I built this because I was interested in the data. Didn't fully get it to what I wanted, but thought I'd share it nonetheless. Maybe someone has better data sources they could share!
Turns out live ship tracking APIs are expensive so I manually just copied the json from https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/cente... I'll probably have an ai agent do the same thing on some cron interval, if this gets any fanfare.
To actually know if the port is open without live ship tracking I found https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a... which was perfect, except it has 4 day lag!
I also thought of adding news feed parsing or prediction market data to get a more definitive answer on if it's open right when you load it, but I spent a few hours and am gonna move on for now.
gloosxan hour ago
Hello OP, I think using an ai agent to fetch the JSON is a bit of an overkill
Here is a node.js script for you which will fetch the data and save it to the file:
import fs from 'fs'
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-extra'
import StealthPlugin from 'puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth'
puppeteer.use(StealthPlugin())
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
async function fetchCoords(x, y, z = 8, station = 0) {
await page.goto(`https://www.marinetraffic.com/getData/get_data_json_4/z:${z}/X:${x}/Y:${y}/station:${station}`);
const jsonRaw = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.innerText);
const json = JSON.parse(jsonRaw)
return json
}
const data8353 = await fetchCoords(83, 53)
const data8453 = await fetchCoords(84, 53)
const data8354 = await fetchCoords(83, 54)
const data8454 = await fetchCoords(84, 54)
const fullData = { ...data8353, ...data8453, ...data8354, ...data8454 }
fs.writeFileSync('data.json', JSON.stringify(fullData, null, 2))
console.log('done!')
process.exit(0)
Jeremy102611 hours ago
The data being ~4 days delayed does kind of make this less useful. It is a nice concept and cool to see the historical data though. Just think the domain and the large "NO" doesn't really fit with the lack of current data.
anonfunctionop11 hours ago
Totally agree, I put some text and tried to make it clear. My first intention was to find some live ship tracking API and see how many ships cross the strait, but they were all hundreds of dollars a month, and behind enterprise contact forms.
baq2 hours ago
You need to send an analyst there with binoculars, a box of cigars and $15k in cash to get realtime trustworthy data
golem142 hours ago
Do these ships not use transponders? E.g., in the US you can use a SDR dongle and a RPI to read local updates. The straight isn't very wide.
Seems cheaper than the cigars and cash.
dewey2 hours ago
Transponders get turned off all the time, especially if you don't want to be targeted.
golem14an hour ago
Are they though, in the straight ? I'm not sure it's such a great move, TBH:
Given that the baddies clearly can locate ships and see that there's no transponder, and come to the conclusion they need. "Hmm, it turned off transponders and is now moving toward the straight. It's a tanker, and not one of ours, or Russia's or China's. Let's bomb it!"
Also, pragmatically, you could look at the transponders suddenly not showing up anymore as a sign of attempt of passage, especially if they show up later on the other side.
But yes, that would no longer be very realtime.
dewey21 minutes ago
Transponders are a voluntary system, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet
zorkedan hour ago
The fleet serving Iran and Russia does not use transponders. It's a large fleet. Ships without transponders are just a fact of life in shipping.
jojobasan hour ago
The strait is wider than horizon distance from reasonable heights. Also that's how you don't hear back from the analyst in many different ways.
Jeremy102611 hours ago
I've done some small scale ship tracking in the past, and yeah, anything beyond finding a specific ship while it is near the shore is stupid expensive.
[deleted]6 hours agocollapsed
anonfunctionop10 hours ago
What do you think of adding prediction market data to the indication? So basically there's this:
https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...
My approach would be if that jumps up to 75%+ it would change to YES. And if we get into May they have one for then too:
https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...
You can actually see in the last 24 hours it jumped up with the ceasefire and Iran saying they would open it and fell back with reports it's been shut down again easlier today.
