Created Monday 17 August 2020

See also: Transportation

Paul Sawers - August 17, 2020 7:16 AM

COVID-19 is accelerating technological advances across just about every industry, from robotic baristas that promote social distancing to AI and remote collaboration tools that help manual laborers get back to work. The pandemic has had a direct impact on the transport realm, with social distancing measures calling traditional modes of travel into question. Demand for ride-hailing services quickly plummeted with the advent of the pandemic, leading Uber to double down on food delivery and micromobility, while drone deliveries soared. And while autonomous vehicle companies have faced significant obstacles to real-world testing, early signs suggest the crisis could hasten the adoption of driverless vehicles.

But automobiles, trucks, and drones are only part of the autonomous transport picture. Ships and other seafaring vessels play a huge role in the global economy. As lockdowns ease and the world adapts to a new paradigm, maritime automation could gain significant traction.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/17/the-role-of-autonomous-ships-in-a-world-wary-of-pandemics/

Container Incident Information Centre

(IMO: 9806079)

On the 1st December 2020, the Japanese flagged containership, 'ONE APUS' (IMO No 9806079) - registered owner 'Chidori Ship Holding LLC', manager 'NYK Shipmanagement' - lost a number of containers as a result of severe weather conditions on the night of Monday 30th November 2020 at 2315LT approximately 1600NM North West of Hawaii, USA.

https://www.one-apus-container-incident.com/

Over 30 container ships are anchored in San Pedro Bay off Los Angeles and Long Beach

Greg Miller, Senior Editor - Wednesday, January 13, 2021

In the movie “Falling Down,” the character played by Michael Douglas is stranded in a Los Angeles traffic jam. He abandons his car, starts walking with briefcase in hand and ultimately has a mental breakdown. Cargo shippers trying to get their containers through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach can relate.

The pileup of ships offshore in San Pedro Bay and congestion onshore at the terminals have reached epic proportions.

And the situation could become even more maddening in the weeks ahead.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/inside-californias-colossal-container-ship-traffic-jam/

4 March 2021 - BBC

Images of what appears to be a hovering ship have been captured as the result of a rare optical illusion off the coast of England.

David Morris took a photo of the ship near Falmouth, Cornwall.

BBC meteorologist David Braine said the “superior mirage” occurred because of “special atmospheric conditions that bend light”.

He said the illusion is common in the Arctic, but can appear “very rarely” in the UK during winter.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-56286719

David Morris encounters rare optical illusion known as superior mirage while out on coastal stroll

Ian Sample Science editor - Fri 5 Mar 2021 08.06 EST

There are only so many polite words that come to mind when one spots a ship apparently hovering above the ocean during a stroll along the English coastline.

David Morris, who captured the extraordinary sight on camera, declared himself “stunned” when he noticed a giant tanker floating above the water as he looked out to sea from a hamlet near Falmouth in Cornwall.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/05/ship-hovering-above-sea-cornwall-optical-illusion

Francesca Street, CNN • Updated 22nd March 2021

(CNN) — Norway has got the go-ahead to construct what's being billed as the world's first ship tunnel, designed to help vessels navigate the treacherous Stadhavet Sea.

First announced a few years ago by the Norwegian Coastal Administration, this mile-long, 118-feet-wide tunnel will burrow through the mountainous Stadhavet peninsula in northwestern Norway.

Building this engineering marvel will cost somewhere in the region of 2.8 billion Norwegian kroner ($330 million) and take between three to four years, with construction due to commence in 2022.

“It's a project that has been planned for decades. So it's very pleasant to finally be able to start the construction work in one year,” temporary project manager Terje Andreassen from the Norwegian Coastal Administration tells CNN Travel.

At the moment, ships navigating the surrounds of Stadhavet are often impacted by rough tides and bad weather.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/norway-ship-tunnel/index.html

April 6, 2021 3:00 pm - Polina Tikhonova

UPDATE 15:00 PM EST: Iran’s IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency confirms SAVIZ ship was attacked by a mine attached to the body of the vessel. It says the ship has been stationed in the Red Sea for a few years, offering support to Iranian commercial ships.

A missile attack is reported in Red Sea targeting Saviz commercial ship used by Iran’s navy, according to Israeli media.

The ship which was allegedly attacked, the Saviz, is reportedly an intelligence vessel linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Al Hadath news agency says the ship has suffered ‘ great damage’. The reported attack took place off the coast of Yemen.

According to a defense analyst, an Israeli Navy Dolphin Class submarine was spotted near the area of the attack.

https://insiderpaper.com/irans-saviz-ship-attack-red-sea-israel/

George Dvorsky - 6 April 2021 3:01PM

None of the 109 expeditioners and crew onboard the MPV Everest were hurt when a fire broke out in an engine room, but the beleaguered Antarctic resupply vessel still has 2,000 miles to go in its long journey back home to Australia.

The port-side engine room of the MPV Everest—an ice class multipurpose construction vessel—caught fire during the afternoon of Monday, April 5, according to the Australian Antarctic Division. The ship, having dropped off a year’s worth of supplies to two Antarctic research stations, was less than a week into its journey to Hobart, Australia when the incident happened.

https://gizmodo.com/antarctic-expedition-disrupted-after-ship-catches-fire-1846628013

By Paul Adams, Diplomatic Correspondent - 22 April 2021

Mohammed Aisha joined his “cursed” ship, the MV Aman, on 5 May 2017.

Today, after spending almost four years on board stranded off the Egyptian coast, he was freed and flown home to Syria. So how does he feel?

His text, from the aircraft on the tarmac at Cairo airport, was brief.

“Relief. Joy.”

And then came a voice message.

“How do I feel? Like I finally got out of prison. I'm finally going to be rejoined with my family. I'm going to see them again.”

It marks the end of an ordeal which has taken its toll on Mohammed's physical and mental health. He was, after all, condemned to a life without power, sanitation or company.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56842506

US importers face even more extreme delays ahead as container capacity maxes out

Greg Miller, Senior Editor - Monday, April 26, 2021

The number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. Does this mean the capacity crunch in the trans-Pacific market is finally easing? Absolutely not, warned Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” he told American Shipper in an interview on Monday.

“What I’m seeing is unprecedented. We are seeing a tsunami of freight,” he reported.

“For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded — and we are a growing company that ships a lot of TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units]. Price doesn’t always even matter anymore.”

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/flexport-trans-pacific-deteriorating-brace-for-shipping-tsunami

By Anusuya Datta | February 9, 2021

The ocean is vast and challenging to monitor. Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) alone total almost 137 million square kilometers (53 million square miles) of open water. Challenges in monitoring and enforcement often pave the way for illicit activities, such as smuggling, piracy, illegal fishing, and human trafficking. Crimes on the high seas are becoming increasingly sophisticated, endangering lives and undermining regional safety and economic growth, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Tankers, and in fact all ships, are mandated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to use Automatic Identification Systems, or AIS, which provides information about the ship to other vessels and to coastal authorities. Rogue vessels often operate with their AIS — and any other tracking systems — switched off. When AIS is not able to supply enough knowledge, other data sources are critical for developing comprehensive maritime awareness. This is where satellite technology comes in.

https://gijn.org/2021/02/09/tracking-dark-ships-with-new-satellite-technology/

By Penny Thomas - June 25, 2021

Every one of the little green and red arrows on the Marine Traffic Live Map is either a cargo ship or tanker. And each one is crewed by a team of individuals who work in an almost invisible industry supporting our 21st century lifestyles.

Manufactured goods such as trainers, TVs and textiles travel from east to west on containerships, whilst oil flows from the US and the Middle East into Asia and beyond.

The International Chamber of Shipping’s (ICS) often-quoted message should not be forgotten: “About 90% of world trade is carried by the international shipping industry. Without shipping, the import/export of affordable food and goods would not be possible – half the world would starve and the other half would freeze!”

It is a sobering thought, and especially poignant today – 25 June – which since 2011 has been set aside to acknowledge how much the global population owes its seafarers.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/blog/renewing-our-respect-for-invisible-essential-workers-of-the-seas/

By Susanne RustStaff Writer - Aug. 5, 2021 12:21 AM PT

The 100-foot-long whale dived and circled in the murky, dark waters of the Santa Barbara Channel, looking for a cloud of krill to scoop and catch inside her 20-foot-long jaws.

As the blue whale began to resurface, whale scientist Brandon Southall was in a boat nearby, and he could feel his throat go dry. The whale was coming up right beneath a 200,000-ton transoceanic cargo ship, named the Maladarko, that was heading east from Hong Kong to its destination in Long Beach Harbor.

“We were plotting the two paths,” said Southall, a researcher at UC Santa Cruz and the president of an Aptos-based marine biology research firm. “It was a straight collision course.”

With the increase of cargo and cruise boat traffic the last several decades, ships have become one of the deadliest threats whales face in open oceans and coastal waters. Ship strikes are not thought to be a predominant cause of the West Coast die-off of gray whales since 2019, but they are a factor, and an increasing concern.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-08-05/how-cargo-cruise-ships-contribute-to-whale-deaths

Posted by msmash on Friday October 08, 2021 11:45AM

Stranded in Yemen's war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If – or when – it explodes or sinks, thousands may die. From a report:

Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire, or explode. The vessel, the F.S.O. Safer – pronounced “Saffer” – is named for a patch of desert near the city of Marib, in central Yemen, where the country's first reserves of crude oil were discovered. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. The ship has been moored there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. More than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The Exxon Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska, in 1989.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/10/08/1838204/the-ship-that-became-a-bomb

Published: 11 October 2021 - Benjamin Q. Huynh, Laura H. Kwong, Mathew V. Kiang, Elizabeth T. Chin, Amir M. Mohareb, Aisha O. Jumaan, Sanjay Basu, Pascal Geldsetzer, Fatima M. Karaki & David H. Rehkopf

The possibility of a massive oil spill in the Red Sea is increasingly likely. The Safer, a deteriorating oil tanker containing 1.1 million barrels of oil, has been deserted near the coast of Yemen since 2015 and threatens environmental catastrophe to a country presently in a humanitarian crisis. Here, we model the immediate public health impacts of a simulated spill. We estimate that all of Yemen’s imported fuel through its key Red Sea ports would be disrupted and that the anticipated spill could disrupt clean-water supply equivalent to the daily use of 9.0–9.9 million people, food supply for 5.7–8.4 million people and 93–100% of Yemen’s Red Sea fisheries. We also estimate an increased risk of cardiovascular hospitalization from pollution ranging from 5.8 to 42.0% over the duration of the spill. The spill and its potentially disastrous impacts remain entirely preventable through offloading the oil. Our results stress the need for urgent action to avert this looming disaster.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00774-8

It took a lot of careful planning to once again bend wood with giant steam boxes.

Sarah Durn - November 9, 2021

In 1745, Götheborg, one of the largest ships in the Swedish East India Company’s fleet, was making its way home from China, laden with green tea, spices, silks, and tons of glistening porcelain. Having rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope and braved the open Atlantic, the ship was finally reaching the end of a grueling, 30-month journey. Then, right outside the harbor of Gothenburg, just miles from its destination, disaster. The ship struck a submerged rock in the Göta älv river. It lifted the 200-foot-long, treasure-laden ship several feet out of the water, and within minutes, five feet of water poured into its hull. A desperate crew managed to salvage much of the precious cargo, but not all of it, and Götheborg would never sail again. For centuries, the wreck sat, undisturbed, on the riverbed until December 9, 1984, when a team of divers began the first excavation of the site.

The project continued for two years. There wasn’t a whole lot left, says Joakim Severinson, a diver on the team. “It wasn’t like a whole complete ship standing on the seabed.” All that remained of Götheborg were “just scattered parts.” The excavation was still able to uncover eight tons of porcelain shards (currently on view at Maritime Museum in Gothenburg) and a two-foot layer of green tea.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/18th-century-steam-boxes-gotheborg-ship

This bright idea revolutionized lighthouses and saved lives

Joanna Goodrich - 16 May 2022

Ships today use satellite-based radio navigation, GPS, and other tools to prevent accidents. But back at the beginning of the 19th century, lighthouses guided ships away from rocky shores using an oil lamp placed between a concave mirror and a glass lens to produce a beam of light.

The mirrors were not very effective, though, and the lenses were murky. The light was difficult to see from a distance on a clear night, let alone in heavy fog or a storm.

In 1822 French civil engineer Augustin-Jean Fresnel (pronounced “Frey Nel”) invented a new type of lens that produced a much stronger beam of light. The Fresnel lens is still used today in active lighthouses around the world. It also can be found in movie projectors, magnifying glasses, spacecraft, and other applications.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fresnel-lens-milestone

On June 9th Reuters reported the Indonesian Navy detained another ship, claiming it had anchored illegally and holding it for $375,000. It’s the latest of dozens of similar recent detentions revealed by Reuters in November. One American captain, claiming he was detained for 24 days last Fall, sat for extensive interviews with gCaptain. This is his story.

David Lewis - June 10, 2022

When Captain David Ledoux dropped anchor off Indonesia’s Bintan Island, waiting for clearance to proceed to the shipyard at Singapore, he had little reason to expect he’d spend the next month in a detention facility menaced by aggressive monkeys.

Ledoux was detained by the Indonesian Navy for 24 days in October of 2021. He also says that, although the agent selected the anchorage and he consulted the Sailing Directions, relevant charts, and other navigation resources, his company elected to hold him responsible for the decision to anchor in waters known to be contested by Indonesia. Ledoux said they let him take the ship on to the shipyard at Singapore after his detention, only then informing him that he would be disciplined for his role in the incident: either demotion to 2nd Mate, six month’s suspension without pay, or the forfeiture of six months’ operations pay.

“I said, for what? What did I do wrong? What policy or law did I violate?” he exclaimed in the first of a series of telephone interviews conducted with gCaptain.

Ledoux submitted extensive documentation from his ordeal, including communications conducted over email and encrypted-messaging app “Whatsapp.” He also said that, while detained, he was instructed to provide letters asserting two false narratives: one suggesting the Marshall Islands-flagged C/S Reliance had experienced fictitious damage to one of the vessel’s thrusters, and another indicating his mental health was failing from the ordeal, and that he was experiencing suicidal ideation.

https://gcaptain.com/american-captain-detained-by-indonesian-navy/

Mike Schuler - June 24, 2022

The number of “smart” containers in the global fleet is set to explode in the coming years as operators and cargo owners seek to increase cargo visibility amid disrupted supply chains and congestion, according to an analysis by Drewry.

In fact, the fleet of telematics enabled container equipment, aka smart containers, is forecast to grow 8-fold over the next 5 years and account for 25% of the global box fleet by 2026, says Drewry. The growth will primarily be driven by wider adoption of the technology across the dry container fleet.

According to Drewry, smart containers have increased in prominence following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting supply chain disruption, which has highlighted the need for better cargo visibility to cope with longer and more volatile transit times. The pace of adoption is expected to accelerate rapidly in the years ahead.

A container becomes “smart” when fitted with a telematics device that provides real-time tracking and monitoring, enabling operators to increase turn time and improve equipment availability. It also allows beneficial cargo owners (BCOs) to understand the location and status of their cargo for greater visibility into their supply chains.

https://gcaptain.com/shipping-industrys-use-of-smart-containers-expected-to-explode-in-coming-years-drewry/

Mike Schuler - June 22, 2022

The number of shipping containers lost at sea has risen significantly during the pandemic thanks to an “unusually high” number of incidents particularly in the winter of 2020-21, the World Shipping Council said in its lastest Containers Lost at Sea report.

The winter of 2020-21 saw a huge spike in the number of weather-related incidents, bringing average losses for the two-year period (2020-2021) to 3,113 containers, compared to 779 in the previous period (2017-2019). The past two years caused worrying break in the downward trend for losses, with the average number of containers lost at sea per year since the start of the survey increasing by 18% to 1,629 (from 2008-2021).

The WSC, the main trade association representing the international liner shipping industry, issues its container loss report typically every three years based on surveys with WSC member companies for the preceeding three years. The WSC’s report is viewed in the industry as being the most accurate and official tally of containers lost at sea.

The WSC has conducted previous surveys in 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020. However, due to the unusually high number of incidents in 2020-21, it’s increasing its frequency of updates to yearly, while its latest report covers the two year period ending in 2021.

https://gcaptain.com/survey-shows-worrying-increase-in-number-of-containers-lost-at-sea/

NOAA - 01/20/23

Unlike left and right, “port” and “starboard” refer to fixed locations on a vessel.

Since port and starboard never change, they are unambiguous references that are independent of a mariner’s orientation, and, thus, mariners use these nautical terms instead of left and right to avoid confusion. When looking forward, toward the bow of a ship, port and starboard refer to the left and right sides, respectively.

In the early days of boating, before ships had rudders on their centerlines, boats were controlled using a steering oar. Most sailors were right handed, so the steering oar was placed over or through the right side of the stern. Sailors began calling the right side the steering side, which soon became “starboard” by combining two Old English words: stéor (meaning “steer”) and bord (meaning “the side of a boat”).

As the size of boats grew, so did the steering oar, making it much easier to tie a boat up to a dock on the side opposite the oar. This side became known as larboard, or “the loading side.” Over time, larboard—too easily confused with starboard—was replaced with port. After all, this was the side that faced the port, allowing supplies to be ported aboard by porters.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/port-starboard.html

Helmar (edited Sep 4, 2016 at 14:43) / confiq (Aug 30, 2016 at 15:27)

This question already has answers here:
Is it a good practice to refer to countries, ships etc using the feminine form? (5 answers) (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12632/is-it-a-good-practice-to-refer-to-countries-ships-etc-using-the-feminine-form)
Pronoun question: referring to inanimate objects as 'he' or 'she' (7 answers) (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/287721/pronoun-question-referring-to-inanimate-objects-as-he-or-she)

I was reading wikipedia about a ship and it it's always refered as female. Is it unique to ships? I've learn in school that words in english does not have a sex, you can call a cats and dogs as “it”.

The boat is not female in itself. You are correct that the English language does not have a grammatical gender (mostly).

