The Strait of Hormuz and other chokepoints: live ships on a 3D globe

What a chokepoint scene shows

Opening a scene switches on everything that belongs to the strait at once: live AIS ships and delayed ones from AISHub, ship detections from Sentinel-1 satellite radar, gas and oil pipelines from OpenStreetMap, shipping lanes and ports. The camera flies over the strait.

A fact card states what flows through the strait, and a counter shows how many AIS ships are in the strait area right now — tracked ships, not total traffic. Every scene adds a card with the Brent and WTI oil price; at Hormuz, news from the Persian Gulf also appears where events were reported.

• Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, Bosphorus
• Malacca, Panama Canal, Gibraltar, Dover

Where the data come from and how fresh they are

Ship positions come from AIS, live via AISStream.io and via AISHub with a delay of 1 to 6 minutes. Global Fishing Watch detections from Sentinel-1 radar are about three days old and cover a ten-day window; a radar detection without AIS does not prove a “dark” ship. Pipelines come from an OpenStreetMap snapshot.

The oil price is indicative — the front-month futures contract from Yahoo Finance, roughly the spot price. IMF PortWatch transit estimates for Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez and the Cape of Good Hope are in the Middle East panel; they are preliminary and updated roughly once a week.

What flows through the straits

The fact card in each scene sums up the essentials: through Hormuz about 21 million barrels of oil a day and LNG from Qatar, through the Strait of Malacca about a quarter of the world’s traded goods and Gulf oil to East Asia, through Bab el-Mandeb oil and goods on the way to Suez, through Suez about 12% of global trade and 10% of seaborne oil, through the Bosphorus Russian and Caspian oil and Black Sea grain, and through the Panama Canal about 5% of world maritime trade. Gibraltar is the Mediterranean’s only ocean gate, and the Dover Strait is the world’s busiest lane with about 400 ships a day.