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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

If you go to vesselfinder you can follow the drama in real-time! Seems it's still stuck: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

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This link is extremely interesting. Keep zooming out all the way if you haven't already.

Wow. The magnitude of global trade is insane!

As is the environmental harm

Super-ships emit ~5g_Co2/Ton/km on average[1], while railway is 2-35g, air transport is 700-3000g and truck transport is 100-2000g.

Surprisingly, the bigger the boat the more effective. We tend to have a bias against larger machines, but often they can be the cleanest in proportion.

[1] https://www.ademe.fr/sites/default/files/assets/documents/86...

I would assume that were the case because if not, presumably it would be cheaper to transport the cargo in multiple smaller ships!

Assuming that pollution primarily caused by fuel usage of course.

Isn't the problem that ships are burning heavy oil instead of diesel or similar? CO2 isn't the main worry afaik, it's the rest that gets blasted unfiltered into the atmosphere and the left over sludge that gets illegally dumped into the sea.

it's not perfect but it's gotten better apparently. 170 countries have signed a treaty significantly reducing the fuel sulphur content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020

https://www.imo.org/fr/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2...

https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/02-I...

  The upper limit of the sulphur content of ships' fuel oil was reduced to 0.5% (from 3.5% previously) - under the so-called "IMO 2020" regulation prescribed in the MARPOL Convention. This significantly reduces the amount of sulphur oxide emanating from ships.

Ironically, a reduction in sulfur emitted from these ships may actually accelerate global warming: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/01/22/67402/were-about...

Burning that kind of fuel near populated areas is a problem, so long-distance shipping is probably the best use for it.

Some things just work best at scale - rockets that have to launch from Earths gravity well apparently do as well:

https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(raketa)

And it makes sense if you think about it - as you scale up, the ammount of fuel you can carry goes up roghly by cube while structure mass, forming a shell effectively arround the fuel, goes up by square of size of the rocket.

Similar things for air resistance - as you scale up yuour rocket the front part creating the most drag will scale more slowly than the volume of the rocket that goes to fuel, payload and structure.

No wonder Starship is already at 9 meters of width and 18 m has been mentioned as a possible future upgrade. Its already bigger than the massive 66+ meter high medieval watchtower in my home town yet it can fly to sub orbital speeds without its first stage booster (which is even bigger)!

For pressure vessels like rockets, the mass of the structure and the mass of the fuel scale together as far as square-cube reasoning goes. The surface area of the structure scales with the square while the volume of the fuel scales with the cube, but the thickness of the cylinder walls must also increase, so you end up with cube vs cube.

5g per km-tonne adds up to a lot though doesn't it.

"Maritime transport emits around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually and is responsible for about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (3rd IMO GHG study)."

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/shipping_en

The problem is that we (as a species) are moving far too much, far too far.

Why truck transport x20 vary?

Possibly road conditions and distance. A truck moving goods around a city will be much less efficient (stop-start traffic) than a truck moving goods over a long distance between cities (likely mostly highway).

There's nothing surprising about large ships being more efficient. But a big issue is that many ships burn dirty fuel. Apparently there are no fuel standards in international waters.

As for the comparison to trains, it matters a lot whether you're talking about diesel or electric trains. Most train lines in Europe are electrified, and as electricity production switches to solar/wind, it may actually end up being cleaner than ships. (Although work is also being done on making ships cleaner. But new international laws are probably needed to get everybody on board.)

The real issue, though, isn't no much whether the transport happens by boat or train, but that it happens at all. The scale of global shipping is this big because everything is produced on the other side of the world. Big ships make that transport more efficient, but a more egalitarian global economy that didn't create incentives for companies to seek out every low-wage country and tax haven, would make local manufacturing more attractive and reduce global shipping.

It's a lot quieter than it used to be.

Even worse for planes on flight radar 24.

Maritime traffic dropped significantly during mid-2020 but has largely recovered. For example, Singapore's stats for Feb 2021 are basically flat year-on-year for container throughput.

The fun thing is that it's not just sea trade, but also internal rivers. Checkout all the ships between Rotterdam and the Ruhr Area, for example.

Thanks to the mandatory AIS system onboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

Apparently 30% of all container traffic go through the Suez canal. Around 51 ships per day.

