How to use MapTiler Ocean

MapTiler Ocean focuses on global bathymetry. You can now have oceans, seas and even landforms with labels, contours with more precise depth, special colour ramps in shades of blue and the bathymetry terrain hillshade in your maps. This article will help you to leverage the MapTiler Ocean map style to the hilt!

Important notice

To use the MapTiler Ocean, you need to set up a MapTiler Cloud account. If you don't have one yet, don't hesitate to sign up for free!

MapTiler Ocean datasets

MapTiler Ocean map style uses various sources of data. The core one is MapTiler Ocean - world gridded bathymetry vector tiles processed from the 15 arc-second elevation dataset by GEBCO. MapTiler Ocean tiles include detailed bathymetry features such as ocean floor polygons with average depth values, contours, landforms or labels.

Additionally, there is the terrain hill shading for both land and ocean, land polygons and selected features from MapTiler Planet (such as rivers or island names) to provide better context information.

Customize the MapTiler Ocean

You can directly use the Ocean map style from MapTiler Cloud or find it at this link. It is listed as a Standard Map in your account's Maps section.

To easily adjust the map colours, use Customize a Copy button that will take you to the Customize interface. Here you can change the colour schemes for land, water and placenames separately and create a completely different map experience in a few clicks!

Advanced editing of colours

Advanced users can adjust the map colours more extensively in the Advanced editor. You can change all layers included in the map and make it completely in your desired style. Labels are split into island, lake, river, ocean, undersea, depth and landform layers. Terrain hillshading colours and exaggeration can be adjusted separately for land and ocean. There are also shadow layers highlighting the land polygons that can be changed.

For the ocean floor changing based on the depth values, we used match expressions in the JSON code. Thanks to this, bathymetry colour ramps can be adjusted to a completely different gradient by changing each of the colour stops. Either adjust the colour or the depth value or both!

The colours go from the lightest blue for a depth of -50m to the darkest for a depth of -12,000m. We are keeping consistent intervals between the depths.

The depth labels on contours are also changing based on the ocean floor. With the depth getting lower than -4,000m, the labels are paled out to stand out in the dark waters. The case expression was used here to differentiate between two colours and two levels of zooming.

You can adjust the expressions prepared by our cartographers or write your own based on the MapLibre GL JS Style specification.

Adding placenames and more geographical context

By default, the Ocean map doesn't include any labels or borders on the land. You can easily add any geographical context information from MapTiler Planet in the Advanced Editor. To check what layers and features are available, please visit the MapTiler Planet schema page. Once you are sure what layers you wish to add, click the Add Layer button in the top-left corner. Here you have a few boxes to fill:

• ID - the name of the layer (you can type whatever suits you)
• Type - the type of the data that defines styling (the most common are Fill for Polygons, Line for LineStrings and Symbol for labels and texts)
• Source - source tileset of the data (here it will be maptiler_planet)
• Source Layer - source layer that can be found in the schema

In this example, we are adding borders. As you can see, the data is of type Line, and comes from maptiler_planet source tileset and the layer is boundary.

You can style the added layer as preferred or you can copy the style from existing map styles that are available in your Maps section. Feel free to copy the whole JSON code of the layer and then adjust the details.

Finally, we added two border layers (country and disputed) and country name labels. Country labels come from the Source Layer called place. The colours are adjusted so that the added context is matching the colour scheme of the Ocean map. The initial JSON code of the layers is taken from the Stage map - you just need to open the Advanced Editor (Edit a Copy button) and copy the code from preferred layers.

Useful links

MapTiler Ocean map
How to build an ocean vector bathymetry map with MapTiler