Edit: I added this, I can see a few downvotes, happy to discuss here or in the github repo if anyone has strong feelings on it!
killingtime749 hours ago
i didnt downvote you but why wouldn't i just go to Polymarket directly for this
anonfunctionop9 hours ago
I mean you obviously could, the url is a little harder to remember and it doesn't have crossing data. This was just a small fun project I did, so you're free to do whatever you like. The reason I thought of using polymarket data is I didn't have live ship tracking data which is what I originally intended to use.
killingtime744 hours ago
I don't mean to say your project is not good, quite the opposite. You successfully got the real vessel crossing data and the prediction data is sort of derived or not really based on reality but on the crowd.
elSidCampeador10 hours ago
I believe NASA / EU provide daily satellite imagery for free (which is of relatively high quality too). I wonder if there's a way to take that data, and training some kind of image recognition model that figures out "movement" or something to the same end? Would be cool to see
anonfunctionop10 hours ago
Funnily enough, I did find a few satellite sources at the beginning for the map background and noticed that all the ships seemed to be scrubbed from the image. It's an interesting idea, thanks for the comment!
The sources I used were:
- ESRI World Imagery[1] — free satellite tiles, high-res, but ships are stripped out from the imagery
- NASA GIBS - VIIRS[2] — near real-time daily satellite imagery from NASA, but resolution is ~375m so ships aren't visible anyway
- Mapbox Satellite[3] — high-res and looks great, but same deal — ships are scrubbed from the composited imagery
1. https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_I... 2. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-softwar... 3. https://www.mapbox.com
letcree9 hours ago
Ai2 has vessel detection models for Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 (ESA) along with Landsat 8, Landsat 9, and VIIRS Nighttime Lights (NASA/USGS/NOAA):
- Sentinel-2 (10 m/pixel): https://github.com/allenai/rslearn_projects/blob/master/docs...
- Landsat (15-30 m/pixel): https://github.com/allenai/rslearn_projects/blob/master/docs...
- VIIRS Nighttime Lights: https://github.com/allenai/vessel-detection-viirs
I think you can see these vessel detections at https://app.skylight.earth/ ("Try out a limited version as a guest") but they seem to be delayed by 48 hours.
VIIRS is very low resolution but you can make out vessels with reasonable accuracy in the night-time images.
VIIRS covers most locations at least once per day, but the other sensors capture a given location only once per 5-10 days (although when combined, Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2/Landsat should provide close-to-daily coverage).
verdverm7 hours ago
There is also a lot of jamming, manipulating, and fake AIS broadcasting going on
https://windward.ai/blog/gps-jamming-disrupts-1100-ships-in-...
lukewarm70727 minutes ago
modifying the data is crazy
doesn't this sort of thing invalidate any kind of experiment because the instrument is no longer trustworthy
[deleted]9 hours agocollapsed
colechristensen8 hours ago
It turns out during a war having real time satellite imagery of shipping would be a poor choice.
lukewarm70725 minutes ago
but what about other experiments, just saying, it's subjective
you could, presumably, mess up other instruments than visual to interfere with enemy countries
tgsovlerkhgsel3 hours ago
The ESA (Sentinel) data is somewhat delayed and has a low revisit period (AFAIK 6 days, although you might get lucky and get more due to overlap the further away from the equator you get) and low resolution. The Sentinel-1 data (SAR, synthetic aperture radar) might be somewhat useful for this as ships should be more easily identifiable on it and you don't have to worry about cloud cover, but probably still less useful than the delayed crossing data.
Ships don't move that quickly; AIS data refreshed once every few hours would probably be more than good enough.
baq2 hours ago
AIS over there is jammed and spoofed. Nobody wants to get bombed and certain Greek and Chinese owners run the strait dark with their crews apparently very happy about the danger pay.
creatonez4 hours ago
Public satellite imagery is heavily censored these days.
kzrdude4 hours ago
Tangential, but I was wondering if it's maybe related: why doesn't google maps and google earth want to show satellite images of the ocean? It just overlays those areas with blue color.
creatonez3 hours ago
Part of it is just because the ocean is difficult to photograph. The parts of coastline that do have ocean surface imagery have crazy artifacting from the sun reflection, and the color is inconsistent from constantly changing sediment and algae levels.
By not providing imagery of the ocean surface, it also gets to display ocean floor topography data it wouldn't otherwise get to show without having to add another mode.