How much longer would it take to go around Africa to Gibraltar?

The increase in distance would be approx. 6,000Nm (assuming they arrived at the entrance to the Red Sea before having to change course).

6000Nm and, say, 25 knots (probably a bit on the high side, but not by much) should add 240 hours of steaming or 10 days to the voyage.

(This will be somewhat offset by the lower speed through the channel, waiting times &c - I've no idea how long a typical Suez transit is.)

"I've no idea how long a typical Suez transit is."

For yachts it is (supposed to be) two days. It's one day to Ismailia on either way and then one for the rest. (The paperwork however, may take longer, but can be arranged in advance.) See more at https://www.noonsite.com/report/suez-canal-transit-informati...

walrus01 linked a video here yesterday [0] of a ship transit. For a ship it takes 11 to 16 hours, including stop on Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the canal.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561816

8 days, but the bigger problem is that increases the expected sea states encountered by several levels. Huge container ships don't like that.

Can you expand as to why not/what "increases expected sea states encountered" means? Maybe an ELI5

Hoping I'm not misreading and this is what you're after - basically, less predictable weather that is more prone to suddenly changing when going that route and also naturally given the extended period of time involved. Longer it take to go around, the more time for potential sea conditions that large container ships may not be safe in.

Very rough water around the cape of good hope. Comparatively calm water through the Suez and Med.

Look at a globe. You'll notice that the water around the tip of South America/South Africa is one of the few bands of the Earth completely unbroken by landmass.

That's a lot of fetch for wind, which transfers energy to the ocean's surface, which travels as waves, which build up because there's no land damping from west to east. Throw in the Antarctic Circumpolar current and weather systems interacting with the Benguela current an Agulhas current... That's a lot of energy getting put into a relatively tiny band of water.

The Cape of Good Hope was previously known as the Cape of Storms based on the aforementioned confluence of forces generally making sea states miserable. The Good Hope part was what putatively happened after you got through it, and the seas you'd have to worry about would generally be calmer.

Had more luck with this one, hug of death?

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoo...

Still stuck. 6 tugs are on it and a pleasure craft, possibly used to direct operations or some idiot taking pictures.

>and a pleasure craft

I see that labeling too, but the Tahia Misr2 is a tug, sister to the Tahia Misr1.

I'm not sure why it's displaying as a pleasure craft.

Maybe it is enjoying itself?

I don't want to know, do I?

Edit: The phrase "pleasure craft" is a triple entendre, and possibly a quadruple.

Ah thanks. I bet it's a data sanitization or registration foul-up. It's Egypt, after all, where things don't always work honestly or consistently.

You fill in the AIS data fields yourself, my experience is that it is not uncomon to see the ”less important” AIS data Fields beeing wrong.

There will be a ton of pictures to document, and later investigate, that incident.

Is the Suez Canal Authority of Egypt or maritime authorities in-charge professional enough to do this?

There are professionals, I don't know how it works at suez but we have people called "Havarie Kommisar", they are the guys brought in by insurances to document and certify accidents involving transportation.

Considering how niche it is, that's a super snappy and well designed site!

EDIT: Just saw they had outages, but I guess nobody ever expected it to be trending on twitter. Works fine for me.

Niche, but very important to participants in the market. There is a growing industry of cargo and vessel tracking SaaS solutions (including https://Vortexa.com)

Fond memories. I once tracked a ship carrying a couple of containers that were urgently needed driving in circles in the English Channel for two weeks.

My partner and I shipped our furniture from the US to Europe for an international move. We were tracking the ship going back and forth between Hamburg and Copenhagen for weeks. Turns out the moving company gave us the wrong ship number, and our stuff had been waiting for us in the destination port.

Cool. It even shows the 7 tugs trying to help.

I was looking up how hard can a tug tug. Wikipedia seems to imply 65 tons is normal.

So how long before they start rerouting, for ships that can make that passage South of the horn?

Does anyone know the transit time to pass through the canal versus going around the South Africa route?

The article on gCaptain said that shippers would begin re-routes after 24 hours of closure, which was about 6:00 UTC today.

How does it look like normally? I guess full of ships anyway?

“If” applies here nicely, website isn’t responding for me

marinetraffic.com is a good alt

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