, Mykonos, Paros, Naxos and Milos — contoured into isobaths from 2 m to 500 m. Depths: GEBCO and surveyed data; basemap © OpenStreetMap, Protomaps.
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The Open Water Problem

Without roads, ships need constant depth checks to avoid running aground. Traditional GPS doesn't know what lies beneath the surface.

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Hexagonal Precision

We divide the planet's navigable water into 356 million hexagons. Each cell holds the shallowest depth inside it and where that depth came from, so the engine knows the clearance under your keel — and how sure it is.

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Adaptive Resolution

Open ocean is meshed at H3 resolution 3 (cells 138 km across); coasts at resolution 10 (130 m); named canals and straits down to resolution 13, where a cell is about 7 m wide. Precision is spent only where the water is narrow.

From Hexagons to Isobaths

The same graph, drawn the way a sailor reads a chart. Depth areas and isobaths are contoured from the hexagons without ever losing a shoal: a hex is only as deep as its shallowest sample.

ArgoRoute depth areas and isobaths over the Kornati archipelago and the Murter channel in Croatia, with water shallower than 2 m in red and shallower than 4 m in amber
≤ 2 m (draught) ≤ 4 m (draught + 2 m) 10 m 30 m 100 m 1000 m+
Kornati and the Murter channel, Croatia, for a 2 m draught — isobaths at 2, 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 and 100 m. Served as vector tiles straight from the ArgoRoute graph; basemap © OpenStreetMap, Protomaps.
ArgoRoute isobaths across the southern Adriatic Sea from the Italian coast to Montenegro, from the 2 m line along the shore to the 1000 m South Adriatic Pit
Depth at every zoom: the southern Adriatic from the Gargano to Montenegro, with the 1000 m South Adriatic Pit. Coarse layers for the overview, resolution 9 hexagons when you zoom into a harbour.

The Planet, Measured

One graph file, built from open data, serving routes and tiles for the whole ocean basin and every water connected to it.

356 M
water hexagons in the planet graph
72 M
depth cells served as vector tiles
10,148
ports embedded in the graph
169,041
charted rocks, wrecks and reefs watched live
35
named canals, straits and port approaches
98 %
of 400 random port pairs routed at 2 m draught
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Built for FlowAround

ArgoRoute was developed for the needs of FlowAround, the travel platform where it powers boat mode: sea routes for its users' vessels and the depth layer under their maps. Every rule on this site was written to answer a question a FlowAround skipper actually asked.

Once the engine is stable, ArgoRoute will become publicly available as a service — the routing API and the depth tiles — for anyone who needs honest routing at sea. Leave your details and we will let you know when that happens.

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Built for the Future of Seafaring

ArgoRoute answers a canal transit in a tenth of a second and an ocean crossing in seconds — and never hides what it does not know. See how the engine works or read how much of the seafloor is actually measured.