Visualizing the Thai cave rescue operation

The Thai cave rescue was a great story with a happy ending. It's also one that lends itself to visualization. A good visualization can explain the rescue operation more efficiently than mere words.

A good visual should bring out the most salient features of the story, such as:

• Why the operation was so daunting?
• What were the tactics used to overcome those challenges?
• How long did it take?
• What were the specific local challenges that must be overcome?
• Were there any surprises?

In terms of what made the rescue challenging, some of the following are pertinent:

• How far in they were?
• How deep were they trapped?
• How much of the caves were flooded? Why couldn't they come out by themselves?
• How much headroom was there in different sections of the cave "tunnel"?

There were many attempts at visualizing the Thai cave rescue operation. The best ones I saw were: BBC (here, here), The New York Times (here), South China Morning Post (here) and Straits Times (here). It turns out each of these efforts focuses on some of the aspects above, and you have to look at all of them to get the full picture.

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BBC's coverage began with a top-down view of the route of the rescue, which seems to be the most popular view adopted by news organizations. This is easily understood because of the standard map aesthetic.

The BBC map is missing a smaller map of Thailand to place this in a geographical context.

While this map provides basic information, it doesn't address many of the elements that make the Thai cave rescue story compelling. In particular, human beings are missing from this visualization. The focus is on the actions ("diving", "standing"). This perspective also does not address the water level, the key underlying environmental factor.

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Another popular perspective is the sideway cross-section. The Straits Times has one:

The excerpt of the infographic presents a nice collection of data that show the effort of the rescue. The sideway cross-sectional section shows the distance and the up-and-down nature of the journey, the level of flooding along the route, plus a bit about the headroom available at different points. Most of these diagrams bring out the "horizontal" distance but somehow ignore the "vertical" distance. One possibility is that the real trajectory is curvy - but if we can straighten out the horizontal, we should be able to straighten out the vertical too.

The NYT article gives a more detailed view of the same perspective, with annotations that describe key moments along the rescue route.

If, like me, you like to place humans into this picture, then you have to go back to the Straits Times, where they have an expanded version of the sideway cross-section.

 

This is probably my most favorite single visualization of the rescue operation.

There are better cartoons of the specific diving actions, though. For example, the BBC has this visual that shows the particularly narrow part of the route, corresponding to the circular inset in the Straits Times version above.

The drama!

NYT also has a set of cartoons. Here's one:

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There is one perspective that curiously has been underserved in all of the visualizations - this is the first-person perspective. Imagine the rescuer (or the kids) navigating the rescue route. It's a cross-section from the front, not from the side.

Various publications try to address this by augmenting the top-down route view with sporadic cross-sectional diagrams. Recall the first map we showed from the BBC. On the right column are little annotations of this type (here):

I picked out this part of the map because it shows that the little human figure serves two potentially conflicting purposes. In the bottom diagram, the figurine shows that there is limited headroom in this part of the cave, plus the actual position of the figurine on the ledge conveys information about where the kids were. However, on the top cross-section, the location of the figure conveys no information; the only purpose of the human figure is to show how tall the cave is at that site.

The South China Morning Post (here - site appears to be down when I wrote this) has this wonderful animation of how the shape of the headroom changed as they navigated the route. Please visit their page to see the full animation. Here are two screenshots:

This little clip adds a lot to the story! It'd be even better if the horizontal timeline at the bottom is replaced by the top-down route map.

Thank you all the various dataviz teams for these great efforts.