If you have a look at this blog there are several reasons offered for why people use female pronouns when referring to ships. I cite the most reasonable below.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/345747/why-are-ships-always-female/345755#345755

Nicole Foy - Oct. 22, 2024 5 a.m. EDT

On the morning of Jan. 22, 2024, Elmer De León Pérez descended deep into the bowels of a ship that he was helping to build in Houma, Louisiana. Pérez was a welder, working to construct one of the U.S. government’s most sophisticated ships, an $89 million vessel for tracking hurricanes and conducting oceanographic research. It was funded by President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-louisiana-houma-shipbuilding-jobs-safety

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday August 25, 2021 07:02PM

A Norwegian company has created the world's first zero-emission, autonomous cargo ship that is expected to journey between two Norwegian towns before the end of the year. CNN reports:

It's not the first autonomous ship – an autonomous ferry launched in Finland in 2018 – but it is the first fully electric container ship, say its makers. Developed by chemical company Yara International, the Yara Birkeland was designed to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are toxic pollutants and greenhouse gases, and carbon dioxide, as well as moving freight away from roads to the sea. The shipping industry currently accounts for between 2.5% and 3% of global greenhouse gases emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization.

https://slashdot.org/story/21/08/25/2233240/worlds-first-crewless-zero-emissions-cargo-ship-will-set-sail-in-norway

Posted by BeauHD on Friday November 19, 2021 06:02PM

Zero emissions and, soon, zero crew: the world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, a small but promising step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint. TechXplore reports:

By shipping up to 120 containers of fertilizer from a plant in the southeastern town of Porsgrunn to the Brevik port a dozen kilometres (about eight miles) away, the much-delayed Yara Birkeland, shown off to the media on Friday, will eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fueled by polluting diesel. The 80-meter, 3,200-deadweight tonne ship will soon begin two years of working trials during which it will be fine-tuned to learn to maneuver on its own.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/11/19/2144210/first-electric-autonomous-cargo-ship-launched-in-norway

Tom Hale - 24 November 21 10:51

All aboard the crewless “ghost ship” of Norway. The world's first fully-electric autonomous cargo ship departed for its maiden voyage in Norway recently, offering a glimpse at what’s set to be the greener, cleaner, and humanless future of sea travel.

The ship, named Yara Birkeland, is an 80 meter (262 foot) long vessel with a deadweight of around 3,200 tons. A system of sensors and computers allows the ship to be commanded autonomously or via remote control, removing the need for an onboard crew. On top of this, the vessel is powered by electrical propulsion and battery meaning it pumps out zero missions.

Its first voyage on Thursday, November 18 was only a demo trip from Horten to Oslo, attended by the Norwegian Prime Minister and the Minister of Fisheries and Ocean Policy. However, the company aims to have the ship in commercial operation from the next few years, transporting mineral fertilizer from Yara's Norweigian factory in Porsgrunn to the port in Brevik. This is only a short journey, just over 20 minutes by truck, but the company believes it will substantially slash their pollution output.

“It will cut 1,000 tonnes of CO2 and replace 40,000 trips by diesel-powered trucks a year,” added Holsether.,” Svein Tore Holsether, CEO of Yara, said at the launch.

“This is an excellent example of green transition in practice, and we hope this ship will be the start of a new type of emission-free container ships. There are a lot of places in the world with congested roads that will benefit from a high-tech solution like this,” he continued.

https://www.iflscience.com/technology/autonomous-ghost-cargo-ship-sets-off-on-maiden-voyage/

There are a few caveats attached to this achievement.

Jon Fingas - June 3rd, 2022

LNG Prism Courage autonomous ship HD Hyundai/Avikus

Autonomous ships just took a small but important step forward. Hyundai's Avikus subsidiary says it has completed the world's first autonomous navigation of a large ship across the ocean. The Prism Courage (pictured) left Freeport in the Gulf of Mexico on May 1st, and used Avikus' AI-powered HiNAS 2.0 system to steer the vessel for half of its roughly 12,427-mile journey to the Boryeong LNG Terminal in South Korea's western Chungcheong Province. The Level 2 self-steering tech was good enough to account for other ships, the weather and differing wave heights.

The autonomy spared the crew some work, of course, but it may also have helped the planet. Avikus claims HiNAS' optimal route planning improved the Prism Courage's fuel efficiency by about seven percent, and reduced emissions by five percent.

As you might have guessed, the feat didn't quite usher in an era of zero-crew shipping. The other half of the trip still required human navigation, and most of the route was in the open sea. It would have been tougher for an autonomous system to control the entire voyage, particularly in ports where docking and packed waterways would pose additional challenges.

https://www.engadget.com/hyundai-autonomous-merchant-ship-ocean-voyage-203435454.html

Big Blue to return to the big blue waves

Katyanna Quach Mon 27 Sep 2021 / 22:14 UTC

The Mayflower, the crewless, autonomous ship built with the help of IBM, will try to sail across the Atlantic again next year, after its first attempt failed shortly after it left the UK for the US.

Created by maritime non-profit Promare, the vessel was designed to not only steer itself but also collect data for scientists to study all sorts of stuff from microplastics to whales. The Mayflower was designed to operate autonomously; it has a mixture of cameras, radar sensors, and machine learning software to detect objects in its environment and navigate safely around cargo ships and fishing vessels. It also has GPS to stay on course, and runs on solar power with a diesel generator for getting through rough conditions.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/27/autonomous_mayflower_ship/

Human-free seafaring isn't going swimmingly

Katyanna Quach - Wed 11 May 2022 20:40 UTC

The crewless AI-powered Mayflower ship, which was on its second attempt to cross the Atlantic ocean alone, is being hauled back to shore after suffering a mechanical failure.

The ship, built by ProMare, a non-profit organization focused on marine research, with help from IBM, set off from Plymouth, UK, last month with the goal of reaching Washington DC. But after less than two weeks into the journey, the computer-controlled vessel broke down near Portugal.

The Mayflower carries numerous cameras and sensors onboard running computer-vision algorithms for navigation. If it suffers a hardware issue, however, there's no one around to fix it. Information on the 15-metre-long vessel's status is shared via an online dashboard, and viewers can track its location and watch live feeds of it sailing.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/mayflower_autonomous_ship/

The unmanned “Mayflower” made landfall in Canada and Hyundai's autonomous tanker vessel completed its first cross-ocean voyage.

Lauren Leffer - 6 June 2022 12:15PM

The attempted autonomous vehicle takeover has reached the high seas.

Two different (at least partially) self-steering ships completed landmark journeys in the past few days. But both milestones come with big caveats: one encountered problems without any people aboard and ended up shortening its trip, and the other still relied on human judgement about half the time.

The completely crewless Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS400) docked in Canada on Sunday. The boat, partially funded by IBM, started out from Plymouth in the United Kingdom on April 27.

https://gizmodo.com/ai-autonomous-ship-mayflower-hyundai-1849022316

Nearly two years late and in the wrong country, we welcome our robot overlords

Lindsay Clark - Tue 7 Jun 2022 20:59 UTC

IBM's self-sailing Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) has finally crossed the Atlantic albeit more than a year and a half later than planned. Still, congratulations to the team.

That said, MAS missed its target. Instead of arriving in Massachusetts – the US state home to Plymouth Rock where the 17th-century Mayflower landed – the latest in a long list of technical difficulties forced MAS to limp to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The 2,700-mile (4,400km) journey from Plymouth, UK, came to an end on Sunday.

The 50ft (15m) trimaran is powered by solar energy, with diesel backup, and said to be able to reach a speed of 10 knots (18.5km/h or 11.5mph) using electric motors. This computer-controlled ship is steered by software that takes data in real time from six cameras and 50 sensors. This application was trained using IBM's PowerAI Vision technology and Power servers, we're told.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/07/ibm_mayflower_canada/

Jon Y - Oct 19, 2022

The Soviet Union was the first country to put a nuclear reactor on a polar icebreaker. And it was rad.

Their icebreakers helped clear a path through the Arctic, turning what had once been frequently unpassable into a reliable trade route into Siberia.

Russia remains the only country in the world with nuclear-powered icebreakers.

In this video, let's take a look at the Soviet Union's nuclear icebreakers, and the crushing impact they had in opening up the Arctic shipping routes.

https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-soviet-unions-nuclear-icebreakers

Scientific American Supplement - (Viewed 8 August 2022)

The whistling buoy now in use was patented by Mr. J.M. Courtenay, of New York. It consists of an iron pear-shaped bulb, 12 feet across at its widest part, and floating 12 feet out of water. Inside the bulb is a tube 33 inches across, extending from the top through the bottom to a depth of 32 feet, into water free from wave motion. The tube is open at its lower end, but projects, air-tight, through the top of the bulb, and is closed with a plate having in it three holes, two for letting the air into the tube, and one between the others for letting the air out to work the 10-inch locomotive whistle with which it is surmounted. These holes are connected with three pipes which lead down to near the water level, where they pass through a diaphragm which divides the outer cylinder into two parts. The great bulb which buoys up the whole mass rises and falls with the motion of the waves, carrying the tube up and down with it, thus establishing a piston-and-cylinder movement, the water in the tube acting as an immovable piston, while the tube itself acts as a moving cylinder.

Thus the air admitted through valves, as the buoy rises on the wave, into that part of the bulb which is above water, is compressed, and as the buoy falls with the wave, it is further compressed and forced through a 2½ inch pipe which at its apex connects with the whistle. The dimensions of the whistling buoy have recently been much diminished without detracting materially from the volume of sound it produces. It is now made of four sizes. The smallest in our waters has a bulb 6 feet in diameter and a tube 10 feet in length, and weighs but 2,000 pounds. The largest and oldest whistling buoy has a 12-foot bulb, a tube 32 feet long, and weighs 12,000 pounds.

https://chestofbooks.com/crafts/scientific-american/sup3/Whistling-Buoys.html

Hariesh Manaadiar - June 29, 2022

Recently, ONE (Ocean Network Express), the 7th largest container shipping line in the world by capacity, implemented a penalty fee in the form of a Weight Discrepancy Charge (WDS) of USD 2,000/- per container from the 1st of July, 2022..

The penalty fee is applicable if there is a misdeclaration of cargo weight details at the time of submission of booking submission and if the weight deviates +/- 3 tons/TEU from the weight on the final Bill of Lading Instruction details and Verified Gross Mass (VGM) documentation..

In the supply chain disruption medley caused by COVID-19, many may have forgotten the issues faced by the industry (and the environment) due to overweight containers and various weight misdeclarations..

Let me refresh you on “When is a container considered as Overweight..??” and about container weight misdeclarations..

https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/understanding-container-weight-misdeclaration/

July 7, 2022

Drewry’s composite World Container Index decreased marginally by 0.2% to $7,050.94 per 40ft container this week.

https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-expertise/world-container-index-assessed-by-drewry

Loz Blain - May 22, 2024

That's without any modification to the ships themselves, too. The ambitious 'Blue Visby Solution' proposes enormous fuel and emissions savings for cargo ships worldwide, simply by being smarter about speed and timing and eliminating inefficiencies.

Shipping is an extremely efficient way to move bulk goods around the planet, but it's responsible for around 3% of global man-made carbon emissions, and the unique energy requirements of long-haul cargo ships make them extremely difficult to decarbonize.

There are all manner of technological solutions in the pipeline: hydrogen, green ammonia and methanol powerplants, flettner rotors, heaving oscillators… There's even been a return to giant sail-wings, as well as giant autonomous kites designed to pull ships along and save fuel.

But that's what makes the Blue Visby Solution so fascinating; you don't have to alter the ships at all. You just pilot them differently.

Currently, according to the Blue Visby team, most cargo ships follow an operational practice known as “sail fast, then wait” (SFTW). That is, they go as quickly as they can from port A to port B, regardless of what the schedule's looking like at their destination. When they get there, they sit still and wait at idle, continuing to burn fuel, until it's time for them to dock and load/unload their cargo.

https://newatlas.com/marine/blue-visby-cargo-emissions/

07 Feb 2023

The Norwegian shipping company Havila Kystruten will no longer allow electric cars on board its ships, according to Norwegian Television NRK. The consequences of an electric car fire are considered too severe, states the company.

The scenic Hurtigruten coastal route between Bergen and Kirkenes runs along the coast of Norway. From 2021, the two shipping companies Hurtigruten and Havila share a mutual agreement on the traffic between the two destinations.

https://ctif.org/news/norwegian-shipping-company-bans-electric-cars-board-classic-ferry-route

Miriam Posner

What happens when ships become data?

It seemed like half of Los Angeles had turned out for boat tours at the Port of Long Beach: parents corralling toddlers, couples on dates, even dog owners in line for pet-friendly tours. The port offers free guided tours to the public once a year, a sort of goodwill gesture to the community that has suffered decades of pollution as a result of its activity, and that of the adjoining Port of Los Angeles. After two hours of waiting, I filed onto an erstwhile whale-watching tour boat, where I took in the port’s enormous container ships. Like my fellow tourists, I was excited to get a glimpse of the scale of operations necessary to keep the nation supplied with toilet paper, plastic toys, and every other conceivable good.

https://logicmag.io/pivot/ghost-ships/

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday September 04, 2022 09:34AM

Slashdot reader artmancc writes:

Like aircraft, many of the world's ocean-going vessels are required to have transponders that broadcast their location. The information is public and can be seen on websites such as AIS Marine Traffic. But according to an analysis reported in The New York Times , a maritime data company called Windward “has uncovered more than 500 cases of ships manipulating their satellite navigation systems to hide their locations.”

The article, by Anatoly Kurmanaev, highlights the Cyprus-registered tanker Reliant, which was observed taking on oil at a Venezuelan refinery last December. At the same time, however, the ship was reporting its position as some 300 nautical miles (about 500 kilometers) away, “drifting innocuously off the coast of St. Lucia.”

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/09/03/2243240/how-shady-ships-are-spoofing-their-locations-with-fake-gps-coordinates

Brian Potter - Sep 26, 2024

The U.S. has interests in regions all around the globe. Perhaps none are more remote than the polar region: areas near or in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Roughly 1/3rd of Alaska is within the Arctic Circle, and though only around 4% of Alaska citizens live there, that’s still tens of thousands of people. There are also significant natural resources in U.S. Arctic territory, including untapped oil and gas deposits, the largest zinc mine in the world, and (potentially) minerals on the Arctic seabed, such as “gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, manganese, nickel, platinum, tin, zinc, and diamonds.”

In the Antarctic, the U.S. operates three research facilities: McMurdo Station, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and Palmer Station. McMurdo Station is the largest research station in Antarctica, with a population of up to 1,000 people (20-25% of Antarctica’s total population).

The U.S. isn’t the only country with major polar interests. Roughly four million people around the world live above the Arctic Circle. Russia has 15,000 miles of coastline along the Arctic ocean, and an estimated 10-20% of Russia’s GDP comes from activities above the Arctic Circle. And as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice and makes polar regions more accessible, international interest in the polar regions is expected to increase. In 2014, Xi Jinping stated that China planned on joining the ranks of “the great polar powers,” and in 2023 Russia and China sent a naval force to patrol near the coast of Alaska. By shipping goods through shorter, previously inaccessible Arctic Ocean routes, China could potentially reduce its ocean-based transportation costs by 40%, saving hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-the-us-cant-build-icebreaking

Imogen James - 10 March 2025

A grey scene on the sea, where a boat appears to be on fire. It's hard to make out, but there are orange flames and large amounts of grey smoke rising from the wreckageImage source, Reuters

Just before 10:00 GMT, two vessels collided off the East Yorkshire coast in a busy shipping area.

Both caught fire. Twelve hours on, they are continuing to burn.

The Stena Immaculate - a US oil tanker - was hit by the Portuguese cargo ship, the Solong, while at anchor.

It came out of the blue, a tanker crew member told the BBC's Rowan Bridge. He and his colleagues were buying new clothes in the local Asda - they had no time to collect their belongings before being rushed onto lifeboats.

The coastguard said 36 people were brought ashore, one of whom was hospitalised.

Solong's owner, Ernst Russ, later shared that one member of its 14-strong crew was missing. This was confirmed by the coastguard as it announced that the search had been called off.

The Stena Immaculate was carrying jet fuel for the US government when it was struck, some of which is spilling into the sea, sparking concerns for the marine life in the area.

The Solong was carrying 15 containers of sodium cyanide among its cargo, according to a report. It's unclear if any has entered the water.

While we're starting to get a clearer sense of the events that led to the collision, many questions as to how and why it happened remain unanswered.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cgq1pwjlqq2t#player

A rescue effort brought 37 people ashore from the wreckage.

AJ Dellinger - March 10, 2025

A container ship collided with an oil tanker off the eastern coast of the United Kingdom at around 9:48 am local time on Monday morning. The crash resulted in a massive fire and gallons of oil being poured into the North Sea, with emergency response efforts underway. According to local officials, one person was hospitalized as a result of the collision, while another 36 people—members of both crews—were taken ashore. All crew members are believed to be accounted for.

According to the New York Times, the ships involved in the collision were the Stena Immaculate, an oil tanker that was registered in the United States, and the Solong, a container ship that was sailing under the Portuguese flag. The Solong reportedly left port in Scotland on Sunday and was on its way to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The Stena Immaculate was anchored at the time of impact, which raises some concerns about the incident—namely, how did the container ship hit a stationary oil tanker in broad daylight?

Speaking to BBC News, maritime safety consultant David Mcfarlane said, “There should be no reason for two ships to collide” in these conditions and that “something has gone very badly wrong.” He did note that it’s pretty standard for ships to be placed on autopilot, but there is supposed to be someone on watch if course correction is needed. Mcfarlane said it’ll take “weeks if not months to come to any proper conclusion.”

https://gizmodo.com/oil-tanker-and-cargo-ship-collide-spark-massive-fire-off-u-k-coast-2000573844

It's still not clear what caused the collision in broad daylight.

Matt Novak - March 11, 2025

A man has been arrested by UK police for suspected manslaughter after the likely death of one person following the collision of two ships in the North Sea, according to Sky News. A container ship hit a stationary tanker that was carrying jet fuel for the U.S. military on Monday off the eastern coast of England.

Humberside Police in the UK released a statement to Sky News explaining they had arrested a 59-year-old man “on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter in connection with the collision.” The man is in custody but has not been formally charged yet, according to Sky News.

The U.S. fuel tanker Stena Immaculate was reportedly anchored off the coast of England when the Portuguese-flagged Solong cargo ship (pictured above) ran into it around 9:45 a.m. local time on Monday. The collision started fires and multiple explosions. Thirty-six people were rescued but one person is missing and presumed dead on the Solong, which will reportedly be allowed to just sink.

https://gizmodo.com/man-arrested-for-suspected-manslaughter-in-uk-ship-collision-2000574446

With draught restrictions already in place the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) is implementing water saving procedures as it battles one of the worst droughts the waterway has seen.

Michele Labrut - Jun 07, 2023

The arrival of the “El Nino’ phenomenon could worsen the drought making economic impact unavoidable based of current estimates warned the ACP.

The last period of intense drought in the Canal took place in 2019 – 2020. These cycles, Panama Canal administrator Ricaurte Vasquez said, have historically happened once every five years. “Still, what we are experiencing now is that these events are being reduced to once every three years,” he added.

The climate emergency decreed by the Panamanian government reinforces what the Panama Canal has been stating regarding the reality of a shortage of fresh water, the ACP said.