I assume another reason is that it reduces the total size of the imagery, which would have been a plus on the 2001 computers that Google Earth was originally developed on.
I believe you can get this imagery from other sources (aside from things that are government-censored), but you face the same problem Google did in how to stitch it together without it being a patchwork of different moments in time.
000ooo0005 hours ago
Read somewhere once that trading firms use satellite imagery of shipping to inform trading strategy. Don't know any more about it unfortunately but it sounds interesting.
barchar6 hours ago
I think sentinel-1 has a SAR instrument, it's very easy to see ships with that data
foresterre10 hours ago
According to the Financial Times (1), the straight is "open" but Iran is extorting fees for passing ships.
> "Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire."
If they really will start doing so for all shipping, that would be odd since the straight itself is in Oman's territorial waters. Even so, the UNCLOS convention (2) requires free transit:
> Article 44 > Duties of States bordering straits > > States bordering straits shall not hamper transit passage and shall give appropriate publicity to any danger to navigation or overflight within or over the strait of which they have knowledge. There shall be no suspension of transit passage.
It would be unprecedented and unlawful, but I guess previous actions of Israel, the US and Iran have shown our world is beyond adhering to laws and agreements now.
(1) https://www.ft.com/content/02aefac4-ea62-48db-9326-c0da373b1... (2) United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea: https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
foxglacier2 hours ago
Iran hasn't ratified it and is not a party to that agreement. You can't really fault a country for not complying with an extraterritorial law made by and for other countries.
femiagbabiaka10 hours ago
Oman and Iran are splitting the fees RE: the statements by Iran.
AnimalMuppet9 hours ago
But collected by Iran, not by Oman. Which is weird, if it's really Oman's territorial waters.
FrustratedMonky9 hours ago
And Trump.
Didn't Trump float the Idea of a joint venture with Iran on the Fees?
Amazing, that once you could make money on a toll, Trump was "there is profit in peace? lets get this peace thing going"
hattmall6 hours ago
Trump and the US effectively control the commerce because they are the only source of insurance. Even with payments and promises from Iran, no ship is sailing without insurance coverage. There is no one insuring the ships other than the US program Trump created.
anonfunctionop10 hours ago
It's super hard to tell what's actually happening. Because I've seen other reports that Iran state media halted traffic earlier today, as reported by Washington Post[1]:
> With Trump and Iran each claiming victory, but still far apart on key issues, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained at a standstill Wednesday.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/08/trump-iran-w...
femiagbabiaka8 hours ago
That's because Israel killed hundreds of civilians in Lebanon today.
spiderfarmer4 hours ago
It's only hard to tell if you rely on the US billionaire controlled media.
quantummagican hour ago
It's been very hard to watch how many people who, a few years ago, believed everything the media said about say the pandemic, now claim you can't trust them at all. Time makes "conspiracy theorists" out of all of us -- it can be hard to see just how much the media lies and distorts, until they start talking about something you care about.
dogscatstrees25 minutes ago
I don't understand why ships can't just run on Oman's side of the strait, isn't there a dash-line down the middle for territorial waters integrity?
incompatible18 minutes ago
Because it's only a few extra kilometres, Iran could still hit them.
alerter12 hours ago
I work for a consultancy that does vessel tracking as one of its main products, and yeah it's expensive! afaik they have remote teams with sensors at key points and a bunch of people using AI/software to manage things like GPS spoofing. So it's all pretty guarded proprietary stuff.
Great bit of topical datavis here.
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
Yeah! The AIS terrain data is expensive, but the good stuff is from satellite tracking and out of my budget for silly site I built on a whim.
namewithhe1d10 hours ago
OP, DM me and I'll get you a persistent key for this data. Not from MarineTraffic
anonfunctionop10 hours ago
Wow thanks, there's not really any dm functionality on hn and I didn't see a clear social handle in your profile. https://github.com/montanaflynn/ has my email.
