In the graph charting interest in the 2016 US presidential election, November 8 is an important date as it was the day the election was held. Megan tells Cueball to bring water if he is on the road during the totality, the implication being that people who are on the road may be stuck in their vehicles for long periods of time, and thus need refreshments. This time also the eclipse-viewers will wish to post their content on the social media which might also cause a cyber traffic jam, in which users may find that they experience delays in sending or receiving data due to a high demand on telecommunications infrastructure. (These traffic jams may be analogous to long lines at the polls or traffic jams caused by people trying to get to the polls.) Also as soon as people driving on the freeway enters the totality zone it has been seen happening that people just stop their cars and get out blocking the roads. Cueball is thus warned by Megan that the extreme amount of social media interest in the eclipse may lead to massive traffic jams, as last days frenzy regarding the eclipse will cause an enormous amount of people to decide to go to the eclipse in the last moment, causing huge traffic jams. Since the eclipse searches are outpacing the 2016 election searches now, this is saying the eclipse popularity is going to rocket upwards just before the eclipse. The link shown in the comic is here: wapo.st/2vkgIBv (subscription required) an archived version is available here at The ' cool map' is hosted by The Washington Post and sourced from Google Trends data. The other comics are 1877: Eclipse Science, 1878: Earth Orbital Diagram, 1879: Eclipse Birds, and 1880: Eclipse Review.Ĭueball comes to tell Megan about a cool map showing that searches on Google on the word Eclipse trace the same path across the USA as the totality band does, implying that those living in the zone are more interested than the rest of the US population.

This comic is the first of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the solar eclipse occurring on Monday, Augwhich was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the contiguous United States from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. Title text: There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 19, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

How to use eclipse searches