I doubt there’s anyone out there who’s even a teeny bit interested in expanding his knowledge and exploring new things and wouldn’t like to get complex scientific processes explained in a simple, straightforward way using beautiful graphics and visual data. If you’re reading this, I can assume you’d have a good amount of interest in beautiful design. Data visualization makes you understand complex things quickly and easily if the information presented is well-founded. With the development of the web technologies, the web 2.0 and HTML5 content presentation techniques have gotten simpler and more precise. An excellent example of what is possible now is a website that illustrates the Dangers Of Fracking to you. A complex process is explained in a beautiful, long page that utilizes some amazing illustrations and graphics and makes fabulous use of parallax scrolling.
If you’re not familiar with the term ‘hydraulic fracturing’, fret not. It is a new method to produce gas, and the site explains it as:
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside.
The site, designed by Linda Dong, uses nicely illustrated graphics like gas trucks or molecular water drops to explain the whole process of producing “fracked gas” and adds interesting data to them—like how many gallons of water are needed (and maybe wasted) to gain a certain amount of gas. [Ed note: My favorite bit on the site is the part where the truck exists a tunnel and rides along other trucks and ultimately enters the hangar.] The site’s (quite obvious) aim is to enlighten uninformed people and to make them rethink the basic question of how many resources we can extract from our planet until we completely ruin it. At the very bottom of the page you are encouraged to support FRAC Act (Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act) and get some more online resources if the topic really catches your attention — which is very likely after spending a few minutes on the site. All in all, Dangers Of Fracking is a very interesting, detailed and nevertheless simple explanation of an important economic and environmental issue and definitely worth your time.
Go ahead and give the site a visit. As we’ve always said, “Scroll baby, scroll!”