HiroProtagonist9 hours ago
Very cool thing of you to do.
nodesocket9 hours ago
Aren't ships turning off their AIS when traveling the straight? I think https://atlas.flexport.com/ could also be a good source.
dzogchenan hour ago
If this is using OpenStreetMap data, you should add attribution.
bl4ckneon12 hours ago
Very cool! I love one off intresting sites like this. Thanks for building it and talking a little bit about where the data comes from etc.
On the note of Ai agent getting the data for you, could you not just build a chrome extention that intercepts/read the api response and then uploads it to whatever ingest endpoint you have? You could probably just call their api end points they use on the page as well but not sure what protections they have so might be a bit tricky. A custom chrome extention could do it though if they have protections.
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
Their APIs are protected by cloudflare, I didn't want to circumvent that. Also I dont really want to make a chrome extension or have a browster tab open, if that's what you meant? I've already made a cron style agent framework[1] so that's what I'd probably reach for since they can actually open the browser and inspect the network traffic to grab the json.
Klonoar12 hours ago
How is doing it via agent not circumventing it?
anonfunctionop11 hours ago
I think I was just spit-balling what would be possible, rather than what I intend to do. As mentioned elsewhere I'm hoping to get an API key from one the data providers, I even reached out to the api behind marinetraffic.com, https://www.kpler.com/product/maritime/data-services to see if they would sponsor the project.
This was just something I built on a whim, but I appreciate your comment and took it to heart!
tomtomtom7779 hours ago
This is a nice overview, but please remove the PolyMarket indicator. It is an obscene prediction mechanism as it creates horrible financial incentives to a war situation. Its degenerate effects have been featured here before. [1]
Let's not condone "measurements" that are effectively ways for people to gain money on important political decisions, affecting the lives of many people.
DaedalusII9 hours ago
why dont UK start enforcing the Marine Insurance Act 1745 to combat this or the Life insurance act maybe 1775
this law literally make it illegal to gamble on marine risk that you do not have direct economic interest in
colechristensen8 hours ago
Are they? Is there a prediction market available in the UK which allows you to place these bets? They're regulated like gambling there.
voidfunc7 hours ago
People don't matter, only outcomes
zeofig8 hours ago
I agree polymarket is "bad", but it's also highly relevant and should absolutely be included in this web page.
afavour8 hours ago
Why is it highly relevant? It’s a bunch of people betting on the outcome.
furyofantares8 hours ago
I've spent years watching prediction markets and finding them to be, by a wide margin, the most accurate way for me to understand the world. It is not remotely close.
It sucks that they're going mainstream, providing incentives to bad actors to profit from their power, and it sucks that they've gone so heavily for the predatory gambling market to boot.
I really hate this duality.
verdverm7 hours ago
> the most accurate way for me to understand the world
Are you sure it's not survivorship bias or similar? I've seen multiple trend lines that are very confident only to switch to the opposite outcome at the very end.
pgodzin7 hours ago
Are you sure you're not the one seeing the survivorship bias? Something that is 10% likely to happen ends up switching to the opposite outcome at the very end 1/10 times. There are thousands of prediction markets up at any given time, so there are going to be plenty of examples of unlikely events happening.
But there is plenty of research on how well-calibrated they are. For example, https://polymarket.com/accuracy
verdverm7 hours ago
Prediction markets, like many other micro-financialization trends, is unhealthy for society. I'm not going to trust research from the very company selling the product. History provides ample examples of how that works without the need to gamble on it.
I would invite you to look into the statistics on foreclosures, bankruptcy, and gambling hotline traffic which compare jurisdictions that have allowed this stuff vs not. Those with demographic breakdowns help to show those most at risk.
michaelt2 hours ago
> it's also highly relevant
Polymarket has $5 million of wagers on "Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April?"
The toll Iran charges for safe passage is $2 million per ship, and at current prices such a ship would be carrying about $200 million of oil. Oh, and we live in a world where a single billionaire will happily spend $200 million to influence politics.
The polymarket number merely shows that nobody's paid to make it higher or lower yet.
nodesocket9 hours ago
By this logic would you also consider trading OIL (USO) and Palantir a "obscene" market.
tomtomtom7779 hours ago
Actually yes. I put my money in things I would like to see shape the future, which I think is what investment should be about: shaping the future.