“This is an issue that the Panama Canal has been warning and preparing for; however, we could not have predicted exactly when the water shortage would occur to the degree that we are experiencing now,” said Vasquez.

https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/panama/panama-canal-takes-water-saving-measures-face-unprecedented-drought

Brian Potter - Oct 08, 2024

On October 1st, 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), primarily dockworkers on East and Gulf Coast ports, went on strike after failing to agree contract terms with USMX, an alliance of port operators and employers. (West Coast ports, which are worked by a different union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, remained open.) Along with higher pay, the main point of disagreement was automation; the ILA demanded a complete ban on introducing new port automation. The strike ended on October 3rd with a tentative agreement on wage increases, but negotiations over automation will continue until January 15th.

The strike sparked a discussion about the quality of U.S. ports, and the degree they need to be automated to improve their performance. Most folks have (reasonably) assumed that the union is holding back port automation that would improve productivity. In the 1960s, dockworkers unions vehemently protested against introducing the productivity-enhancing shipping container, and current ILA president Harold Daggett has complained about EZ passes for highway tolls eliminating union jobs. The ILA’s case has not been helped by the extremely high wages of longshoremen (and of Daggett), the video of Daggett threatening to “cripple” the entire economy, or the fact that Daggett is alleged to have connections to organized crime.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more-automation

Alyse Stanley - Saturday 29 May 2021 8:57PM

Tonnes of plastic waste from a burning container ship is washing ashore in Sri Lanka in what’s likely the nation’s worst beach pollution crisis to date, a senior environmental official told AFP on Saturday.

Thousands of military and security personnel in hazmat suits have been combing a stretch of coast near the Port of Colombo for debris as an international firefighting operation continues to douse flames aboard the MV X-Press Pearl. The Singapore-registered container ship caught fire on May 20 following an onboard explosion as it waited to enter the harbor. Among its cargo includes 25 tonnes of nitric acid, 278 tonnes of bunker oil, and at least 28 containers of polyethylene pellets, a raw material used in the packaging industry, officials said.

https://gizmodo.com/plastic-waste-from-burning-ship-buries-sri-lankas-coast-1846999786

Molly Taft - 2 June 2021 11:33AM

Sri Lanka is facing a rapidly unfolding environmental crisis after a cargo ship that caught on fire last month has sunk, pouring tons of plastic pellets and huge amounts of chemicals into surrounding fishing waters. Government officials worry an oil spill could come next in what’s shaping up to be one of the worst marine disasters in the country’s history.

On Wednesday, authorities paused fishing along 50 miles (81 kilometers) of Sri Lanka’s coast, halting more than 5,600 boats. The government also deployed soldiers to clean up the mess, which began more than two weeks ago after an initial fire released billions of plastic pellets into the sea.

https://gizmodo.com/smoldering-ship-leaking-billions-of-plastic-pellets-sin-1847015857

Peter Krouse - Jul. 03, 2025, 10:16 a.m. / Updated Jul. 03, 2025, 4:58 p.m.

CLEVELAND, Ohio - A ship that docked in Cleveland last summer harbored what scientists believe was a previously unknown form of life.

The revelation occurred after the research vessel Blue Heron, which was monitoring harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie, began having mechanical issues.

The captain, Rual Lee, piloted the boat to Cleveland where it could be examined in a dry dock at Great Lakes Shipyard on the Old River Channel of the Cuyahoga River.

After the Blue Heron was lifted out of the water and lowered onto a parking lot, the problem was diagnosed. The propellor shaft bearings needed replacing.

But as one mystery was resolved, another more enigmatic one emerged.

Lee noticed a tar-like substance oozing from the rudder post, a normally hidden component of the ship’s steering apparatus that was exposed during maintenance.

He had never seen anything like it during previous dry dock inspections of the ship, a former fishing boat acquired by the University of Minnesota Duluth to conduct research.

Curious, Lee took a glop of the goo and plopped it in water to see if it left a sheen. It didn’t. Then he turned a blowtorch on the slimy substance to see if it would burn. It didn’t do that either.

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2025/07/mysterious-life-form-found-on-ship-that-docked-in-cleveland.html

Bloomberg - April 29, 2021

Containers piled high on giant vessels carrying everything from car tires to smartphones are toppling over at an alarming rate, sending millions of dollars of cargo sinking to the bottom of the ocean as pressure to speed deliveries raises the risk of safety errors.

The shipping industry is seeing the biggest spike in lost containers in seven years. More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 have fallen overboard so far in 2021. The accidents are disrupting supply chains for hundreds of U.S. retailers and manufacturers such as Amazon and Tesla.

There are a host of reasons for the sudden rise in accidents. Weather is getting more unpredictable, while ships are growing bigger, allowing for containers to be stacked higher than ever before. But greatly exacerbating the situation is a surge in e-commerce after consumer demand exploded during the pandemic, increasing the urgency for shipping lines to deliver products as quickly as possible.

“The increased movement of containers means that these very large containerships are much closer to full capacity than in the past,” said Clive Reed, founder of Reed Marine Maritime Casualty Management Consultancy. “There is commercial pressure on the ships to arrive on time and consequently make more voyages.”

https://www.supplychainbrain.com/articles/33002-shipping-containers-are-falling-overboard-at-a-rapid-rate

By Ann Koh | April 27, 2021

Containers piled high on giant vessels carrying everything from car tires to smartphones are toppling over at an alarming rate, sending millions of dollars of cargo sinking to the bottom of the ocean as pressure to speed deliveries raises the risk of safety errors.

The shipping industry is seeing the biggest spike in lost containers in seven years. More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 have fallen overboard so far in 2021. The accidents are disrupting supply chains for hundreds of U.S. retailers and manufacturers such as Amazon and Tesla.

There are a host of reasons for the sudden rise in accidents. Weather is getting more unpredictable, while ships are growing bigger, allowing for containers to be stacked higher than ever before. But greatly exacerbating the situation is a surge in e-commerce after consumer demand exploded during the pandemic, increasing the urgency for shipping lines to deliver products as quickly as possible.

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2021/04/27/611630.htm

Jun 9, 2021 4:24 PM - Philip Teoh

Some bulk cargoes can cause cargo liquefaction if the moisture content exceeds a certain level. Cargo liquefaction occurs when dry bulk cargoes with high moisture content start to behave like liquids when the ship is moving. Such cargoes shift rapidly in the holds of a ship, resulting in free surface effect, making the ship unstable and potentially causing it to capsize.

This arises if the shippers do not comply with the testing and certification requirements that are required under SOLAS and the IMSBC Code 2009 and designed to ensure that cargoes are loaded only if the moisture content is sufficiently low to avoid liquefaction occurring during the voyage.

Iron and other mineral ore as well as bauxite cargoes which are left in the open prior to shipment are subject to rain and weather conditions, which can increase the moisture content to dangerous levels. These problems related to wet cargo and moisture content particularly worsen during regional wet seasons. In cargoes loaded with a moisture content in excess of the Flow Moisture Point (FMP), liquefaction may occur unpredictably at any time during the voyage.

https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/the-risk-of-cargo-liquefaction

A new report tracks just how much shipping-related emissions retailers like Walmart, Ikea, Amazon, and Target are responsible for.

Molly Taft - 20 July 2021 9:45AM

Newly obtained data shows how 15 companies—including big names like Walmart, Ikea, and Amazon—are responsible for millions of tons of pollution and carbon emissions from an often-overlooked sector of their business: importing goods into the U.S. on cargo ships. A new report released Tuesday by Pacific Environment and Stand.earth uses hard-to-get data on international shipping to definitively trace just how much environmental damage some of these big companies are causing by importing goods.

We ship a lot of stuff. Today, about 80% of global trade is circulated around the world by about 50,000 ships, and the industry is expanding quickly; cargo volumes could grow by as much as 130% by 2050 as Amazon conquers more of the world and one-click shipping becomes more widely available around the world. Those ships run on extremely dirty (and cheap) fuel, known as “bunker fuel,” that releases a lot of pollutants. It’s estimated that maritime shipping is responsible for between 10% to 15% of the world’s sulfur oxide and nitrous oxide emissions and shipping is responsible for 2.2% of global carbon emissions.

https://gizmodo.com/the-hidden-toll-of-shipping-1847325869

Shippers jockey for limited vessel space, but some companies are getting priced out of the market for international freight transportation

Eric Kulisch, Air Cargo Editor - Friday, July 30, 2021

The blows to the global supply chain never seem to end in 2021, resulting in delays that have sharply reduced the system’s effective capacity and put upward pressure on shipping rates that began reaching record highs months ago. Purchasing ocean transportation has become so expensive that many companies with lower-value commodities can’t afford to import anymore, analysts and logisticians say.

Vessel operators have no extra ships to meet a tidal wave of freight demand, containers are in short supply or can’t get quickly repositioned where needed, and destination ports are piling up with boxes because they can’t keep up with the volume. The logjam, which is adding weeks of delay for major export trades from Asia, has been exacerbated by a series of weather- and COVID-related events, as well as operational mishaps.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/are-you-shipping-me-32000-container-move-from-china-to-la

The Danish company's boss said hundreds of its ships were laying idle outside ports around the world because they were unable to unload their goods due to a lack of lorry drivers and warehouse congestion.

By John-Paul Ford Rojas, Business reporter - Tuesday 2 November 2021 14:57

Maersk, the world's biggest shipping company, has warned there is “little visibility” about when bottlenecks in global supply chains will end.

The Danish group, which reported record quarterly revenues despite the disruption as its freight rates increased sharply, said current conditions were expected to continue at least until the first quarter of next year.

A lack of lorry drivers is preventing ships from offloading goods at ports around the world, with 300 container vessels currently laying idle, chief executive Soren Skou said.

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/no-end-in-sight-to-gigantic-bottleneck-for-global-freight-shipping-giant-warns-12457953

Abha Bhattarai - Thu, November 18, 2021, 4:26 AM

Abha Bhattarai Thu, November 18, 2021, 4:26 AM·7 min read

The furniture giant Ikea is known for flattening tables, chairs and even beds into compact bundles that can be lugged home in car trunks and pickup beds.

Now its executives are using that expertise to squeeze as many seasonal offerings as possible into massive metal boxes for ocean transport. They prioritized lightweight and pliable - pillows and throws, wine glasses and plates - and holiday perennials like children's easels and toys, said Javier Quiñones, chief executive of Ikea U.S. The desks, chairs and home office accessories that were big sellers early in the pandemic are on the back burner until next year.

https://news.yahoo.com/shipping-container-shortage-changing-shows-122617154.html

Maritime shipping for Amazon, Walmart, Target, and IKEA accounted for some 20 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions between 2018 and 2020.

Mack DeGeurin - 30 November 2021 3:40PM

Mega retailers Amazon, Walmart, Target, and IKEA have made a mint during the pandemic as millions of consumers flocked to online shopping. Those companies have seen record profits as a result, but those profits will come at a steep environmental cost.

A new report released by Stand.earth and Pacific Environment determined maritime shipping for those four companies alone accounted for some 20 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the past two years, the majority of which stemmed from goods transported between China and the U.S. West Coast. The report warns these emissions could be getting worse still as supply chain crunches force vessels carrying goods to idle mid-transit.

“The retail brands that fill our homes and lives with their products bear a direct responsibility both for the pollution that the maritime shipping in their supply chains creates and for taking the necessary actions to demand emissions reductions now and 100 percent zero-emissions shipping,” the report’s authors write.

https://gizmodo.com/online-shopping-is-turning-the-high-seas-into-a-super-p-1848138988

Hannah Towey - 10 January 2022

The Ever Ace, the world's largest cargo ship, is as long as four football fields and can carry over 23,000 containers.

Container ships like this one have more than doubled in size over the past decade. While the massive vessels can hold more Amazon orders than you can imagine, the rapid growth presents a problem for US ports — the ships can't fit into most harbors.

In response, the Army Corp of Engineers has allocated billions of dollars to deepen ports across the US.

From Massachusetts to Alabama, officials say ports must accommodate supersized ship dimensions in order to remain competitive in global trade.

https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-spends-billions-deepening-port-harbors-for-mega-container-ships-2022-1

We can blame the Big Boat Era for many of our supply chain headaches

Rachel Premack - Thursday, May 19, 2022

I hate big boats, and so should you.

In 2006, Maersk stunned the global shipping community with the introduction of Emma Maersk, a container ship that could carry nearly 15,000 twenty-foot equivalent units. (TEUs translate to about half of a standard forty-foot shipping container.)

Emma Maersk set off an “arms race” with its introduction. Ocean carriers ordered bigger and bigger ships, believing that they could reach economies of scale if they could jam all their shipments into one big boat instead of a few small ones.

Today, we’ve appeared to reach peak Big Boat Era. The Emma Maersk is now wimpy next to 2022’s true megaships. The largest container ships to be delivered this year have a maximum capacity of 24,000 TEUs. (This class of ship is named — I am not making this up — the “Ever Alot.” The Evergreen shipping company, the very same that blocked the Suez Canal last year, ordered the record-breaking ship.)

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/big-boats-are-ruining-everything

Inbound container volumes to the US are reverting to pre-pandemic levels

Henry Byers - Tuesday, June 7, 2022

The latest ocean container bookings data reveals that despite the strong levels of inbound cargo during the first five months of 2022, import demand is not just softening — it’s dropping off a cliff. Because capacity on the trans-Pacific has remained relatively stable, Drewry’s container spot rates from China to the West Coast have plunged 41% month-over-month to $9,630.

Freight forwarders will enjoy expanding margins on ocean freight, while U.S. trucking carriers and intermodal volume providers may start to see volume risks.

Consumer buying patterns are rapidly normalizing to pre-COVID levels, and U.S. retailers are stuck with too much inventory. Target (NYSE: TGT) shares dropped Tuesday morning after executives said the company would mark down unwanted items, cancel purchase orders and move quickly to get rid of excess inventory.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/us-import-demand-drops-off-a-cliff

We’ve supersized our capacity to ship stuff across the seas. As our global supply chains grow, what can we gather from the junk that washes up on shore?

Kathryn Schulz - May 30, 2022

There is a stretch of coastline in southern Cornwall known for its dragons. The black ones are rare, the green ones rarer; even a dedicated dragon hunter can go a lifetime without coming across a single one. Unlike the dragons of European myth, these do not hoard treasure, cannot breathe fire, and, lacking wings, cannot fly. They are aquatic, in that they always arrive from the sea, and they are capable of travelling considerable distances. One was spotted, like Saoirse Ronan, on Chesil Beach; another made its home on the otherwise uninhabited Dutch island of Griend, in the Wadden Sea. Mostly, though, they are drawn to the windswept beaches of southwestern England—to Portwrinkle and Perranporth, to Bigbury Bay and Gunwalloe. If you want to go looking for these dragons yourself, it will help to know that they are three inches long, missing their arms and tails, and made by the Lego company.

Cornwall owes its dragon population to the Tokio Express, a container ship that sailed from Rotterdam for North America in February of 1997 and ran into foul weather twenty miles off Land’s End. In heavy seas, it rolled so far abeam that sixty-two of the containers it was carrying wrenched free of their fastenings and fell overboard. One of those containers was filled with Lego pieces—to be specific, 4,756,940 of them. Among those were the dragons (33,427 black ones, 514 green), but, as fate would have it, many of the other pieces were ocean-themed. When the container slid off the ship, into the drink went vast quantities of miniature scuba tanks, spearguns, diving flippers, octopuses, ship’s rigging, submarine parts, sharks, portholes, life rafts, and the bits of underwater seascapes known among Lego aficionados as LURPs and BURPs—Little Ugly Rock Pieces and Big Ugly Rock Pieces, of which 7,200 and 11,520, respectively, were aboard the Tokio Express. Not long afterward, helicopter pilots reported looking down at the surface of the Celtic Sea and seeing “a slick of Lego.” (As with “fish,” “sheep,” and “offspring,” the most widely accepted plural of “Lego” is Lego.) Soon enough, some of the pieces lost overboard started washing ashore, mostly on Cornish beaches.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-containers-sink-in-the-drink

Much of the cargo for back-to-school and year-end holiday shopping arrived months before the usual peak season

Costas Paris - Sept. 5, 2022 7:03 am ET

Freight rates on the main ocean trade routes are sinking during what is typically the industry’s peak season after cargo owners shipped holiday goods early and inflation dented consumer demand.

The cost to ship a 40-foot container from China to the U.S. West Coast now stands around $5,400 a box, down 60% from January, according to the Freightos Baltic Index. A container shipped from Asia to Europe costs $9,000, 42% less than at the start of the year. The rate for both routes, while still above prepandemic levels, peaked at more than $20,000 last September.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ocean-shipping-rates-have-plunged-60-this-year-11662375780

By Chris Isidore, Amanda Watts, Judson Jones and Brandon Miller, CNN Business - Updated: Sat, 08 Oct 2022 12:09:47 GMT

The lowest water levels in the Mississippi River in a decade, caused by a severe Midwest drought, have closed the vital channel to barge traffic at a crucial time of the year for the transport of crops from the nation's heartland.

The Army Corps of Engineers has been dredging portions of the river for the past week in an attempt to deepen channels and get barge traffic moving again. But the closures have caused a massive tie-up in the nation's already struggling supply chains.

The low water has also been responsible for eight barges running aground during the last week, according to a report from the US Coast Guard.

As of Friday, the Coast Guard reports that there are 144 vessels and 2,253 barges queued up and waiting to get through two stretches of the river where traffic has been halted – one near Memphis, the other just north of Vicksburg, Mississippi. While the Coast Guard statement said it hopes to resume traffic again as soon as late Friday, it couldn't say for certain when that would happen.

https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_93bc2d6fc053e08af790efe1859b0935

John Konrad - January 8, 2023

(gCaptain) As China’s lockdown lifts and the world looks to the future with hope that this marks the final chapter of the worst pandemic since the Great Influenza of 1918, it’s essential to remember that other catastrophic events could once again bring global trade to a screeching halt during this most unlucky decade. COVID has been a devastating reminder of the fragility of human life, and history tells us that a great naval war always looms on the horizon, but what if a computer virus could wreak the same havoc? It may sound far-fetched, but it’s not impossible. While extensive network security protocols would likely halt the spread of a man-made virus, history reminds us of a natural electromagnetic threat that could be just as lethal to machines as COVID was to human lives.

On the unforgettable day of September 2, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington made a remarkable discovery – a larger white flare on the sun. His observation of the first Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was confirmed by others and soon after the mesmerizing Polar Lights aurora dipped down as far as Cuba. But the event brought more than celestial beauty. This phenomenon had a remarkable effect on the telegraph wires – the most advanced technology of the time. Across the United States and Europe, malfunctions caused communication chaos and ignited wildfires. It was a remarkable event that wreacked havoc that was manageable mostly because it occured nearly two decades before telephones and 23 years before the first centralized commercial generation of electricity

https://gcaptain.com/could-an-electrical-pandemic-destroy-shipping/

Loz Blain - December 04, 2023

Ships can become mobile wave energy converters, say Chinese researchers, using “heaving oscillators” that draw power from heaving, rolling and pitching movements as they move through the sea, while also acting as motion dampers to improve safety.

