About Raindrop
Every day a drop of rain lands somewhere on Earth: a mountain pass, a city, a glacier. Water only runs downhill, and every stream joins another until it reaches the sea, or a lake with no way out. Raindrop asks where this one ends up.
The answer is often not the nearest coast. Rain on Delhi is about 1,000 km from the Arabian Sea but reaches the Bay of Bengal. Four drops a few kilometres apart in the Swiss Alps reach four different seas.
How it plays
Drop a pin anywhere on the map where you think the water ends. Within 100 km, you’ve found it. A miss tells you how far off you are, never which way, and draws a ring that distance around your pin: the answer lies somewhere on it. Each miss also shows more of the drop’s journey. Four tries.
The routes
Each route follows the rivers of Natural Earth’s 1:10m map from the drop to the river’s mouth. Lines are simplified, and where the map has a gap (across a lake, a delta, or a stretch the map leaves out) the route is drawn straight. Distances are measured along the drawn route, so they are close to, but not exactly, the river’s length.
Every route’s ending was checked against an independent, finer river network (HydroSHEDS’ HydroRIVERS), and drops where the two disagreed were left out.
Fair play
Everyone gets the same drop, and a new one falls at 00:00 UTC. Which drop falls on which day is kept on the server, so not even the page’s code knows tomorrow’s. Your results stay in your browser: no accounts, no cookies, no ads.
Credits
Coastlines, lakes, borders, sea names and rivers: Natural Earth (public domain). Fonts: Source Serif 4 and IBM Plex Mono (SIL Open Font Licence).
Free, no ads, no accounts. Enjoying it? Buy me a coffee ☕