A Map Showing Every Cargo Ship
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It scans the entire (?) globe every few hours. I think accrss to those observations is one of the benefits of a paid AIS subscription.
(I'm an engineer at Spire, we've launched a constellation of nanosatellites that does exactly that: https://spire.com/products/sense/ )
What network design is used to communicate between the satellites? I presume that they don't all go at the same speed in the same direction, so the network layout must be flexible, right?
Also, what is their size? You called them nanosatellites, can they really be a hundred nanometers big? How are they powered, and how are they put out of commission?
Ah yes! I think the term "nanosatellites" is a bit confusing--it refers to satellites between 1 and 10 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniaturized_satellite#Nanosat...). Ours are 3U cubesats so they are about 30cm long. Much bigger than a hundred nanometers!
They have solar panels which are used to charge batteries, and since they are in low-earth-orbit they will eventually de-orbit and burn up on reentry after several years. The FCC actually requires that cubesats re-enter the atmosphere within 25 years.
Narrator is unnecessarily alarmist here, and sounds like we should be concerned about the contribution of cargo ships to the greenhouse. I would say we should celebrate the shipping industry for being so much more beneficial to humanity per unit of CO2.
Wrong. Shipping is the most efficient transportation of mass-distance per unit of CO2. Shipping's CO2 contribution is only %3-%4 of total CO2 produced by humans.
Not sure what you mean by "group", but animal agriculture beats all transportation (road, sea, air) combined when it comes to greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect. There are a few different sources from the UN on this (plus some other sources with even higher numbers).
Very few ships travel around the southern tip of South America
A corrupted data point sends it flying across Russia and into Southern Europe.
A lone ship travelling to Svalbard.
Multiple ships travelling in rivers deep into Russia.
Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.
Russia is huge, hence a lot of river shipping.
Control of the seas would bring a lot of influence, hence the British control of Gibraltar and the complex history of the Suez Canal.
You can stop there.
The latitudes between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula are the only latitudes that have no land (barring the area around the North Pole, which are usually locked in sea ice). As a result, there is a very strong current and very strong winds that make shipping dangerous. Note that most ships prefer the Straits of Magellan--a cramped, dangerous corridor, to passing the open water south of Cape Horn, which should tell you just how dangerous the area is.
> Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.
The Strait of Malacca is the real chokepoint, not the South China Sea. The concerns about the South China Sea are largely related to natural resources that may lie in the area. It should come as no surprise that Malacca was traditionally the worst area for piracy--before they started cracking down on it in the early 2000's, it was pretty much as bad as the Somali hijackings that gripped press (and those made press largely because the hijackings had spread from the Gulf of Aden, a consistent pirate menace as far back as Roman times, to the Indian Ocean off of Somalia).
Or is that just a flaw of 2D-mapping?
What were oil prices then? What are they now? What is the state of piracy then? What is is now? Interesting, but I suggest that the really interesting details aren't to be found on this map.