There are any number of floating wave energy generators under development, goes the thinking here – and yet not many aboard ships, which spend most of their working days in the waves. And where better to generate energy than right there on a ship, where energy storage is shaping up as one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in the race to decarbonization?

Researchers at the Shanghai Ship and Shipping Institute (go ahead and say that five times fast) proposed a two-body point absorber system that would sit below deck on a freighter, to preserve cargo space, but would also be isolated from the seawater by the hull.

The device would consist of a frame, securely attached to the ship at the top and bottom, with an oscillator body capable of moving up and down the frame rails, a spring to suspend the oscillator, and a hydraulic cylinder attached to the floor and the bottom of the oscillator.

https://newatlas.com/marine/heave-oscillators-wave-energy-ship/

Zach Strickland, FW Market Expert & Market Analyst - Sat, December 28, 2024 at 5:30 PM PST

Tender lead times last week hit their highest value since SONAR released tender data in 2018, averaging 3.76 days between tender and requested pickup. The previous high of 3.68 was set last year at the same time. Is this a longer-running trend or just a seasonal glitch?

Christmas is typically the seasonal peak of the Outbound Tender Lead Time (OTLT) index. Lead times increase leading into major national holidays as transportation managers tender loads for pickup for the period of time beyond the holiday. Staffing is typically limited at both shipper and carrier, meaning increased preparation and planning are required to limit disruptions to their operations.

With Christmas and New Year’s Day landing on Wednesdays, schedules are incredibly challenging to navigate, which probably helped push lead times higher than normal. The data suggests there is a longer-running trend component, however.

Lead times in 2024 were the highest on record, averaging over three days. The reasons for this are unclear, but after the pandemic, shippers may have learned the value of notifying carriers with optimal notice.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-shippers-increasing-lead-times-013000246.html

David Tracy - 1 December 2020 3:15PM

Back in September of 2019, a 600+ foot cargo ship called the MV Golden Ray, which was apparently loaded in an unstable fashion with over 4,000 cars, capsized in St. Simons Sound just off the port of Brunswick, Georgia. Since then, responders have been working to remove the ship in sections to send the hulk to the scrapper. November was particularly exciting, as workers used a chain to cut off the first enormous chunk of ship, revealing mangled cars within. Here’s a look at the fascinating way the team pulled this off.

https://jalopnik.com/a-chain-just-cut-through-a-capsized-cargo-ship-filled-w-1845784581

FreightWaves - Fri, September 24, 2021, 1:13 PM

There are over 60 container ships full of import cargo stuck offshore of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but there are more than double that — 154 as of Friday — waiting to load export cargo off Shanghai and Ningbo in China, according to eeSea, a company that analyzes carrier schedules.

The number of container ships anchored off Shanghai and Ningbo has surged over recent weeks. There are now 242 container ships waiting for berths at countrywide.

Whether it's due to heavy export volumes, Typhoon Chanthu or COVID, rising congestion in China is yet another wild card for the trans-Pacific trade.

Volatile trade flows

Congestion in Chinese ports that slows the flow of exports is bad news for U.S. importers but it could temporarily alleviate pressure on the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/container-ships-now-piling-anchorages-201330706.html

July 21, 2022

The Chittagong Port Authority (CPA) has detected two containers with the same number in its yards.

Both the 40-foot containers are bearing the same number: SLHU4500470. However, the boxes are bearing two separate seals: 001535 and GTS 005946.

The Container Terminal Management System (CTMS) of the port detected the boxes, which were kept under the port’s security arrangement.

Port officials said that one of the two containers may contain computer accessories while the other one may have solar photovoltaic water pump.

https://container-news.com/two-containers-with-same-number-detected-in-chittagong-port/

Thu, Mar 27 20257:57 AM EDT / Updated Thu, Mar 27 20252:22 PM EDT - Lori Ann LaRocco

Key Points

Atlantic Container Line, an ocean carrier which handles large industrial items including the wings for Airbus planes, says it will be forced to abandon the U.S. market if the government follows through on threats to fine Chinese-built shipping vessels.

• Unordered List ItemIts CEO Andrew Abbott tells CNBC that freight rates will head back to Covid surge levels and there will be no economic rationale to continue to operate as a niche freight company within the U.S.
• Unordered List Item“This hits American exporters and importers worse than anybody else,” says Abbott. “If this happens … we’re going to have to shut down.”
• Unordered List ItemOcean carrier on why US threat to fine Chinese containerships is bad trade policy

Niche ocean carrier Atlantic Container Line is warning the fines the U.S. government is considering hitting Chinese-built freight vessels with would force it to leave the United States and throw the global supply chain out of balance, potentially fueling freight rates not seen since Covid.

“This hits American exporters and importers worse than anybody else,” said Andrew Abbott, CEO of ACL. “If this happens, we’re out of business and we’re going to have to shut down.”

The United States Trade Representative held its second day of this week’s hearings on the fines that would be levied under Section 301 of U.S. trade law on Wednesday, with over 300 trade groups and other interested parties warning the government across comments letters and in testimony that the U.S. is no position to win an economic war that places ocean carriers using Chinese-made vessels in the middle. Soon, Chinese-made vessels will represents 98% of the trade ships on the world’s oceans.

The policy proposal, begun under the Biden administration and culminating in a January report concluding China’s shipbuilding industry had an unfair advantage, would allow the U.S. government to impose steep levies on Chinese-made ships arriving at U.S. ports. For Chinese-owned operators (such as Cosco), a service fee of up to $1 million could be charged on each vessel. For non-Chinese-owned ocean carriers with fleets containing Chinese-built vessels, the service fee would be up to $1.5 million for each U.S. port of call.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/27/if-china-freight-ship-fines-hit-were-out-of-business-in-us-carrier-warns.html

David Shepardson - Thu, August 25, 2022 at 10:54 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Global shipping container suppliers China International Marine Containers and Maersk Container Industry in a joint statement on Thursday said they have abandoned a merger plan, citing significant regulatory challenges.

China International Marine Containers (CIMC) in September had agreed to buy the Danish shipping company AP Moeller - Maersk's refrigerated containers maker for $987.3 million.

The U.S. Justice Department said the deal would have combined two of the world's four suppliers of refrigerated shipping containers and further concentrated the global cold supply chain.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shipping-container-suppliers-abandon-merger-175418285.html

The effects of restrictions on shipping in the Red Sea and Panama Canal are being felt around the world. Global trade is under immense strain, freight costs are rising, and environmental pollution is increasing.

Dirk Kaufmann - 8 July 2024

The significance of the Red Sea shipping route for global trade is enormous. But for over six months now, Houthi militias from Yemen have been attacking ships in the region for their owners' or operators' ties to Israel. The attacks come as Israel executes its war against the militant group Hamas in Gaza following its massacre of Israeli citizens on October 7 of last year.

On June 20, for instance, the Houthis, who say they are fighting for the Palestinian cause, sank a coal ship with a drone strike.

In response to the Houthi attacks, US and British military vessels have repeatedly targeted militia positions in Yemen over the past several months. Additionally, warships from two international coalitions are operating in the region to secure maritime traffic along the Yemeni coast. The German Navy, for one, is part of the EU naval mission Aspides.

https://www.dw.com/en/global-trade-woes-mount-as-shipping-costs-rise/a-69586965

Modeling 5 to 10 GWh electrified containerships, researchers find that 40% of routes today could be electrified in an economically viable manner, before considering environmental costs.

August 22, 2022 - John Fitzgerald Weaver

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have released a study which examines “the technical outlook, economic feasibility, and environmental impact of battery-electric containerships.”

Breaking from previous studies, the researchers have classified the volume of space housing the batteries as an opportunity cost, rather than a fixed technical constraint. After modeling a wide variety of containership sizes, as well as 13 major world trade routes, the research suggests that more than 40% of the world’s fleet of containerships could be electrified “cost-effectively and with current technology,” by the end of this decade.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/08/22/ev-shipping-is-set-to-blow-internal-combustion-engines-out-of-the-water/

Less than you might imagine, thankfully

Simon Sharwood - Tue 2 Jan 2024 00:58 UTC

The US Coast Guard has advised that a ship carrying around 800 tonnes of Lithium-Ion batteries – some of which caught fire – is out of danger after its crew handled the situation admirably.

This story starts when the good ship Genius Star XI left South Korea on December 17, bound for the United States. According to Maritime News, the voyage struck trouble on Christmas Day when some of the batteries caught fire. The vessel's crew reportedly used carbon dioxide to douse the blaze, but it spread a little before being contained.

When such batteries catch fire, they are at risk of thermal runaway. When that happens, expect a lot of heat, fire, and nasty smoke. A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ions, all blazing away fiercely, is not a pleasant prospect.

On the 28th, the US Coast Guard received a report of a “contained but ongoing” fire aboard the vessel.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/02/ship_li_ion_fire/

The global shipping industry is going old school, and using sails again.

Angely Mercado - 3 July 2023

French company Airseas, has promised to help cargo ships reduce their fuel consumption, and cut their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 20%. And they’re doing this with the Seawing—a 1,000 square meter kite that will fly 300 meters (984 feet) above the water’s surface. So the global shipping industry is apparently rediscovering the joy (and efficiency) of sails.

The large, ship-sized kite is currently being developed, and the company plans to open a factory to produce the Seawing in 2026. Once manufactured, Airseas has promised that launching and operating a Seawing on a cargo vessel will be automated, making it easy to use for crews. The kite and the equipment that launches it is mounted on a boat’s deck, and the crew can simply press some buttons and a large kite will ascend into the sky. That’s not to say that the cargo ships won’t use their engines at all, but the kite will take some pressure off of those engines and will reduce the need for fuel. The wind will move the ship, just like it did for hundreds of years in the ye olden days before industrialization.

https://gizmodo.com/kites-on-boats-airseas-seawing-shipping-emissions-1850601496

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday May 30, 2024 08:30PM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:

The slashing of pollution from shipping in 2020 led to a big “termination shock” that is estimated have pushed the rate of global heating to double the long-term average, according to research. Until 2020, global shipping used dirty, high-sulphur fuels that produced air pollution. The pollution particles blocked sunlight and helped form more clouds, thereby curbing global heating. But new regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulphur content of fuels by more than 80%. The new analysis calculates that the subsequent drop in pollution particles has significantly increased the amount of heat being trapped at the Earth's surface that drives the climate crisis. The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks.

Dr Tianle Yuan, at the University of Maryland, US, who led the study, said the estimated 0.2 watts per sq meter of additional heat trapped over the oceans after the pollution cut was “a big number, and it happened in one year, so it's a big shock to the system.” “We will experience about double the warming rate compared to the long-term average” since 1880 as a result, he said. The heating effect of the pollution cut is expected to last about seven years. The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, combined satellite observations of sulphur pollution and computer modeling to calculate the impact of the cut. It found the short-term shock was equivalent to 80% of the total extra heating the planet has seen since 2020 from longer-term factors such as rising fossil-fuel emissions.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/05/30/2222212/cut-in-ship-pollution-sparked-global-heating-spurt

The so-called Bayside Canadian Railway is now at the center of a massive court fight.

James Gilboy - February 27, 2022

Life is full of loopholes big and small, and sometimes you just have to run a train right through one. That seems to be the case with the Bayside Canadian Railway, anyway, down at the southwestern tip of New Brunswick, Canada. It runs about 200 feet along a clearing just across the St. Croix River from Maine. Its tiny train slowly bumps back and forth, going approximately nowhere. And it's now at the center of a massive court battle between its operators and the U.S. federal government.

Run by a subsidiary of the American Seafood Group, a huge Seattle-based seafood processor that operates in Alaska, the Bayside Canadian Railway is said by the DOJ to fly afoul of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, according to Anchorage Daily News. Also known as the Jones Act, the law requires shipping between American ports be done with American-built, American-flagged vessels, which the ASG doesn't operate. An exemption known as the third proviso, however, apparently accommodates goods that make part of the journey via rail in Canada.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/44445/canada-has-a-railroad-for-fish-thats-only-200-feet-long-heres-why

Posted by msmash on Wednesday June 16, 2021 08:00PM

An anonymous reader shares a report:

By late January 2021, some 55 vessels were crowded around the LA and Long Beach ports, reportedly sitting in the ocean for up to two weeks. FreightWaves noted that it took longer for some of these ships just to get unloaded than it was for them to cross the Pacific. Why is there a delay to unload these ships? The boom in demand is, of course, one leading reason. American ports are also seeing a shortage of labor. There's an ongoing shortage of the longshoremen who who undertake the critical task of getting these containers off the ship and onto trucks or trains. Dozens were quarantined due to the coronavirus at varying points last year.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/06/16/2254236/why-we-are-in-a-shipping-crisis-thats-sparking-shortages

June 21, 2021 5:09 AM ET - Scott Horsley

John Nephew thought he had a winner with a new tabletop game called Dice Miner. Importing the games from China turned out to be its own roll of the dice.

Nephew, founder of Atlas Games in Duluth, Minn., ordered a 40-foot cargo container full of games from Shanghai in December, anticipating delivery in about six weeks.

Instead, the games took nearly six months to arrive — an increasingly common example of the supply chain bottlenecks pushing inflation to its highest level in more than a dozen years.

“We were booked on something like eight different shipping voyages in a row, and had them canceled from under us,” Nephew says.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/21/1007938067/cargo-is-piling-up-everywhere-and-its-making-inflation-worse

Hannah Towey, Grace Kay, and Áine Cain - Aug 30, 2021, 7:59 AM

Forty-four freight ships are stuck awaiting entry into California's two largest ports, the highest number recorded since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Marine Exchange of Southern California reported on Saturday.

The queue is a result of the labor shortage, COVID-19-related disruptions, and holiday-buying surges. Port of Los Angeles data indicated that the ships' average wait time had increased to 7.6 days.

“The normal number of container ships at anchor is between zero and one,” Kip Louttit, the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, told Insider in July.

California ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach account for about one-third of US imports. These ports operate as a primary source of imports from China and have experienced heavy congestion throughout the pandemic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/shipping-delays-china-supply-chain-record-ships-stuck-california-ports-2021-8

Hannah Towey,Grace Kay,Áine Cain - September 14, 2021

Key ports in Southern California have hit a fourth record in less than three weeks, as shipping delays surge past early pandemic levels.

On Monday, 56 cargo ships were stuck at anchor or in drift areas off of Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. The ports are currently dealing with 140 total ship in the ports, including 87 freighters, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

In late August, the ports hit an all-time high not seen since February, when the onset of the pandemic and panic-buying wreaked havoc on global supply chains.

The queue is a result of COVID-19-related disruptions, and holiday-buying surges, paired with a national labor shortage. Port of Los Angeles data indicates that ships' average wait times have increased to 8.5 days.

“The normal number of container ships at anchor is between zero and one,” Kip Louttit, the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, told Insider in July.

https://news.yahoo.com/record-breaking-44-container-ships-145905612.html

Grace Kay - Tue, September 21, 2021, 12:25 PM

From above they may look like colorful specks in the distance, but the cargo ships floating off the coast of Southern California represent a massive bottle neck for the global supply chain.

On Monday, 97 hulking cargo ships were at Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. At the time, 70 of the container ships were at anchor or in drift areas waiting for space to open up in the port, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

On Sunday, when Sam Kirschner snapped a photo from his plane window - over 10,000 feet above the shore - the Southern California ports had just finished a week where they had hit a new ship-backlog record every day, as the queue lengthened by 10 ships.

https://news.yahoo.com/look-record-breaking-port-congestion-181939208.html

U.S. shipping operations remain clogged as ports, truckers and warehouses can’t find enough workers or agree on 24/7 operations

By Costas Paris , Jennifer Smith The Wall Street Journal - September 26, 2021

Nike Inc. doesn’t have enough sneakers to sell for the holidays. Costco Wholesale Corp. is reimposing limits on paper towel purchases. Prices for artificial Christmas trees have jumped 25% this season.

Despite mounting shipping delays and cargo backlogs, the busiest U.S. port complex shuts its gates for hours on most days and remains closed on Sundays. Meanwhile, major ports in Asia and Europe have operated round-the-clock for years.

“With the current work schedule you have two big ports operating at 60%-70% of their capacity,” said Uffe Ostergaard, president of the North America region for German boxship operator Hapag-Lloyd AG . “That’s a huge operational disadvantage.”

The American supply chain has so far failed to adapt to the crush of imports as businesses rush to restock pandemic-depleted inventories. Tens of thousands of containers are stuck at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, the two West Coast gateways that move more than a quarter of all American imports. More than 60 ships are lined up to dock, with waiting times stretching to three weeks.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/cargo-piles-up-as-california-ports-jostle-over-how-to-resolve-delays

Andy Serwer with Max Zahn - Sat, October 9, 2021, 4:50 AM

As we head closer to the second anniversary (if that’s the right word for it) of the pandemic, it’s clear we’ve made some great progress fighting COVID-19.

We have testing and vaccines that work. We know masks and social distancing are effective. Despite the nagging disruptions that mark much of what we do — and even worse the horror of continued sickness and death — in some ways, we can hope that the worst is behind us.

But not all of it. An under-recognized characteristic of any pandemic is its nonlinear course, which delivers, in true viral fashion, shocking, unanticipated consequences. That brings us — 20 or so months into the COVID-19 pandemic — to a vast oceanic parking lot dotted with scores of giant container ships off the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

No doubt you’ve heard how the world’s supply chain is being stressed like never before, resulting in shortages and delays in everything from semiconductors, to cars, sneakers, exercise equipment, and Rolexes. Initially this was because factories in Asia (for example) had to close for weeks or even months because workers were sick with the coronavirus. That was true and still is the case in Vietnam, for instance.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-crazy-shipping-crisis-explained-094340766.html

It's another example of what the global supply crisis looks like at its worst.

Jody Serrano - 23 October 2021 10:45PM

f you want to know what a global supply chain crisis looks like at its worst, all you have to do is check out what happened at southern California’s ports this week.

The state’s port complex in Los Angeles and Long Beach at one point had more than 100 ships waiting to unload their cargo in recent days, an all-time high, the Guardian reported. For a complex used to seeing less than 20 ships at anchor pre-pandemic, the wave of traffic is staggering. Unfortunately, this isn’t something new for the port complex, which has been on a record-breaking streak for months.