But disregarding this admittedly niche attitude; it's not the same thing. If you're opening bets on the ships being bombed before a certain date, you're opening incentives for people to do so. Although buying OIL or Palantir is morally questionable, it does not create such direct incentives.
trhway8 hours ago
>you're opening incentives for people to do so
how about short-selling of stocks, isn't it the same thing? I'd even argue that sinking one ship affects say 10 people of the crew who most probable will survive in the warm Gulf waters whereis sinking a company may affect many people life outcomes probably causing a number of indirect deaths. CDS of 2008 would be similar example.
>buying OIL or Palantir is morally questionable, it does not create such direct incentives
it creates direct incentives to suppress competitors - wind and solar energy for OIL, and whoever Palantir competitors are.
Wrt. "Hormuz open" - does the "open" definition includes the new fee Iran would be taking for the strait traverse (something like $1/barrel, nice for Iran, how come that they had't implemented such an idea before? one can only wonder)
tomtomtom7778 hours ago
> how about short-selling of stocks, isn't it the same thing?
Yes. That's why it's illegal to short-sell your stocks just before you announce that your company is broke.
There are no such regulations when betting on a bomb dropping on a boat.
nodesocket8 hours ago
Shaping the future for “good” is not investing. That is ESG and if you value capital and capital appreciation ESG has been proven not to be a solid strategy. See also altruistic capitalism with such moral people as Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Trevor Milton and Adam Neumann. Solid list of moral people shaping the future.
sharmajai8 hours ago
Who said investing is _only_ for "capital and capital appreciation"? It can also be for social good.
tomtomtom7778 hours ago
Wow. I am not sure how to respond to this as you seem to have a completely different mindset. You mean to say it is "proven" not to be a solid strategy as in not maximizing profit?
Surely, you acknowledge that funding something is a rather direct way of actively supporting it. It is your money and your choice of what you choose to invest it in, and thus how you choose to shape the future. If you buy OIL to make money, you are still responsible for the additional investment made in oil, and are still shaping the future, whether you like it or not.
DwnVoteHoneyPot5 hours ago
No, you're wrong. Oil producers produce oil... Consumers consume oil. In between the producers and the consumers, it doesn't matter whether or not trader A sells a barrel of oil to B, then B sells to C, and C sells it someone else. All of the A to B to C is net zero.
All of the money comes from consumers. The money may change hands 100 times in between, but the money from consumers goes to producers.
If you purchase any products which included petroleum in your life, whether it's a house, car (EV or not), or stretchy clothes, that is what funds the oil producers. That where the money goes into the system, including to investors as return.
nodesocket7 hours ago
> It is your money and your choice of what you choose to invest it in, and thus how you choose to shape the future.
Absolutely, but I believe you are conflating investing vs donating. The literal definition of investing is:
> Allocating money (or capital) with the expectation of generating a return or profit over time.
tomtomtom7773 minutes ago
The fact that is used to make profit doesn't absolve us from any moral judgement. Buying stocks of a company improves its financial position allowing it to grow.
Would you buy stocks of ClusterBombsInc over CureForCancerInc because it has slightly better prospects?
Invictus07 hours ago
The ticker is USO, not OIL, and it's abundantly clear that you have no idea how it works.
tomtomtom7772 minutes ago
I am responding to someone that used OIL presumably because it is - although incorrect - more clear as an example for those that are not into trading.
auntienomen8 hours ago
The problem with prediction markets is fundamentally that they're unregulated.
Modern equities and futures markets are highly evolved and rather carefully regulated systems. We've spent centuries learning what the failure modes are and how to guard against them. It's never perfect, it's never going to be perfect -- it's fundamentally a voting system -- but in general, we get liquidity and price discovery at a relatively low cost, while avoiding fraudulent and evil behavior like wash trading and criminal profit laundering.
