The Blitz

On September 7, 1940, the first night of the Blitz, over 800 bombs were dropped on London. This Google Map animates all the bombs dropped on London on that date.

The map uses Google Fusion Tables. Fusion Tables contains some pretty powerful spatial query functions. To create the animation I just run through the Fusion Table holding the data, showing each bomb in chronological order.

The map was partly inspired by Google's Mano Marks, who has been experimenting with creating time-line slide bars for use with Google Maps and Fusion Tables. Looking at Mano's examples got me thinking it would be nice to do a chronological animation.

This proof of concept isn't perfect (I don't like the flickering between each query) but works fairly well as a first try.

View the The Blitz Google Map.