In June, for instance, the port in Los Angeles became the first one in the Western hemisphere to receive 10 million container units in a 12-month period, according to the outlet. Just last month, the Los Angeles port had its busiest September ever. Meanwhile, in Long Beach, some expect the port to process more than nine million container units this year, which would be the most in the port’s history.

https://gizmodo.com/more-than-100-cargo-ships-were-waiting-to-unload-in-sou-1847924794

Posted on October 28, 2021 by TheZvi

A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to

• Understand what happened.
• Make sure everyone knows it happened.
• Understand how and why it happened.
• Understand how we might cause it to happen again.
• Update our models and actions.
• Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization.

That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/an-unexpected-victory-container-stacking-at-the-port-of-los-angeles/

Chiara Vercellone, USA TODAY - Fri, October 29, 2021, 3:12 PM

The claim: Image shows 200,000 cargo containers waiting to dock at Long Beach port

As two ports in California work around the clock to alleviate the backlog of cargo ships waiting to unload, some social media users are claiming the backup numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

“This is current map of cargo containers at sea waiting to port around the U.S.,” reads the caption of a viral Oct. 21 Facebook post, which accumulated 3,000 shares in a week. “There are now 200,000 containers just at the Long Beach, CA port waiting to dock.”

Other versions of the post have also accrued thousands of shares.

Accompanying the caption is an image of a map of the western coasts of North and South America. Green arrows can be seen spread all over the Pacific Ocean, with a heavy concentration near the the U.S. West Coast.

https://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-around-170-ships-220548553.html

Grace Kay - Oct 28, 2021, 8:17 AM

Look no further than satellite data to see how congestion at ports in Southern California surged in the past two years.

Before the pandemic, the ports in Long Beach and Los Angeles typically averaged zero to one ships at anchor, waiting to dock and unload. The highest backlog that the ports, which are responsible for nearly half of all US imports, had seen was 17 ships, according to the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

Time-lapsed data from Spire Maritime, a vessel-tracking company, tells the story of how the backlogs grew to encompass 100 ships.

https://www.businessinsider.com/satellite-video-shows-cargo-ship-backlogs-in-california-ports-tripled-2021-10

Dani Romero - Sun, October 31, 2021, 6:13 AM

With shipping delays mounting and cargo piling up at Los Angeles County ports, local officials are tightening the rules on lingering shipping containers that surround the docks, part of an effort to ease congestion of freighter ships anchored along Southern California’s coast.

Beginning Nov. 1, carriers will be charged $100 per container, with the fee increasing $100 per container per day — but the fee will not be assessed until Nov. 15.

Collected fees will be reinvested by the ports in programs to increase efficiency and address congestion, according to the announcement.

“This is not intended as a pass-on cost, rather it's intended as ‘let's move the cargo’,” Mario Cordero, Port of Long Beach Executive Director, said in a press conference on Wednesday. In an effort to ease the logjam, Long Beach recently relaxed rules that constrained the amount of cargo-staking at ports.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/la-long-beach-target-ugly-hazard-of-containers-near-ports-amid-supply-crisis-131248353.html

Mike Schuler - June 27, 2022

With a busy summer expected at the San Pedro Bay ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, vessel traffic officials are reporting a new record low number of containerships waiting for a berth.

The Marine Exchange of Southern California on Friday reported just 16 containerships in the backup, setting a new record low for 2022.

For comparison, this is down from an all-time record high of 109 containerships in the backup in early January of this year. Compared to 2021, the backup hit a low of 9 ships in June 2021, decreasing from a February peak of 40. However, the backup increased steadily from the June low through the end of the year—leading to January’s record. To put it another way, year-over-year the backup is up 77%, but down over 85% compared to the peak.

https://gcaptain.com/checking-in-on-southern-californias-containership-backup/

Nov. 22, 2022 at 9:07 p.m. ET - Paul Berger

Officials declared an end to the backup of ships at Southern California’s ports more than two years after vessels began lining up in weekslong queues that became one of the most visible signs in the U.S. of the pandemic-driven turmoil in supply chains.

The Marine Exchange of Southern California said Tuesday the backup at the neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that climbed to a high of 109 vessels in January had fallen to zero.

Kip Louttit, the marine exchange’s executive director, said both ports have enough labor to handle the current volume of ships while some ocean carriers are delaying vessel arrivals to better suit their own operations.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/after-2-years-container-ship-backlog-at-southern-california-ports-is-over-11669169229

Ship backlog off Los Angeles and Long Beach has completely vanished

Greg Miller - Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Not a single container ship waited offshore of the ports of Los Angeles or Long Beach on Tuesday. It was the first time the queue had gone to zero since October 2020, in the early days of the COVID-era consumer boom.

“The container-ship backup for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach has ended,” declared Kip Louttit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, in a statement to the media. “It is time to move into a different phase of operations.”

The backup may be over in Southern California, but it’s not yet over for North America overall.

An American Shipper survey of MarineTraffic ship-position data and port queue lists showed 59 container ships waiting off North American ports on Tuesday morning, mainly along the East and Gulf coasts.

That’s still well above pre-COVID levels, when numbers were in the single digits. But congestion is clearly easing: The count is down 60% from the peaks earlier this year.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/zero-ships-waiting-off-southern-california-59-off-other-ports

24/06/2022 - Le News

This week, a project to build an underground freight tunnel network stretching from Geneva to St Gallen, was given a start date of 1 August 2022 by the Federal Council, reported RTS.

The Cargo sous terrain (CST) project will connect Switzerland’s key hubs starting in 2031. CST aims to take the strain off the road and railway networks, reduce the environmental impact of transport and improve the delivery of goods across the country.

The project, which was launched in 2013, includes a three lane underground tunnel network with automated, driverless electric transport vehicles travelling at 30km an hour operating 24 hours a day. In addition, there will be a rapid overhead roof track will deliver smaller packages.

https://lenews.ch/2022/06/24/switzerlands-underground-freight-project-gets-start-date/

Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) - 7:21 AM · Jan 6, 2024

95% of container ships that would’ve transited the Red Sea are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa as of this morning. The ships diverting from their ordinary course are marked orange on the @flexport

map below.

https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1743654060673093754

21st January 2024, 06:00 PST - Chris Baraniuk, Features correspondent

Hundreds of cargo ships are being rerouted around the southern tip of Africa to avoid Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. But just how easy is it to divert the world's biggest ships?

You can see exactly where the drone attack hit. Just look for the grisly black scorch marks staining the ship's white paint. On 17 January, the MV Genco Picardy, a US-owned bulk carrier, became the latest victim of Houthi rebel assaults on commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea. One of the world's busiest shipping lanes is now, surely, the most dangerous.

Since November, Yemen's Houthi rebel group has targeted vessels passing through the strait of Bab al-Mandab, a 20 mile (32km) wide channel that splits north-east Africa from Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. They claim to be targeting vessels with connections to Israel following the start of the war in the Gaza Strip.

They've used everything from heavily armed hijackers to missiles and drones. For seafarers caught up in the chaos, it must be terrifying. A tanker, for example, could carry around one million barrels of highly flammable oil. The crew of the MV Genco Picardy – which was carrying phosphate rock – were unharmed and were able to extinguish the fire caused by the incendiary drone.

It's not a situation anyone would envy, says Michelle Wiese Bockmann as she describes counting no fewer than 300 ships entering the most dangerous stretch of the Red Sea one day earlier this week.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240119-red-sea-crisis-how-global-shipping-is-being-rerouted-out-of-danger

Mostafa Salem, CNN - Updated 12:07 PM EDT, Thu July 10, 2025

Ten people have been rescued from the Red Sea after their ship sank near Yemen following an attack by the Houthis, according to the European Union’s maritime security mission, with several others believed to be being held by the rebel group.

The Houthis said they had taken some of those on board to an undisclosed location following the attack on the Eternity C, the second time they have targeted commercial shipping in the Red Sea this week. Maritime security sources told Reuters that the Yemeni militia was believed to be holding six crew members.

Three of the 25 people on board were killed in the attack, the EU’s Operation Aspides told CNN.

The ship’s crew consisted of 22 members – 21 Filipinos and one Russian – while a three-person security team was also on board, according to the EU mission, which coordinates rescue operations in the Red Sea.

The mission said that of the ten people recovered from the water on Wednesday and overnight into Thursday, eight were Filipino crew members, while the other two were security personnel, of Greek and Indian nationality.

https://www.cnn.com/world/middleeast/eternity-c-houthi-rebels-red-sea-intl-hnk

Mary Hanbury - Mon, October 11, 2021, 5:22 AM

The Port of Savannah is overwhelmed with shipping containers 
as the supply chain crisis continues.

There are nearly 80,000 containers stacked up on the docks, 
The New York Times reported.

The head of the Georgia Ports Authority said some ships 
were waiting for nine days before getting a slot.

The Port of Savannah, like other ports around the US, is approaching crisis point, according to a report by The New York Times.

It has nearly 80,000 containers - 50% more than normal - stacked up, and the person that oversees the port says he's “never had the yard as full as this.”

About 700 containers have been left there for a month or more, per The Times. In September, 4,500 containers sat in the port for weeks, waiting to be collected by the trucks or boats that take them to their next destination, The Times reported.

These issues have become common in ports around the world.

https://news.yahoo.com/nearly-80-000-shipping-containers-122235646.html

Enormous container ships ferry goods all over the world, but when one of them gets into trouble – as happened with the Ever Given and Ever Forward recently – how can they be saved? Chris Baraniuk finds out.

Chris Baraniuk - 30th May 2022

Rain lashed the windows. A violent sea pounded the steel hull of the ship and the wind roared with primeval power. It was the middle of the night in the summer of 2010. The Kota Kado, a 230m-long container ship, had run aground outside the port of Hong Kong. Her crew had evacuated but standing on the bridge in his life jacket, prepared for the worst, was salvage master Captain Nick Sloane. He beheld the force of the typhoon that now, in the darkness, raged over the stricken vessel.

Sloane was holed up with just five other members of the salvage team. Days earlier, they had arrived to the South China Sea with the aim of saving the Kota Kado. When typhoons were forecast to batter the grounded ship, Sloane made the decision to stay on board overnight with a skeleton crew. He wanted to feel how the vessel flexed in the storm, to understand where it hit her hardest, knowing that this would inform whatever measures they took next. But it was a very close call.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220530-how-to-rescue-the-worlds-biggest-cargo-ships

Tanker blocked canal for hours, close to where Ever Given container ship became stuck, disrupting supply chains for a week

Martin Farrer - Wed 31 Aug 2022 21.17 EDT

A tanker getting stuck used to be more the domain of niche business news, but that was before the Ever Given, so all eyes were soon on the Affinity V tanker’s plight in the Suez Canal.

On Wednesday, the 250-metre long Affinity V tanker was bound for Saudi Arabia when it ran aground close to the same spot in the narrow southern section of the canal in Egypt where the Ever Given container ship caused a week-long halt to traffic in March 2021, dominating global headlines and paralysing supply chains.

The plight of the Singapore-flagged vessel raised alarm bells reminiscent of the kind of delays that forced the owners of the Ever Given to pay compensation of more than $200m to the Suez Canal Authority.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/01/suez-canal-ship-stuck-blocked-again-affinity-v

Monday, April 1, 2024

On April 1, 2024, Grace Ocean Private Limited and Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., as owner and manager of the M/V DALI, filed a Petition for Exoneration from or Limitation of Liability in this Court. Petitioners also filed a Motion to Accept Interim Stipulation for Value and Stipulation for Costs and for the Entry of Restraining Order and Order for Issuance of Notice.
https://www.mdd.uscourts.gov/news/matter-petition-grace-ocean-private-limited-et-al-exoneration-or-limitation-liability-2024-04

Mike Schuler - March 31, 2022

Evergreen Marine, the owner of the stuck Ever Forward, has declared General Average following two unsuccessful attempts to refloat the ship in Chesapeake Bay.

The latest attempt took place Wednesday hoping to take advantage of a weather system that helped to raise tides about a foot higher than normal. Unfortunately, the refloating attempt was unsuccessful and there did not seem to be any movement of the ship.

In a statement, Evergreen said GA has been declared “in light of the increasing costs arising from the continued attempts to refloat the vessel.”

General Average is a maritime law principle requiring that the shipowner and cargo interests proportionately share in the costs associated with rescuing a vessel after a major casualty. When GA is declared, cargo owners are required to contribute to a GA fund before their cargo can be released.

https://gcaptain.com/ever-forward-general-average-declared/

Lauren Hamilton - April 8, 2022, 10:58 AM

A new effort aimed at removing 500 shipping containers from a stranded cargo ship in the Chesapeake Bay begins Saturday.

The 1,000-foot Ever Forward has been stuck in the Chesapeake Bay since March 13.

The latest move, which is expected to take several days, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, comes after two failed attempts to get the massive container ship unstuck.

https://wtop.com/maryland/2022/04/latest-effort-to-free-ever-forward-cargo-ship-in-chesapeake-bay-begins-saturday/

BILL HUTCHINSON - Sun, April 17, 2022, 1:55 PM

The 1,095-footEver Forward cargo ship that has been mired in the mud of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland for more than a month was dislodged and refloated early Sunday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The massive cargo ship, which ran aground in shallow water 36 days ago, was yanked from a mound of mud by two pulling barges and six tugboats working in tandem around 7 a.m., the Coast Guard said.

“The vastness and complexity of this response were historic, as an incident like the Ever Forward grounding, in type and duration, is a rare occurrence,” Capt. David O’Connell, commander of Coast Guard Sector Maryland-National Capital Region, said in a statement. “It was the collaboration of each responding agency, Evergreen Marine Corporation, and dedicated responders that resulted in the successful refloating of Ever Forward while ensuring the safety of the public and response personnel, mitigating pollution potential, and minimizing economic impacts.“

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/cargo-ship-stuck-chesapeake-bay-163256359.html

Posted by msmash on Friday February 18, 2022 08:40AM

A burning car transport ship drifted in the mid-Atlantic on Thursday after the huge vessel's 22 crew members were evacuated due to the blaze, the Portuguese navy said. From a report:

Shipping in the area was warned that the 200-meter-long (650-feet-long) Felicity Ace was adrift near Portugal's Azores Islands after the crew were taken off on Wednesday, Portuguese navy spokesman Cmdr. Jose Sousa Luis said. The Felicity Ace can carry more than 17,000 metric tons (18,700 tons) of cargo. Typically, car transport ships fit thousands of vehicles on multiple decks in their hold.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/02/18/1615256/burning-cargo-ship-is-adrift-in-mid-atlantic-without-crew

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday February 26, 2022 09:34PM

“Volkswagen AG has lost hope that many of its roughly 4,000 vehicles aboard a cargo ship that caught fire last week in the Atlantic can be saved,” Bloomberg reported Friday, citing estimates that the total cargo loss for the Felicity Ace could exceed a third of a billion dollars.

“The blaze is believed to have lasted more than a week after the Panama-flagged ship's crew members were evacuated and it was left adrift.”

VW's Golf compact cars and ID.4 electric crossovers were among the vehicles aboard the ship, according to an internal email last week from the automaker's U.S. operation. Headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, the group manufactures cars under brands including VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini — all of which were on the ship.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/02/26/2330202/losses-estimated-at-334m-for-cargo-ship-fire-as-lithium-ion-batteries-burned-more-than-a-week

March 1, 2022

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — A large cargo vessel carrying cars from Germany to the United States sank Tuesday in the mid-Atlantic, 13 days after a fire broke out on board, the ship’s manager and the Portuguese navy said.

The Felicity Ace sank about 400 kilometers (250 miles) off Portugal’s Azores Islands as it was being towed, MOL Ship Management in Singapore said in a statement. A salvage team had put out the fire.

The 200-meter-long (650-foot-long) vessel listed to starboard before going under, the ship’s manager said.

The Portuguese navy confirmed the sinking, saying it occurred outside Portuguese waters. A Portuguese Air Force helicopter evacuated the 22 crew members when the fire first broke out, setting the ship adrift.

https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-united-states-germany-portugal-2bb8dd53fa48ae066c3ae3f2bcfe999e

Sure, hundreds of Bentleys and Porsches died, but what about that 1996 Prelude?

Steve DaSilva - 5 April 2022 3:30PM

Just under two months ago, the cargo ship Felicity Ace caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean while hauling millions of dollars worth of European cars. The fire destroyed every single car on board, even forcing Lamborghini to restart production of the Aventador Ultimae to replace burned-up machine. But what of the poor owner of the one (1) 2014 Kia Soul on the ship’s manifest?

https://jalopnik.com/these-are-all-the-cars-that-sank-on-the-felicity-ace-1848751894

Mitsui OSK Lines has instituted a new policy for shipping EVs, but other car carriers aren't rushing to follow.

Lewin Day - April 6, 2022

The recent sinking of the Felicity Ace car carrier is already having an impact on the broader shipping industry. Automotive transport companies are beginning to implement policies restricting or outright banning EVs out of concerns for the fire risks posed by batteries, reports Splash.

Japan's Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) suffered greatly earlier this year when its ship, the Felicity Ace, was lost to a fire that broke out during transit of the Atlantic Ocean. Around 4,000 cars were lost, with the manifest including the last run of Lamborghini Aventadors and one enthusiast's Honda Prelude. The incident incurred losses for the company on the order of $500 million according to law firm Vinson & Elkins. With the ship having sunk, the cause of the fire will likely remain a mystery, but the EVs carried onboard are suspected to have contributed to the ferocity of the blaze.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/45112/car-shipping-giant-bans-used-evs-after-felicity-ace-sinking

Water, water everywhere, but it would just make it worse

Iain Thomson - Thu 5 Jun 2025 07:28 UTC

US Coast Guard and civilian vessels have rescued 22 sailors off the coast of Alaska after some of the electric cars they were transporting caught fire.

The good ship Morning Midas - a roll-on, roll-off ferry that was delivering 3,000 vehicles from Yantai, China, to Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico - is currently around 304 miles south of Adak, Alaska, the US Coast Guard tells us. The sailors on the vessel, operated by UK-based Zodiac Maritime, noticed the fire at around midnight UTC on 3 June and were unable to stop the conflagration.

“The vessel is loaded with around 3,000 vehicles, 800 of which are electric vehicles,” Zodiac Marine told The Register. “Smoke was initially seen emanating from a deck carrying electric vehicles.”

“The crew immediately initiated emergency firefighting procedures using the vessel’s onboard fire suppression systems. However, despite their efforts, the situation could not be brought under control.”

The crew made a distress call and boarded lifeboats. Nearby merchant vessels responded and rescued the mariners, the Coast Guard tells us. The ship is now likely to continue burning until specialized fire-fighting crews arrive and attempt to halt the blaze.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/05/zodiac_maritime_electric_car_fire/

It's still smoking, but help is on hand

Iain Thomson - Wed 11 Jun 2025 14:01 UTC

A tug has reached the Morning Midas, six days after a presumed battery fire broke out, causing the crew to abandon ship.

