Data and Methodology

Each flash on the globe represents one real human death, timed and placed from public demographic data. No flash corresponds to a specific identifiable person — the events are statistical, not records of individuals.

How often people die (rate & timing)

Each country emits deaths as an independent Poisson process. A country's deaths per year are computed as crude death rate × population ÷ 1000, which sets the mean interval between flashes; individual gaps are drawn from an exponential distribution, so deaths arrive irregularly (clustering and spacing out) rather than on a fixed beat. Worldwide this sums to roughly two deaths every second.

• Crude death rate & population — World Bank Open Data (indicators SP.DYN.CDRT.IN and SP.POP.TOTL), most recent year available per country. The World Bank's crude death rate is itself derived from the UN World Population Prospects.

Where deaths appear (placement)

Within a country, a death is not dropped at a random point but sampled from a population-density grid, so flashes concentrate where people actually live and each country's real annual total is preserved.

• Population density — Gridded Population of the World, v4 (GPWv4), aggregated to a 0.5° grid. Each cell's population sets how likely a death is to land there.

What you see (visualization)

Each death is rendered as an "atomic blast seen from space":

• A double flash — a near-instant first pulse, a brief dark minimum, then a longer second pulse that fades — echoing the double-flash signature of a nuclear detonation (the real first pulse lasts about a millisecond; here it is slowed so it is visible).
• A single, subtle shockwave that refracts the surface like one expanding water ripple, then dissipates.

Centring on you

On load the globe rotates to centre on your approximate location, looked up from your IP address via the free service ip-api.com. Only coordinates and a place name are used, cached briefly in memory and never stored. If the lookup is unavailable the globe simply keeps its default view.

Caveats

This is an illustrative visualization, not a surveillance or forecasting tool. Rates are national averages applied uniformly in time; density placement is approximate; and the blast imagery is a metaphor, not a depiction of cause or manner of death. Figures reflect the latest available data, which lags real time by one or more years.