I expected this to be http://marinetraffic.com/ which shows current/recent locations. But I'm not sure if it shows every single cargo ship in the world.
Yep, terrestrial AIS receivers can only receive messages from ships that are less than ~50 nautical miles off the coast. Further out than that and you need satellite-based AIS data.
(I'm an engineer at Spire, we've launched a constellation of nanosatellites that does exactly that: https://spire.com/products/sense/ )
This is endlessly fascinating, thank you. I'm sure there's fun work being done by commodities traders using this type of data - sure enough there's a pricing section for API calls to their service. I would be curious to see how well it can predict performance for manufactured goods though - for large-scale consumers like Wal-Mart it might be possible to say that rising imports to the US (more container ships incoming) point to increased demand by consumers, therefore invest in Wal-Mart.
"Burning massive quantities of bunker fuel. The result is a huge amount of CO2...commercial ships produce more than a million tons of CO2 every day."
Narrator is unnecessarily alarmist here, and sounds like we should be concerned about the contribution of cargo ships to the greenhouse. I would say we should celebrate the shipping industry for being so much more beneficial to humanity per unit of CO2.
Um yeah bunker fuel is disgusting stuff. It's so bad, sometimes ships can't burn it in territorial waters due to local environmental regulations. It's not the CO2 in bunker fuel exhaust that makes it so terrible, it's everything else.
I don't see how it's alarmist to note the fact that they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group. I think they could do better, and we wouldn't pay that much more as consumers for a lot of the goods, unless the biggest overhead really _is_ with shipping.
"they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group."
Wrong. Shipping is the most efficient transportation of mass-distance per unit of CO2. Shipping's CO2 contribution is only %3-%4 of total CO2 produced by humans.
> they are by far and away one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses as a group
Not sure what you mean by "group", but animal agriculture beats all transportation (road, sea, air) combined when it comes to greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect. There are a few different sources from the UN on this (plus some other sources with even higher numbers).
> Very few ships travel around the southern tip of South America
The latitudes between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula are the only latitudes that have no land (barring the area around the North Pole, which are usually locked in sea ice). As a result, there is a very strong current and very strong winds that make shipping dangerous. Note that most ships prefer the Straits of Magellan--a cramped, dangerous corridor, to passing the open water south of Cape Horn, which should tell you just how dangerous the area is.
> Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.
The Strait of Malacca is the real chokepoint, not the South China Sea. The concerns about the South China Sea are largely related to natural resources that may lie in the area. It should come as no surprise that Malacca was traditionally the worst area for piracy--before they started cracking down on it in the early 2000's, it was pretty much as bad as the Somali hijackings that gripped press (and those made press largely because the hijackings had spread from the Gulf of Aden, a consistent pirate menace as far back as Roman times, to the Indian Ocean off of Somalia).
The southern tip of South America is known as Cape Horn (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Horn). It's an unpredictable and dangerous area, hence the popularity of the Panama Canal.
Russia is huge, hence a lot of river shipping.
Control of the seas would bring a lot of influence, hence the British control of Gibraltar and the complex history of the Suez Canal.
Note that I'd expect to see the influence of ice floe in the Bering Sea (=from Alaska to Russia, the most used channel should change latitude depending on the ice coverage in winter), but I don't see where the ice limit could be. Do they have icebreakers to keep the channel open?
>> The map is built from data showing ship locations in 2012, so it's not exactly what things look like today, but it's a pretty close approximation.
What were oil prices then? What are they now? What is the state of piracy then? What is is now? Interesting, but I suggest that the really interesting details aren't to be found on this map.
Readit News
(I'm an engineer at Spire, we've launched a constellation of nanosatellites that does exactly that: https://spire.com/products/sense/ )
It scans the entire (?) globe every few hours. I think accrss to those observations is one of the benefits of a paid AIS subscription.
Narrator is unnecessarily alarmist here, and sounds like we should be concerned about the contribution of cargo ships to the greenhouse. I would say we should celebrate the shipping industry for being so much more beneficial to humanity per unit of CO2.
Wrong. Shipping is the most efficient transportation of mass-distance per unit of CO2. Shipping's CO2 contribution is only %3-%4 of total CO2 produced by humans.
Not sure what you mean by "group", but animal agriculture beats all transportation (road, sea, air) combined when it comes to greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect. There are a few different sources from the UN on this (plus some other sources with even higher numbers).
Dead Comment
Very few ships travel around the southern tip of South America
A corrupted data point sends it flying across Russia and into Southern Europe.
A lone ship travelling to Svalbard.
Multiple ships travelling in rivers deep into Russia.
Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.
The latitudes between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula are the only latitudes that have no land (barring the area around the North Pole, which are usually locked in sea ice). As a result, there is a very strong current and very strong winds that make shipping dangerous. Note that most ships prefer the Straits of Magellan--a cramped, dangerous corridor, to passing the open water south of Cape Horn, which should tell you just how dangerous the area is.
> Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.
The Strait of Malacca is the real chokepoint, not the South China Sea. The concerns about the South China Sea are largely related to natural resources that may lie in the area. It should come as no surprise that Malacca was traditionally the worst area for piracy--before they started cracking down on it in the early 2000's, it was pretty much as bad as the Somali hijackings that gripped press (and those made press largely because the hijackings had spread from the Gulf of Aden, a consistent pirate menace as far back as Roman times, to the Indian Ocean off of Somalia).
Russia is huge, hence a lot of river shipping.
Control of the seas would bring a lot of influence, hence the British control of Gibraltar and the complex history of the Suez Canal.
You can stop there.
Deleted Comment
Or is that just a flaw of 2D-mapping?
What were oil prices then? What are they now? What is the state of piracy then? What is is now? Interesting, but I suggest that the really interesting details aren't to be found on this map.