The vessel, operated by the British firm Zodiac Marine, was transporting 3,000 cars – 800 of them electric – from China to Mexico on June 3, when the crew noticed smoke billowing out of the level where the electric cars are parked. They tried to tackle the blaze but had to take to the lifeboats, after which a merchant craft that responded to their mayday message rescued them.

The ship continued to burn and drifted northeast at approximately 1.8 miles per hour (1.6 knots/2.9 kmh), the US Coast Guard said on Monday. It is currently 220 miles (354 km) south of Adak, America's westernmost city, located in the Aleutian Islands.

The case highlights the dangers of working with lithium batteries, particularly when sea water is involved. Since it is a much better conductor of electricity than fresh water, salt water has been shown to short out some batteries, causing a runaway thermal reaction.

Once a lithium fire starts, it's incredibly difficult to put out. A specially developed powder is usually used to starve the fire of oxygen - a matter complicated by the battery occasionally flaring up again after seemingly being extinguished.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/11/ship_electric_fire/

The potential for an oil spill is… high.

AJ Dellinger - June 25, 2025

If you were waiting on a new car, the Domino’s Pizza Tracker equivalent for vehicle orders might be stuck at the “Delivery” spot for a while. A cargo ship carrying a fleet of electric vehicles, hybrids, and gas-powered vehicles sank, according to the New York Times, after catching fire while crossing the Pacific.

The Morning Midas, a ship sailing under a Liberian flag and managed by international shipping firm Zodiac Maritime, went under about 360 nautical miles from the coast of Alaska, according to the report. The ship had caught fire about three weeks ago and sustained additional damage from severe weather before it finally headed to its watery grave. It was reportedly sailing from China to Mexico with a large load of automotive cargo on board.

The 600-foot boat was carrying 70 electric vehicles, 681 hybrids, and more than 2,000 conventional vehicles, according to information provided by the U.S. Coast Guard. It was also carrying about 1,800 metric tons of ship fuel, which is great for a ship crossing the ocean and not so great for a ship headed to the sea floor, as it creates the potential for an oil spill. According to the Times, none of the cargo that was on board the Morning Midas was salvaged before it went down.

While the cars went down with the ship, the Morning Midas crew was successfully evacuated. The 22 crew members were all evacuated by lifeboat and picked up by a commercial ship shortly after the initial fire broke out on June 3. They ditched the ship once it was clear they couldn’t contain the fire, which burned for about a week before firefighting crews were able to reach it. The fire did burn out before the ship sank, but not soon enough to allow anything to be saved.

https://gizmodo.com/cargo-ship-carrying-flaming-evs-sinks-off-the-coast-of-alaska-2000620335

By Hanna Ziady, CNN Business - Updated 10:24 AM ET, Wed September 29, 2021

London (CNN Business)Seafarers, truck drivers and airline workers have endured quarantines, travel restrictions and complex Covid-19 vaccination and testing requirements to keep stretched supply chains moving during the pandemic.

But many are now reaching their breaking point, posing yet another threat to the badly tangled network of ports, container vessels and trucking companies that moves goods around the world.

In an open letter Wednesday to heads of state attending the United Nations General Assembly, the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and other industry groups warned of a “global transport system collapse” if governments do not restore freedom of movement to transport workers and give them priority to receive vaccines recognized by the World Health Organization.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/29/business/supply-chain-workers/index.html

September 27, 2021 - Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy

The global supply chain mess will require increased global vaccination and acquired immunity, semiconductor capacity expansion and the end of extraordinary housing/labor supports to resolve. We expect all three to occur over the next few months, leading to a global growth bounce in 2022

The containership industry is a good illustration of the supply chain mess: as shown in the first chart, more than 70 containerships are stacked up outside Los Angeles/Long Beach ports waiting to unload. Idle containerships are back to just 3% of the total fleet, shipping costs are surging, manufacturing delivery times are extended and rail shipments are declining sharply from their summer peak, illustrating the far reaching impact of the delays.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/eye-on-the-market/dude-where-is-my-stuff/

How industry failures to collaborate and share information left the system vulnerable

By David J. Lynch - Updated Sept. 30 at 6:00 a.m. Originally published Sept. 30, 2021

Reporting from Los Angeles and Joliet, Ill.

The commercial pipeline that each year brings $1 trillion worth of toys, clothing, electronics and furniture from Asia to the United States is clogged and no one knows how to unclog it.

This month, the median cost of shipping a standard rectangular metal container from China to the West Coast of the United States hit a record $20,586, almost twice what it cost in July, which was twice what it cost in January, according to the Freightos index. Essential freight-handling equipment too often is not where it’s needed, and when it is, there aren’t enough truckers or warehouse workers to operate it.

As Americans fume, supply headaches that were viewed as temporary when the coronavirus pandemic began now are expected to last through 2022.

Ref email from JWL on 30 Sep 0934 PT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/supply-chain-issues

Mary Hanbury, Business Insider - September 27, 2021

Costco has joined Home Depot in renting its own container ships to prevent delays and keep costs down as the global shipping crisis rages on.

In a call with analysts Thursday, Costco CFO Richard Galanti said the company had chartered three ships to import products from Asia to the US and Canada. This would help Costco avoid spending six times the normal price on shipping or containers through a third party, he said.

Each ship could carry between 800 and 1,000 containers at a time, he said. The company had also leased “several thousand containers for use on these ships,” he said.

Costco expected to make about 10 deliveries over the next year using these ships, accounting for about 20% of its imports from Asia, he said.

https://news.yahoo.com/costco-renting-3-container-ships-100115623.html

Behind shipping delays and soaring prices are workers still at mortal risk of COVID-19.

By Amanda Mull - September 21, 2021

At this point, the maddeningly unpredictable Delta variant has changed the expected course of the coronavirus pandemic so much that it can be hard to know exactly what you’re waiting for, or if you should continue waiting at all. Is something like before-times normalcy still coming, or will Americans have to negotiate a permanently changed reality? Will we recognize that new normal when it gets here, or will it be clear only in hindsight? And how long will it be before you can buy a new couch and have it delivered in a timely manner?

Somehow, that third question is currently just as existential as the first two. Everyday life in the United States is acutely dependent on the perpetual motion of the supply chain, in which food and medicine and furniture and clothing all compete for many of the same logistical resources. As everyone has been forced to learn in the past year and a half, when the works get gummed up—when a finite supply of packaging can’t keep up with demand, when there aren’t enough longshoremen or truck drivers or postal workers, when a container ship gets wedged sideways in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes—the effects ripple outward for weeks or months, emptying shelves and raising prices in ways that can seem random. All of a sudden, you can’t buy kettlebells or canned seltzer.

All of this was supposed to be better by now. Not perfect—even a triumphant end to the pandemic wouldn’t stop climate change or political unrest from throwing their own wrenches into global logistics—but better. Instead, as Delta has forced new restrictions in countries fighting to contain the virus and deepened uncertainty and fear in the United States, the game of supply-chain whack-a-mole that manufacturers and shippers have been playing for the past year and a half has grown only more complex. Some book publishers have had to delay new releases because the pulp used to manufacture paper has been gobbled up by online shopping’s endless appetite for cardboard.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/09/pandemic-supply-chain-nightmare-slow-shipping/620147/

Aarthi Swaminathan·Reporter - Mon, October 4, 2021, 6:25 AM

Supply chain constraints are affecting economies across the world, with trucking and shipping lines besieged by delays. A new note from HSBC illustrates just how bad the situation has become.

Exporters and importers are “currently in the throes of the peak container shipping season,” the bank stated in its September 30 note. And as demand vastly outstrips supply, there's a major backup that's causing widespread effects.

For instance, the volume of goods traded between Asia to North America in the first seven months this year was nearly 1.3 times that of the same period pre-pandemic. Meanwhile, coronavirus restrictions have led to increased congestion.

“As we look across the landscape, whether it be surface transportation here in North America or… on a global basis when we look at air and ocean, we continue to see challenges,” Robert Biesterfeld, CEO of C. H. Robinson, a freight broker, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “We continue to see very, very strong demand in the market being met by a very constrained capacity environment.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/charts-supply-chain-crisis-132551609.html

Grace Kay - Thu, October 28, 2021, 4:55 AM

• Ports in Southern California have broken numerous records this year as over 100 ships wait to dock.
• 12 Longshoremen described what it's like keeping the supply chain moving despite historic backlogs.
• The workers told Insider ports are running at a break-neck pace, but the situation is getting worse.

Dock workers have long been working day and night to keep the supply chain running. But, since the pandemic started, COVID-19 shutdowns and surging demand have cast the ports into chaos - and workers say there's no end in sight.

Insider spoke with 12 dock workers from across the US, including seven that work at ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach - locations responsible for over 40% of the nation's imports. The workers asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about their jobs, but their identities have been verified by Insider.

Four longshoremen with more than 20 years of experience at the major California ports said they've never seen anything like the near-record backlogs. The issues are spilling over to ports in cities like Seattle and Houston, as well, workers said.

https://news.yahoo.com/12-dock-workers-reveal-never-115500136.html

We are now in a giant parking lot game that threatens the global economy. Thank deregulation and the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998.

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Today I’m writing about supply chain disruptions at the ports, and the Bill Clinton-era law that caused it.

Matt Stoller - Nov 13, 2021

The Suez Canal and Our Big Dumb Ship Problem

With an overwhelming news cycle, it often seems like weird problems in the economy have been here forever. But the first time the supply chain crisis snarling imports hit the headlines was just eight months ago, when an ultra-large container ship called the Ever Given wedged itself into the side of the Suez Canal, blocking one of the busiest and most vital shipping lanes in the world. The Ever Given is the height of the Empire State Building, and many people mocked the situation, noting that big things tend to be hard to fit into small spaces. While hilarious at the time, it was a harbinger of things to come.

What’s happened since - the intense backlog at the ports and the possibility of a Christmas without presents - has shown that the Ever Given was not a one-off accident, but a sign of a systemic weakness in the transportation networks we rely on to move things. And while the trigger of this latest crisis was Covid, there have been signs of instability in shipping for decades. In 2017, a cyberattack at Danish shipping giant Maesk snarled supply chains for months. A few years earlier, the South Korean ocean carrier Hanjin went bankrupt, stranding boxes out at se as its mega-ships, bobbing in the waves, couldn’t be unloaded. In the early 2000s, West Coast port traffic nearly came to a standstill.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-legal-revolution

Posted by msmash on Friday November 26, 2021 08:00PM

Despite recent reports that congestion issues are easing on the water at California's major ports, drayage truckers claim this isn't the case for them – as long wait times, a flawed appointment system and other efficiency issues continue to plague marine terminal operators in the state. From a report:

As Port of Oakland officials are urging ocean carriers to add direct services to their port to help relieve supply chain bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, truckers whose livelihoods depend on how many containers they can turn in a day are bracing for possible extra capacity if steamship lines skip Southern California and head to Oakland.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/11/27/0314212/california-port-truckers-drowning-in-supply-chain-inefficiencies

As congestion clears on the water, port truckers’ frustration mounts

Clarissa Hawes, Senior Editor, Investigations and Enterprise - Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Despite recent reports that congestion issues are easing on the water at California’s major ports, drayage truckers claim this isn’t the case for them — as long wait times, a flawed appointment system and other efficiency issues continue to plague marine terminal operators in the state.

As Port of Oakland officials are urging ocean carriers to add direct services to their port to help relieve supply chain bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, truckers whose livelihoods depend on how many containers they can turn in a day are bracing for possible extra capacity if steamship lines skip Southern California and head to Oakland.

“All we hear in the news is the lack of congestion on the waterside and we can confirm that, but we are drowning on the landside by long lines and staffing issues at the terminals,” Bill Aboudi, president of AB Trucking, told FreightWaves this week.

An unreliable appointment system has drayage companies checking day and night to find open slots and vessel schedule changes — which Aboudi compared to playing musical chairs — have truckers concerned they won’t be able to handle a container volume increase if some of these issues aren’t addressed soon.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/california-port-truckers-drowning-in-supply-chain-inefficiencies

Prepared in cooperation with the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission

Jack Eggleston and Jason Pope (U.S. Department of the Interior / U.S. Geological Survey) - 2013

https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf

FOX 13 News Staff - June 10, 2023 4:09PM

According to the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), work slowdowns directed by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) brought ground operations at marine terminals to a halt on Friday. As a result of this, longshore workers were sent home.

Officials say on Saturday, the ILWU refused to call any longshore workers to the container terminals for the first shift of the day. This left the Port of Seattle completely shut down with goods left sitting on the ships.

According to an article posted by Reuters, the ocean shipping industry saw record profits during the pandemic cargo boom, and now unions want a pay increase that would reflect the worker's contribution to that success.

https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/port-of-seattle-shuts-down-due-to-labor-negotiations

Port Chief Warns Of Potential Product Shortages

Hugh Cameron - May 08, 2025 at 6:30 AM EDT / Updated May 10, 2025 at 11:26 AM EDT

Another shipping port official voiced concern about the drastic decline in imports as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs.

“I can see it right over my shoulder here, I'm looking out at the Port of Seattle right now, and we currently have no container ships at berth,” Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins told CNN on Wednesday.

“That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it's pretty rare,” he added. “And so to see it tonight is I think a stark reminder that the impacts of the tariffs have real implications.”

Newsweek has reached out to the Port of Seattle via email outside of business hours for further comment. Why It Matters

Several port authorities have observed a similar drop in cargo volumes over the past few weeks, warning that such a decline could have significant and adverse effects on consumers—who may face rising prices and limited product availability—as well as the supply chain-linked sectors of the U.S. economy. What To Know

Calkins told CNN that the current situation would impact the job security of longshoremen and those dealing directly with the freight, as well as industries responsible for transporting imports nationwide.

“And that's hundreds of jobs right here in our region and across the country,” he said, adding that his port had not witnessed such a significant downturn in activity since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.newsweek.com/seattle-port-says-no-container-ships-tariffs-2069464

Stuart Chirls - Mon, December 23, 2024 at 11:01 AM PST

Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp. became the latest ocean carrier to join the newbuilding club when it announced plans to order a dozen or more new container ships.

The Taiwan-based carrier in a release said its board on Dec. 20 approved a new fleet optimization plan, including the addition of up to 13 container vessels ranging from 8,000 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) to 15,000 TEUs.

The orders, which the carrier said will optimize its service network and enhance fleet competitiveness, replace 20-years-and-older ships of 5,500 TEU to 6,500 TEU capacity on main service routes.

The vessels — at the smaller end of modern capacity —could likely been seen in intra-Asia service as well.

The new ships will include clean energy technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — a key concern of ocean lines dealing with carbon taxes in Europe.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yang-ming-plans-order-container-190103238.html

Study of one wreck supports the idea that its 50,000 peers may leak pollutants.

Doug Johnson - 10/19/2022, 6:55 AM

The V-1302 John Mahn has sat at the bottom of the North Sea off Belgium for decades. The ship began its life in Germany as a 48-meter-long fishing vessel. However, during the Second World War, the Nazi Kriegsmarine requisitioned it for use as a patrol boat. On February 12, 1942, a squadron of six British Royal Air Force planes struck it with two bombs. It sank.

It wasn’t just the boat that sank, however. Along with it went its stores of coal and its remaining ammunition, among other chemicals. While the boat’s no longer a Nazi threat, new research suggests that it has been leaking pollution—including various heavy metals—into the North Sea ever since. This, in turn, has changed the surrounding environment at a microbial level. The research is part of the North Sea Wrecks project, an effort to aid in the identification and mitigation of wrecks and their environmental impacts in the region.

“We wanted to see if old shipwrecks in our part of the sea … were still shaping the local microbial communities and if they were still affecting the surrounding sediment. This microbial analysis is unique within the project,” Josefien Van Landuyt, a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University and one of the paper’s authors, said in a press release.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/nazi-warship-is-still-doing-evil-to-the-environment-this-time/

Stockholm University - October 25, 2022

Marine archaeologists from Vrak - Museum of Wreck have found the wreck of the naval vessel Äpplet, Vasa's sister ship. The ship was first launched in 1629 and was built by the same master shipbuilder who completed the Vasa. The discovery was made within the research programme “The Forgotten Fleet”, which is led by Stockholm University.

On several occasions the museum’s maritime archaeologists have collaborated with the navy to survey a strait at Vaxholm, an island outside Stockholm. In December 2021, a huge shipwreck was discovered there. Parts of the ship’s sides had fallen to the bottom of the sea, but the hull was otherwise preserved up to a lower gun deck. The fallen sides had portholes on two different levels, evidence of a warship with two gun decks.

https://www.su.se/english/news/vasa-s-sister-ship-%C3%A4pplet-found-a-unique-historical-discovery-1.633118

The wreck site is the world largest online wreck database, we have 206.640 wrecks and 176.250 positions, 73.200 images, 2569 maritime charts, 32.930 ship owners and builders and a lot more… Visitors who want to help and see more data, have to subscribe. (free)

https://www.wrecksite.eu/wrecksite.aspx

Washington University in St. Louis - November 30, 2022

More than 3,000 years before the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean, another famous ship wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern shores of Uluburun—in present-day Turkey— carrying tons of rare metal. Since its discovery in 1982, scientists have been studying the contents of the Uluburun shipwreck to gain a better understanding of the people and political organizations that dominated the time period known as the Late Bronze Age.

Now, a team of scientists, including Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have uncovered a surprising finding: small communities of highland pastoralists living in present-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia produced and supplied roughly one-third of the tin found aboard the ship—tin that was en route to markets around the Mediterranean to be made into coveted bronze metal.

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-year-old-uluburun-shipwreck-reveal-complex.html

Marine archaeologists believe the ship dates to sometime between 1300 – 1850. It was found at the bottom of the lake Mjøsa, at 410 metres.

Ida Irene Bergstrøm Journalist - Friday 18. November 2022 - 16:13

“Mjøsa is like a mini-ocean, or a really large fjord,” says marine archaeologist Øyvind Ødegård from NTNU.

For centuries, ships and boats have travelled these waters. Diving archaeologists have registered around 20 wrecks in shallow water. But the lake has never been examined beyond scuba diving depth of around 20-30 metres.

“We believed that the chance of finding a shipwreck was quite high, and sure enough, a ship turned up,” Ødegård says.

The mapping of the sea bottom of Mjøsa started a couple of weeks ago. It yielded results on the very last day.

