The Crunch: the tragedy in Sudan, a hole in airspace, and outdoor swimming pools
The Guardian reveals what appears to be a comprehensive strategy to destroy food supply chains and starve people in Sudan
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter we have charts on shrinking glaciers, where all of Melbourne’s pools are, and what made thousands of people happy.
But first …
Kaamil Ahmed and Alex Clark at the Guardian in the UK have a devastating story of what appears to be a comprehensive strategy to destroy food supply chains and starve people in Sudan.
There’s a lot in this piece, including satellite images showing villages being burned and their livestock and farming infrastructure destroyed.
Back in Australia, we’ve visualised some of the deadly impacts of climate change in the past fortnight – including this story looking at how hot the nights were over one of the hottest ever summers.
Many of the weather stations that recorded some of their hottest January daytime temperatures then set rainfall records a month later – as you can see in this Big Chart.
Finally, we mapped the heavy rainfall and dangerous flooding across the Northern Territory and Queensland over the past week.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. Now you see me
As a lifelong resident of (relatively) hot countries, I’m, frankly, struggling to get my head around a glacier so large that it could shrink by more than 3km.
This is a really interesting and sad story from the ABC, of climate change affecting a way of life in Switzerland.
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2. A massive hole
Nick Evershed and our colleagues from the UK and Middle East worked on this story about how the US-Israeli war on Iran created a massive hole in global airspace as airlines diverted away from the conflict:
Click through for an animated version of this map, as well as some other visuals exploring the impact on air travel.
Reuters also released this visual packed series looking at protests across the world, evacuations in Lebanon, toxic clouds over Tehran and more.
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3. Outsourced again?
Over the past decade, employment at Nike’s factories in Indonesia shrank in more developed areas, and grew in lower-cost areas, according to this story by ProPublica:
The satellite transition from undeveloped land full of trees to a sprawling campus that makes footwear is quite stark.
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4. Girt by pool
The Age has an interesting story using AI and satellite images to find outdoor swimming pools in Melbourne:
This kind of story shows how we can use AI to analyse huge chunks of data and reveal some of the inequalities across our cities not captured by other metrics.
It also reminded me of this Pudding story from a couple of years ago, where they identified almost 60,000 outdoor basketball courts across the United States.
Bookmarks
100 different visualisations using one dataset
The 2026 Sigma awards shortlist
Americans are particularly likely to view their fellow citizens as “morally bad” (Australia is in there too)
Simon Willison has visualised different sorting algorithms
How sound helped the ABC sync videos of the Bondi terror attack
A beautiful story about why summers aren’t the same as they were for previous generations
Off the Charts
Perennial Crunch favourite Alvin Chang is back with some joy – although not with his usual purple palette. This time, Alvin is mapping responses from a 2017 project that asked people for their “happy moments”.
You can actually click on little people and see what they say:
The data methodology is particularly interesting in this one – how Alvin categorised the responses and then split them into regions to map.
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