At 410 metres, the autonomous underwater vehicle Hugin from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, found a shipwreck.

https://sciencenorway.no/archaeoloy-medieval-history-ships/shipwreck-discovered-at-the-bottom-of-norways-largest-lake-possibly-700-years-old/2110769

JARRETT A. LOBELL - January/February 2023

By the summer of 1917, during World War I, circumstances in Britain were extremely dire. Since 1914, the lives of 40,860 British merchant seamen, fishermen, and passengers had been lost, and 5,696 ships sunk, most by the dozens of German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic. The threat was grave not just to those crossing the seas, but to Britain itself, which, by many estimates, had only about six weeks of food remaining. “Britain was only ever going to succumb to Germany if the country starved, and the Germans came very close to succeeding,” says archaeologist Innes McCartney of Bangor University. “The merchant marine was being decimated and Britain wasn’t able to produce new ships as quickly as they were going down.” What changed the tide of the war and saved Britain from both starvation and defeat was the introduction of the convoy system, in which ships would travel together in groups. “The convoy system was brought in as a last desperate measure to stop the Germans from sinking merchant ships that were sitting ducks when sailing alone,” says McCartney. Thus, when U-boat crews spotted smoke on the horizon, it was no longer from a lone ship, but from a group of ships protected by the navy. “That changed the game completely,” he says.

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/496-2301/digs/11045-digs-irish-sea-shipwrecks

Ironton sank after colliding with another ship in 1894, killing five sailors. Now, the intact wreck has finally been found.

Kevin Hurler - 3 March 2023

Researchers with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the state of Michigan, and Ocean Exploration Trust have found a long-lost sailing ship called Ironton resting upright at the bottom of Lake Huron.

As the 191-foot-long (58-meter) Ironton sailed across the inky black water of Lake Huron in the early hours of a September 1894 morning, it collided with a freight ship called Ohio. Ironton sank, with only two of its seven crew surviving to tell the tale, and no one saw it again for over a century. This week, NOAA announced that the Ironton was found using sonar imaging in 2019. Researchers located the ship hundreds of feet below the surface, sitting upright on the lakebed, with its three masts and rigging appearing relatively undamaged.

https://gizmodo.com/ironton-shipwreck-found-lake-huron-sonar-1850184109

The ‘Ironton’ has been perfectly preserved since the day it sank in ‘Shipwreck Alley’

Christopher Parker - March 3, 2023

Just off the coast of the northeast Michigan mainland sits the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The area also goes by another, less benign name: “Shipwreck Alley,” the final resting place for over 200 ships tossed about by the fierce winds of the mighty Lake Huron. Finding sunken vessels is not uncommon here.

However, when researchers located a barely damaged 150-year-old schooner barge sitting on the lake’s floor, they made some waves.

News of the discovery of the Ironton, a 191-foot wooden vessel capable of carrying more than 48,500 bushels of grain, was announced in a March 1 statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Researchers located the wreck in 2019, but they wanted more time to study it before going public.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ironton-shipwreck-lake-huron-180981741/

Spanish Shipwreck Reveals Evidence of Earliest Known Pet Cats to Arrive in the United States The two felines—one adult, one juvenile—appear to have been cared for by the sailors before the vessel sank in a hurricane in 1559, according to a new study

Sarah Kuta - May 6, 2025

Cats are beloved members of many families, with 73.8 million of them prowling and purring their way around 42 million American households. But it wasn’t always this way: Domestic cats are relative newcomers to the Americas, having only arrived roughly 500 years ago with European explorers.

Now, a new study is offering even more insight into the history of these four-legged felines. Researchers have discovered the remains of two house cats in a 466-year-old Spanish shipwreck near Florida, which are likely the earliest known cats in the United States. They describe their findings in a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity.

The remains were found among the wreckage of the Emanuel Point II, a Spanish ship that sank in September 1559 near what is now Pensacola, Florida. The vessel was one of 11 ships that had sailed north from Mexico during an expedition under the command of Tristán de Luna y Arellano.

The conquistador’s fleet was anchored near the Spanish settlement of Santa María de Ochuse when a hurricane swept through, causing six of the vessels to sink and another to be driven inland. Between 1992 and 2016, researchers discovered three of the expedition’s shipwrecks.

Divers have successfully recovered several artifacts from the ships, including fragments of jars that likely contained olive oil, wine or water. Additionally, they’ve discovered the remains of several critters, including cockroaches, rats and at least two domestic cats.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/spanish-shipwreck-reveals-evidence-of-earliest-known-pet-cats-to-arrive-in-the-united-states-180986560/

In a disaster worse than the Titanic, it was believed a young man swam over six kilometres to safety. It didn’t add up

Eve Lazarus - 6:30, Jul. 5, 2025

I t’s the morning of August 22, 2019, and I’m in a Zodiac bouncing along the waters of the St. Lawrence River. It can hold six divers and all their gear, but this morning, there are only six of us—no gear. Far from being divers, we are curiosity seekers from New York, Vancouver, London, and Montreal, all obsessed with the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, which claimed 1,014 lives in 1914.

Until a few years ago, I had never heard of the Empress and its disastrous end. And that’s staggering, because the loss of passenger life (836) outnumbered that of the Titanic (832).

The Empress, owned by the all-powerful Canadian Pacific Railway, carried more than 117,000 people between Liverpool, England, and Saint John, New Brunswick, and later Halifax or Quebec City, depending on the season, in ninety-six round trips between 1906 and 1914. A million or so Canadians from coast to coast can trace their roots back to an ancestor who came to Canada on this ship.

Every schoolchild knows the story of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness?

https://thewalrus.ca/empress-of-ireland-survivor-mystery/

Composite images of Endurance compiled from 25,000 digital scans mapped by underwater robots

Esther Addley - Thu 10 Oct 2024 12.26 EDT

More than a century after it sank below the icy Weddell Sea in Antarctica, forcing its crew to embark on one of the most celebrated survival quests in history, new images have revealed the remarkable state of preservation of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance.

The famed vessel, which sank in 1915 after becoming stuck in pack ice, was discovered in 2022 resting at a depth of 3km below what Shackleton called “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

The images, compiled from thousands of detailed 3D scans of the wreckage, show how little it has altered or decayed in the century since, with the ship’s rigging, helm and woodwork all remarkably preserved under the icy waters.

In addition, a number of the crew’s dining plates can be seen resting on the deck, along with a single knee-length boot, which may have belonged to Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, the images show a flare gun among the debris – the same gun that was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the Endurance sank, an event he described in his diary.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/images-remarkable-preservation-ernest-shackleton-ship-endurance

New NatGeo documentary was directed by the same duo who brought us the Oscar-winning Free Solo.

Jennifer Ouellette – Nov 5, 2024 1:27 PM

The story of Arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's failed 1914 expedition to be the first to traverse the continent of Antarctica has long captured the popular imagination, as have the various efforts to locate the wreckage of his ship, the Endurance. The ship was finally found in 2022, nearly 107 years after it sank beneath the ice. The stories of Shackleton's adventures and the 2022 expedition are told in parallel in Endurance, a new documentary from National Geographic now streaming on Disney+.

Endurance is directed by Oscar winners Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo). According to Vasarhelyi, she and Chin had been obsessed with the Shackleton story for a long time. The discovery of the shipwreck in 2022 gave them the perfect opportunity to tell the story again for a new audience, making use of all the technological advances that have been made in recent years.

“I think the Shackleton story is at the heart of the DNA of our films,” Vasarhelyi told Ars. “It's the greatest human survival story ever. It really speaks to having these audacious objectives and dreams. When everyone tells you that you can't, you want to do it anyway. It requires you to then have the actual courage, grit, discipline, and strength of character to see it through. Shackleton is that story. He didn't sensibly achieve any of his goals, but through his failure he found his strength: being able to inspire the confidence of his men.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/endurance-documents-hunt-for-shackletons-shipwreck/

November 13th, 2024

Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice off Antarctica. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men waited for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slowly crushed, and eventually had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the history books is the sub-expedition made by Shackleton and five others in search of help, which ensured the rescue of every single man who’d been on the ship.

This harrowing journey has, of course, inspired documentaries, including this year’s Endurance from National Geographic, which debuted at the London Film Festival last month and will come available to stream on Disney+ later this fall. “The documentary incorporates footage and photos captured during the expedition by Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who [in 1914] brought several cameras along for the journey,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Filmmakers have color-treated Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used artificial intelligence to recreate crew members’ voices to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”

https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/a-new-3d-scanreveals-the-remarkably-well-preserved-wreck-of-shackletons-endurance.html

It turns out explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton knew his vessel had shortcomings.

Margherita Bassi - October 6, 2025

British polar explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton established his place in the annals of history after ensuring the survival of his entire crew following the shipwreck of Endurance in 1915. A new paper sheds light on the state of the infamous vessel—and what Shackleton knew of it before setting off.

Jukka Tuhkuri, a polar explorer and researcher specializing in ice mechanics and arctic marine technology at Finland’s Aalto University, has revealed that Endurance was not as sturdy as widely believed, and that Shackleton knew about its structural shortcomings. His work adds nuance to one of the most famous survival stories over 100 years since the explorer’s death and three years since he and the rest of the Endurance22 mission found the shipwreck.

https://gizmodo.com/new-study-reveals-why-the-endurance-sank-2000667287

The underwater drone Hydrus can capture georeferenced 4K video and images simultaneously.

Jennifer Ouellette - 4/2/2024, 11:01 AM

A small underwater drone called Hydrus has located the wreckage of a 100-year-old coal hulk in the deep waters off the coast of western Australia. Based on the data the drone captured, scientists were able to use photogrammetry to virtually “rebuild” the 210-foot ship into a 3D model (above). You can explore an interactive 3D rendering of the wreckage here.

The use of robotic submersibles to locate and explore historic shipwrecks is well established. For instance, researchers relied on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study the wreckage of the HMS Terror, Captain Sir John S. Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition to cross the Northwest Passage in 1846. In 2007, a pair of brothers (printers based in Norfolk) discovered the wreck of the Gloucester, which ran aground on a sandbank off the coast of Norfolk in 1682 and sank within the hour. Among the passengers was James Stuart, Duke of York and future King James II of England, who escaped in a small boat just before the ship sank.

In 2022, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic announced the discovery of British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance. In 1915, Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months on the Antarctic ice after the ship was crushed by pack ice and sank into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. The wreckage was found nearly 107 years later, 3,008 meters down, roughly four miles (6.4 km) south of the ship's last recorded position. The wreck was in pristine condition partly because of the lack of wood-eating microbes in those waters. In fact, the lettering “ENDURANCE” was clearly visible in shots of the stern.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/explore-a-virtual-model-of-100-year-old-shipwreck-off-australias-western-coast/

Researchers believe it's the remains of La Fortuna, a ship involved in a failed Spanish raid.

Margherita Bassi - August 15, 2025

Archaeologists in Brunswick County, North Carolina, have discovered four shipwrecks in just two months.

One could be La Fortuna, a Spanish ship destroyed in September 1748, during King George’s War. The researchers found the wrecks and a number of colonial waterfront features in May and June at the Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site (BTFA), the former location of a pre-Revolutionary port and later a Civil War Confederate fort. The exposed remains, previously hidden beneath a marsh, are now vulnerable to erosion.

“We are extremely excited about these important sites, as each one will help us to better understand the role of BTFA as one of the state’s earliest colonial port towns,” Jason Raupp, an archaeologist at East Carolina University who led the discovery team involved, said in a university statement.

Raupp and his colleagues found the shipwrecks along the BTFA shoreline. Samples from one of the wrecks revealed that the ship included timber from either Monterey cypresses or Mexican cypresses, meaning wood from either Southern California or Central America. According to the researchers, this suggests that shipbuilders in the 18th century used materials from Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.

https://gizmodo.com/possible-spanish-shipwreck-from-the-1700s-spotted-on-north-carolina-shore-2000643450

Raman spectroscopy of 12 collarbones suggests most crew members were right-handed.

Jennifer Ouellette – Nov 4, 2024 11:25 AM

Henry VIII's favorite warship, the Mary Rose, sank in battle in 1545. Archaeologists successfully raised the ship in 1982, along with thousands of articles and the remains of 179 crew members—all remarkably well preserved thanks to the anaerobic conditions of the shipwreck created by the layers of soft sediment that accumulated over the wreckage.

A new analysis of some of the recovered bones reveals that whether someone is right- or left-handed could affect how their collarbone chemistry changes as they age, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. This has implications for our understanding not just of aging, but of bone conditions like fracture risk and osteoarthritis.

As previously reported, the earliest-known reference to the Mary Rose appears in a January 29, 1510, letter ordering the construction of two new ships for the young king: the Mary Rose and her sister ship, dubbed the Peter Pomegranate. Once the newly built ship had launched, Henry VIII wasted no time defying his advisers and declaring war on France in 1512. The Mary Rose served the monarch well through that conflict, as well as during a second war with the French that ran roughly from 1522 through 1525, after which it underwent a substantial overhaul.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/scientists-glean-clues-about-how-we-age-from-mary-rose-crew-bones/

The Spanish galleon sank in 1708 and was discovered in 2015, but its true identity remained unconfirmed—until now.

Margherita Bassi - June 11, 2025

In 1708, the British sank a Spanish galleon—a large war and/or merchant ship used from the 15th through the 17th centuries—off the coast of Colombia. Over three centuries later, its cargo of gold coins may have just helped scientists finally identify its wreck.

A team of researchers and naval officers used an uncrewed remotely operated underwater vehicle to study an 18th-century shipwreck that the Colombian government discovered in 2015. Their survey uncovered coins that provide further evidence the wreck is likely the long-lost San José Galleon, highlighting the usefulness of coins as chronological markers in marine archaeology.

“The Tierra Firme Fleet, commanded by the San José Galleon, held the exclusive monopoly on transporting royal treasures between South America and the Iberian Peninsula,” explained Daniela Vargas Ariza, lead author of the study published earlier this week in Antiquity, in a statement. Vargas Ariza is also an archaeologist affiliated with the Almirante Padilla Naval Cadet School and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History.

The fleet was one of the Hispanic Monarchy’s most important cargo fleets, according to the statement. Also known as the Catholic Monarchy, the crown ferried royal cargo from the Americas between the 16th and 18th centuries. That brings us back to 1708, when historical sources suggest that the British sank a cargo-heavy San José Galleon in Colombian waters.

https://gizmodo.com/300-year-old-coins-help-confirm-shipwreck-as-the-long-lost-san-jose-galleon-2000614140

The vessel, seized by infamous pirates en route to Lisbon from Goa, was carrying an “eye-watering” amount of treasure, archeologists say.

Natalia Mesa - July 7, 2025

In 1721, pirates attacked and seized a Portuguese ship carrying a massive trove of treasure en route to Lisbon. Now, researchers believe they’ve discovered its remains off the coast of Madagascar.

The discovery comes from two researchers from the Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation in Massachusetts, who have conducted several studies on the wreckage over the last 16 years. They say new clues have revealed the ship’s identity as the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, a 700-ton warship. Their findings were published in Wreckwatch Magazine, but have not been peer-reviewed.

The wreck lies near the shores of Nosy Boraha, an island off Madagascar’s northern coast historically known as Île Sainte-Marie, a notorious pirate stronghold during the “Golden Age of Piracy.” The capture of Nossa Senhora do Cabo was “among the most dramatic episodes” of this era, the authors wrote in the study.

In the study, the researchers conducted underwater excavations using sonar imaging and remote sensing technology. They identified the ship based on its structure and artifacts recovered from the ship’s remains, along with archaeological records. They discovered religious figurines and objects made of wood and ivory, including one depicting the Virgin Mary, part of a crucifix, and an ivory plaque bearing a religious inscription. According to the researchers, these items were likely produced in Goa—which, at the time, was colonized by Portugal—and were being transported to Lisbon.

https://gizmodo.com/lost-for-300-years-pirate-plundered-treasure-ship-discovered-off-madagascar-coast-2000623968

Piece by piece, experts carefully transported the Phoenician vessel to dry land, where it will be studied and preserved

Sarah Kuta - January 8, 2025

Archaeologists have raised a 2,600-year-old shipwreck from the waters near southeastern Spain.

Divers initially located the vessel in 1994, according to CBS News’ Emily Mae Czachor. The 27-foot-long wreck, which had been carrying a load of lead ingots when it sank, was discovered near the town of Mazarrón.

Known as the Mazarrón II, the ship was located just six feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean, roughly 200 feet away from a beach called Playa de la Isla. It was covered in sand, which helped keep it hidden for centuries.

More recently, changes along the coastline—including coastal construction and shifting sea currents—made the wreck site more vulnerable.

“The wreckage can no longer remain where it is because its sand protection is now disappearing,” said Carlos de Juan, an archaeologist at the University of Valencia who led the excavation project, in a July 2024 statement. “The wreckage has survived for centuries, but now it is time to roll up our sleeves and ensure that we can continue to enjoy this asset of cultural interest.”

For many years, the wreck had been covered by a protective metal box. But a group of experts who studied the wreck site between 2017 and 2019 found that the metal box was sinking and threatened to crush the shipwreck.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/divers-recover-ancient-shipwreck-that-sank-2600-years-ago-off-the-coast-of-spain-180985778/

Schooner Trinidad hailed as ‘significant shipwreck’ after successful sonar search reveals well preserved vessel

Maya Yang - Sat 2 Sep 2023 13.17 EDT

A long-lost shipwreck dating back to the late 1800s has been discovered in Lake Michigan.

The Wisconsin Historical Society announced that the shipwreck hunters and historians Brendon Baillod and Bob Jaeck located the wreck of the schooner Trinidad in 270ft of water off Algoma, Wisconsin, earlier this year.

The Trinidad, which the WHS hailed as a “significant shipwreck”, was located by Baillod and Jaeck on 15 July following a two-year search via side-scanning sonar, Baillod said in an article on Shipwreck World.

According to the WHS, the schooner – a term used to describe a sailing ship with two or more masts – was built in 1867 at Grand Island, New York, for the Great Lakes grain trade between Milwaukee, Chicago, Buffalo and Oswego. It transported coal or iron from New York and returned with grain from the midwest.

“Trinidad was a ‘canaller’ or canal schooner specially built to pass through the Welland Canal that connected Lake Erie and Ontario,” WHS said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/02/shipwreck-trinidad-lake-michigan-wisconsin

Brendon Baillod - August 31, 2023

Discovery of the Historic Great Lakes Schooner Trinidad

On July 15th, 2023, Wisconsin Maritime Historians Brendon Baillod and Bob Jaeck located the intact remains of the 156 year old schooner Trinidad in nearly 300 feet of water off Algoma, Wisconsin as the result of a deliberate search. The pair had been searching for the lost ship for the past two years with side scanning sonar.
The Trinidad had piqued Baillod’s interest nearly twenty years earlier while constructing a database of all known vessels lost in Wisconsin waters. The historic schooner “ticked all the boxes” as a candidate for discovery. Her crew gave a good description of where she sank, and she went down fairly slowly in deep water so she was likely very intact. She was also fairly near to a port city for convenient access and her loss was not well-known, even to the local community. Few people if any had ever searched for her.

https://www.shipwreckworld.com/articles/discovery-of-the-historic-great-lakes-schooner-trinidad

Diving team believe deep North Sea find is long-lost HMS Hawke, sunk by German U-boat 110 years ago

Agence France-Presse - Sat 17 Aug 2024 13.49 EDT

A team of UK divers has hailed the discovery of a wreck off Scotland believed to be a Royal Navy warship sunk during the first world war but still “virtually intact”.

The team found what it thinks is HMS Hawke – which sank after being hit by a German torpedo in October 1914 – in the North Sea earlier this week.

Paul Downs, who was among the divers and filmed footage of the long-lost wreck, described it as “a once in a lifetime” discovery given its “unbelievable” condition.

“She is virtually intact,” he told Agence France Presse. “The state of preservation is unbelievable for a wreck that’s 110 years old and came to a violent end.”

Lost in Waters Deep, a group which searches for first world war shipwrecks in Scottish waters, spearheaded the years-long effort to find the warship.

The team is now awaiting official confirmation from the Royal Navy after providing it with their findings.

Only 70 of HMS Hawke’s crew survived, while more than 500 died, after it was attacked by a German U-boat in the early months of the first world war.

The warship, an Edgar-class cruiser first launched in 1891, was 387ft (118 metres) long and 60ft (18 metres) wide.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/17/virtually-intact-wreck-off-scotland-believed-to-be-royal-navy-warship-torpedoed-in-wwi

Map of Ship Sinkings

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/fe88b5e18c6443c7afaf6e32f8432687

HATEM MAHER - Thu, March 25, 2021, 8:36 AM

A quick end to traffic disruption in Egypt's Suez Canal was unlikely Thursday, with efforts to pull a stranded, massive ship yielding little progress and the head of a newly hired rescue team saying it can take “days to weeks” to re-float the vessel.

Ever Given, a 224,000-ton ship registered in Panama that is 400 meters long and 59 meters wide, has been stranded since Tuesday morning after running aground due to a “dust storm” and bad weather conditions, according to Egyptian officials.

Eight tugboats, including one that's 160 tons, have relentlessly tried to pull the ship with little success. Peter Berdowski, the chairman of a Dutch firm hired by Egypt to clear navigation in the vital waterway, said the strategy was ineffective.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/moving-stranded-cargo-ship-suez-153600162.html

The Ever Given had listed its destination as Rotterdam in the Netherlands prior to getting stuck in the canal

By Ken Martin - March 24, 2021

Shipping traffic has essentially been shut down in Egypt's Suez Canal.

A cargo container ship considered one of the largest in the world has turned sideways and blocked all traffic, according to officials.

The situation is threatening to disrupt a global shipping system already strained by the coronavirus pandemic.

The MV Ever Given is a Panama-flagged container ship that carries trade between Asia and Europe.

The ship became grounded Tuesday.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/massive-cargo-ship-turns-sideways-blocks-egypts-suez-canal

By Reality Check & Visual Journalism, BBC News - 25 March 2021

An operation to free a giant container ship stuck in the Suez Canal is continuing, with warnings it could take days or even weeks.

The Ever Given, operated by the Taiwanese company Evergreen Marine, is the length of four football pitches and is lying across the southern end of the canal preventing other ships from getting through one of the world's busiest waterways.

https://www.bbc.com/news/56523659

March 25, 202110:27 AM ET - Scott Neuman

Eight large tugboats were continuing a struggle to free a giant container ship lodged crossways in the Suez Canal after the vessel ran aground earlier this week, bringing transit through one of the world's busiest waterways to a halt.

The Suez Canal Authority said in a statement Thursday that it had officially suspended traffic while efforts to dislodge the 1,300-foot Ever Given continued. The salvage operator working to free the ship said it could be weeks before it is refloated — raising the possibility of major new disruptions to global commerce just as supply chains have begun to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/25/981128288/it-might-take-weeks-to-free-ship-stuck-in-suez-canal-salvage-company-says

By Magdy Samaan, Laura Smith-Spark and Mostafa Salem, CNN - Updated 1:23 PM ET, Sat March 27, 2021

Cairo, Egypt (CNN)Efforts to dislodge the huge container ship stuck in the Suez Canal intensified Saturday as the backlog of ships at either end of the crucial waterway grew, heightening concerns over the impact of the blockage on global supply chains.

The Ever Given, a container ship almost as long as the Empire State Building is tall, ran aground in the Egyptian canal on Tuesday after being caught in 40-knot winds and a sandstorm.

Since then, dredgers have been working to remove vast quantities of sand and mud from around the port side of the 224,000-ton vessel's bow.

A senior Suez Canal pilot told CNN the gigantic container ship could be dislodged by Saturday evening.

The pilot – who is not authorized to speak to the media but works for the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) – believes that several factors are now contributing to the anticipated success of the rescue operation including the near completion of the dredging work, the expected high tides and the availability of powerful tug boats.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/27/africa/suez-canal-ship-refloat-attempt-intl/index.html

By Hanna Ziady, CNN Business - Updated 7:07 AM ET, Fri March 26, 2021

One of the world's most vital trade arteries has been blocked by a quarter-mile-long container ship, creating a traffic jam that has ensnared over 200 vessels and could take weeks to clear.

But even before the Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal earlier this week, global supply chains were being stretched to the limits, making it much more expensive to move goods around the world and causing shortages of everything from exercise bikes to cheese at a time of unprecedented demand.

A prolonged closure of the key route between West and East could make matters much worse. Costly delays or diversions to longer routes will heap pressure on businesses that are already facing container shortages, port congestion and capacity constraints.

The grounding of the Ever Given is delaying shipments of consumer goods from Asia to Europe and North America, and agricultural products moving in the opposite direction. As of Friday, some 237 vessels, including oil tankers and dozens of container ships, were waiting to transit the canal, which handles about 12% of global trade.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/26/business/global-shipping-supply-chains/index.html

Tugboats, excavators, and cranes all may be enlisted to help the Ever Given.

Aarian Marshall, wired.com - 3/27/2021, 3:30 AM

Every day, some 50 ships pass through the Suez Canal, the waterway slashed between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. These are big ships: some 10 percent of the world’s maritime trade traverses the Suez. But not Wednesday.

That’s because a ship called the Ever Given, en route to Rotterdam, Netherlands, from China, is wedged between the canal’s sandy banks. The vessel, operated by Taiwan-based Evergreen Group, is one of the biggest in the world: as long as four football fields, as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747, and, thanks to the 200,000 tons of containers stacked on board, as tall as a 12-story building.

It might be there a while. It’s not easy to unstick a gigantic shipping vessel, experts say. The Suez Canal Authority, the Egypt-owned body that owns and operates the canal, has not yet said when it expects traffic to resume.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/what-will-it-take-to-get-a-giant-cargo-ship-unstuck-from-the-suez-canal/

By Eileen AJ Connelly - March 28, 2021 | 3:34pm

The massive container ship that is blocking the Suez Canal may have run aground because of human error, not a strong windstorm, Egyptian officials said this weekend.

Initial reports said the 1,300-foot, 200,000-ton Ever Given got wedged in the shipping channel because of high winds and a sandstorm that affected visibility.

But the head of the Suez Canal Authority now says weather conditions were “not the main reasons” for the ship’s grounding.

“There may have been technical or human errors,” the canal authority’s Chairman Osama Rabie told reporters Saturday, without giving more details, the BBC reported.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/28/human-error-may-be-behind-ship-blocking-suez-canal-authorities/

Last Updated: March 29, 2021 at 12:13 a.m. ET / First Published: March 29, 2021 at 12:04 a.m. ET - By Mike Murphy

The massive cargo ship that has been blocking the Suez Canal for nearly a week has been partially freed, according to reports late Sunday.

Maritime services provider Inchcape Shipping tweeted that “The MV Ever Given was successfully re-floated” early Monday, local time. “She is being secured at the moment. More information about next steps will follow once they are known.”

The Wall Street Journal, citing the chairman of organization that operates the waterway, reported late Sunday that the ship had been partially freed and that the next step was to straighten its course.

“We are not finished yet, but it has moved,” Suez Canal Authority Chairman Osama Rabie told the Journal.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/cargo-ship-blocking-suez-canal-partially-freed-11616990653

And not just the obvious ones about containers

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor - Mon 29 Mar 2021 / 05:57 UTC

The ship that’s blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week has shifted.

That Ever Given moved in the early hours of Monday, Egyptian time, seems certain as footage from the scene has emerged.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/ever_given_shifts_tech_memes/

After impeding traffic for days, high tide and plenty of tugs got it unstuck.

Jonathan M. Gitlin - 3/29/2021, 8:01 AM

After nearly a week of blocking one of the world's most important maritime shortcuts, the massive Ever Given cargo ship is now free and on the move. “I am excited to announce that our team of experts, working in close collaboration with the Suez Canal Authority, successfully refloated the Ever Given on 29 March at 15:05 hrs local time, thereby making free passage through the Suez Canal possible again,” said Peter Berdowski, CEO of the salvage company Boskalis.

Owned by shipping company Evergreen, the 400-meter-long Ever Given is one of the longest ships ever built, dwarfing even the biggest nuclear aircraft carriers. The ship was caught in a storm on March 23 while transiting the Suez Canal, where a combination of high winds and the ship's massive sail area turned it diagonally. At that point, the Ever Given ran aground and completely blocked the 152-year-old canal, which is less than a meter deep in many places outside of a dredged navigation channel.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/03/the-massive-cargo-ship-that-blocked-the-suez-canal-is-now-moving-again/

Dharna Noor - 1 April 2021 1:20PM

The Ever Given is no longer stuck in the Suez Canal, but we’re still dealing with the fallout of the near-weeklong blockage. One of the saddest effects is that thousands of animals will die untimely deaths.

When the 312-foot-long (400-meter-long) Ever Given first got lodged in the canal last week, it prevented some 100 other cargo ships from passing through. At least 20 of those ships had live animals onboard. According to estimates made by the animal rights nonprofit Animals International, those 20 ships likely contained a combined 200,000 animals, including sheep, cattle, and other livestock. It’s like a really depressing version of Noah’s Ark.

Even though workers finally successfully dislodged the boat earlier this week, all those creatures likely face a grim fate. After spending days stuck in the canal, the cargo carriers the animals are on are quickly running out of food and water.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/hundreds-of-thousands-of-animals-got-stuck-in-the-suez-1846599146

30 March 2021 - Matt Griffin

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1868 created a new trade route between Europe and Asia as an alternative to the long sea journey around the Cape of Good Hope, but a different route had also been given serious consideration.

A survey of the Isthmus of Suez in 1798 had incorrectly shown the Red Sea to be 8.5m higher than the Mediterranean, an idea finally put to rest by a more accurate survey carried out by British army officer Captain Francis Rawdon Chesney in 1830. Chesney’s recommendation however was for the establishment of a permanent steam-boat service on the Euphrates River as part of an overland route linking the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and in 1834 the UK Parliament voted a grant of £20,000 towards determining the navigability of the Euphrates during the winter months.

https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2021/03/an-alternative-to-the-suez-canal.html

Egypt's Suez canal Authority warns the ship and its cargo will not be allowed leave if the issue of damages goes to court.

2 April 2021

Egypt wants over $1 billion in compensation after a cargo ship blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, a top canal official has said.

Lt. Gen. Osama Rabei, head of the Suez Canal Authority on Thursday warned the ship and its cargo will not be allowed leave Egypt if the issue of damages goes to court.

He said in a phone interview with a pro-government TV talk show that the amount takes into account the salvage operation, costs of stalled traffic, and lost transit fees for the week that the Ever Given had blocked the Suez Canal.

https://www.trtworld.com/business/egypt-demands-over-1b-in-damages-after-suez-canal-blockage-45537

When the container ship Ever Given became wedged in this Egyptian passage, it highlighted global capitalism but hid its uneven origins and benefits

April 2, 2021 - Aaron Jakes

On Monday afternoon, the Ever Given was floating again. After six days of excavation, dredging, and mounting international panic, the massive container ship finally came unstuck from where it was wedged in the banks of the Suez Canal. Last week, as the number of vessels waiting at either end of the Canal rose and the costs of the disruption to supply chains continued to grow, sensational headlines described the Egyptian channel opened in 1869 as “the world’s jugular vein.”

To extend the metaphor: the grounding of the Ever Given had delivered a debilitating stroke to global commerce. In the midst of a pandemic that has disrupted commerce worldwide, a stubborn clot in one strategic locale threatened lasting damage to the health of economies everywhere.

While blood circulates evenly throughout a healthy body, delivering benefits and removing waste, the Suez Canal does not. Instead, it has functioned as a powerful technology for directing the benefits of global integration toward some places while offloading the dire costs onto others. And while its nineteenth-century creators boasted of its speed, that was not a universal benefit: the Canal has always worked to block some kinds of movement while accelerating the passage of others.

https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-world-the-suez-canal-made/

The ship that brought global trade to its knees is still stuck in the Suez Canal and now finds itself at the centre of an almighty international row

22.06.2021 06:00 AM - Alex Christian

DAY AFTER DAY, the 24-person crew duly go about their tasks. Routine maintenance is performed. Fire drills are carried out. Minimum safe manning standards are kept. Everything is ready and raring to go. But this ship hasn’t moved for months – and most of its inhabitants haven’t set foot on land since they set sail more than 100 days ago. All they can do is wait.

Outside, the Egyptian sun slowly simmers cargo headed for the UK and Germany, as well as trains destined for central and eastern Europe – wiring, lawnmowers and gazebos which will one day be bound for assembly lines, supermarket shelves and homes across the continent. Alongside surgical gowns, wheelchair parts and sun loungers, there’s also plenty of food: tea leaves, lemons and tofu all rot away in the heat. None of it can be offloaded.

This is the Ever Given, the same ship that launched a thousand memes when it got stuck across the Suez Canal on March 23 and held up nearly $60 billion of trade. It took a week of tugs, dredging and a crack team of salvage experts to free the 220,000-tonne megaship. As the Ever Given set sail once more, horns blared out in triumph. Yet its next unscheduled stopover lay just 30 kilometres away in Great Bitter Lake where it was towed for a seemingly routine inspection. It’s been anchored there ever since.

The vessel is stuck once more – this time by an almighty international legal row. By mid-April, it had been impounded, with the Suez Canal Authority, or SCA, slapping a claim against its owners in an Egyptian court. The salvage fee? Nearly $1bn. “I’ve seen cases like this but on a much smaller scale,” explains maritime solicitor Jai Sharma of law firm Clyde & Co, which represents the insurers of more than $100 million worth of cargo on board the Ever Given. “What sets this apart is the amount of money being requested – it’s far, far beyond what anyone in our industry would expect.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ever-given-global-supply-chain

Mike Schuler - July 13, 2023

The March 2021 grounding of the Ever Given marked a critical moment for the maritime shipping industry. Its grounding came near start of the pandemic-fueled boom cycle, thrusting the industry into the global spotlight as some 12% of global trade came to a screeching halt, not to mention launching what seemed like a internet million memes.

Now over two years later, the Panama Maritime Authority, acting as the authority of Ever Given’s flag state, has submitted its accident report to the International Maritime Organization, finally shedding light on the cause of what is arguably the most famous grounding in the modern shipping industry.

The Suez Canal is a 193-kilometer-long artificial waterway that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, providing a crucial shortcut for international maritime trade. It is owned and managed by the Suez Canal Authority, an Egyptian state-owned authority.

https://gcaptain.com/ever-given-report-highlights-suez-canal-pilots-role-in-grounding/

The Suez Canal recently welcomed the largest container ship in the world, which transited its waters for the first time. It was a ceremonious moment that required special attention and handling from the canal authority.

31 Aug 2021, 14:18 UTC - Cristina Mircea

On August 28, the Ever Ace container ship made waves and turned heads with its unusual appearance. This monstrous floating box was built by Samsung Heavy Industries for Evergreen Marine Corporation and has a capacity of 23,992 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit), making it the largest such vessel in the world. It is the newest addition to Evergreen’s fleet and was delivered by the builder this July.

The Ever Ace measures 1,312 ft (400 meters) in length and weighs approximately 235,000 tons.

Because of its large size, the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) followed its protocols and offered navigation support during the transit, ensuring a safe passage of the ship. It also welcomed the captain and the crew of the vessel. The SCA later shared the moment on social media.

Earlier this month, the Ever Ace set sail from the Port of Taipei in Taiwan, beginning its maiden voyage. Its destination is the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where the container ship is expected to arrive on September 4.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/world-s-largest-container-ship-successfully-passes-through-the-suez-canal-168414.html

Chris Littlechild - April 1, 2025 2:15 pm EST

It's easy to equate strength with size. Does a great white shark wield more power than a tiny sprat? Well, yes, but there's much more to the equation than that. Relative to its body weight, the horned dung beetle – all 10 millimeters of it – is one of the world's strongest animals, capable of rolling its favorite food in balls that weigh as much as 1,141 times more than it does itself. By a similar token, you might look at a vast cruise ship and a relatively tiny tugboat and think that there could only possibly be one winner there. The U.S. Navy has also wielded some of the smallest tugboats around. As it turns out, though, your average tugboat really is a horned dung beetle of the ocean.

As one tugboat captain, David Missroon, boasted of his vessel to Popular Mechanics in February 2010, “She's got the strength of a center in the NFL with the speed and agility of a defensive end.” All of this is packed into a relatively small body: The vessel in question, the Edward J. Moran (not pictured here) is approximately 30 meters long, with a deadweight of 228 tonnes and measuring 11 meters at the beam.

Considering the size of some of the vessels that tugboats are charged with leading, towing, and rescuing, it's difficult to picture where all this NFL center strength comes from. The key is not only the considerable horsepower of a tugboat (which measures 6,500 hp in the case of the Edward J. Moran), but also the brilliant way in which it's deployed.

Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/1820283/tugboats-strength-reason/

Christiaan De Beukelaer - February 17, 2023

Japanese bulk carrier MOL is operating a wind-assisted ship. American food giant Cargill is working with Olympic sailor Ben Ainslie to deploy WindWings on its routes. Swedish shipping company Wallenius is aiming for Oceanbird to cut emissions by up to 90 percent. The French startup Zephyr & Borée has built the Canopée, which will transport parts of European Space Agency’s Ariane 6 rocket this year.

I researched the decarbonization of the shipping industry. While doing fieldwork aboard the Avontuur, a wind-propelled cargo ship, I even got stuck at sea for five months (because of the pandemic, not because the winds failed).

https://singularityhub.com/2023/02/17/wind-powered-cargo-ships-are-the-future-debunking-4-myths-that-stand-in-the-way-of-cutting-emissions/