These new "prediction markets" have been put in place without any of those hard-earned protections. And surprise, they're rife with dirty trick and dirty money.
nodesocket8 hours ago
Agree 100% that prediction markets are the wild-wild-west with no insider trading protections, pump and dump, and no oversight. It’s perverting the wisdom of the crowd and efficient market thesis.
watwut2 hours ago
>It’s perverting the wisdom of the crowd and efficient market thesis.
I mean, looking at futures and stocks now, I dont believe in those anymore anyway.
nodesocketan hour ago
typical HN comment when it comes to finance and the stock market. Over and over again the wisdom of the HN crowd is wrong in regards to stocks. Intel at its bottom (they are done, and doomed, listening to main stream media) perfect time to buy and load up. This has occurred over and over again in my 15 years being on HN, almost always they call a bottom.
mvdtnz9 hours ago
Oil futures or any other commodity purchase that doesn't result in the buyer taking actual physical ownership of what they purchase is an obscene gambling market with perverse incentives yes correct.
isubkhankulov9 hours ago
How will commodity producers (oil companies, farmers) hedge their risk / stabilize their prices without speculators and their “perverse incentives”?
DaedalusII9 hours ago
[flagged]
broken-kebab8 hours ago
We will gather special people, very wise, and completely honest. They'll form a committee, and we will call it Gosplan, comrade!
DaedalusII9 hours ago
by this logic investing in SAFEs is obscene gambling with perverse incentives and we should shut down the venture capital industry
Octoth0rpe9 hours ago
Yep
[deleted]9 hours agocollapsed
micromacrofoot9 hours ago
objectively so
foxes9 hours ago
Yes
antonvs8 hours ago
Why would you not? Unless you literally don't care about damaging our planet and civilization in the interests of your own personal profit.
colechristensen8 hours ago
At this point efficient pricing of energy is a strong motivator for environmental causes. Solar is ridiculously cheaper than fossil fuels and not subject to geopolitical risk. And once you have solar panels you've got energy for decades.
Carbon-related environmentalism and greed now go hand in hand.
FrustratedMonky9 hours ago
> "obscene"
And yet, it is the wisdom of the crowds. The crowds being obscene.
Aren't we all constantly hitting re-fresh for updates, and making predictions.
The prediction markets are just consolidating that 'desire'.
tomtomtom7779 hours ago
Well, it would be if everyone betting wouldn't have an influence on the outcome. That's "wisdom of the crowds". But what if the people putting money on the Strait being closed are the same that close them? Surely, that's no longer the wisdom of the crowds at play. Just perverse incentives.
FrustratedMonky9 hours ago
I agree. Maybe an un-expected outcome.
Who could have foreseen that a government/person would actually blatantly start a war, and manipulate bombing raids in order to manipulate a market, without being charged with a crime himself.
In sports betting, it seems obvious if a player throws a game.
In a war? Surely nobody would do this, right? Who could imagine it.
verdverm7 hours ago
> In sports betting, it seems obvious if a player throws a game.
On the other hand, since you can bet on individual pitches, you no longer have to throw the game, just the right pitch at the right time. A couple of players were caught, but who knows how widespread this really is...
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/46917665/mlb-betting-gua...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-current-major-leagu...
The focus on making money above all else, as a cultural dynamic, is degrading the human experience. It increasingly seeps into more aspects of our lives and is part of the broader Trustpocalypse.
antonvs8 hours ago
> Who could have foreseen
Economists. They even have a term for this, dating back to the late 1800s: "moral hazard".
Polymarket creates moral hazard when participants can profit from outcomes they can influence.
tomtomtom7779 hours ago
You don't have to imagine some giant conspiracy. Fact is, that everyone can make a bet, and there are a lot of people with knowledge and influence in the political decisions made.
In sports, at least the outcome is only effected by the sportsmen. Here, who knows which and how many people have inside knowledge and influence that they can use that to their financial advantage?
FrustratedMonky9 hours ago
Yeah. I have to agree. My view has changed in last week.
I never imagined that markets could be so corrupted by those in power, without some other consequences somehow balancing out. Like being arrested, or removed from office.
Forget PolyMarket. We literally have bets being made on oil futures, directly before a tweet by the president. Openly profiting on direct minute by minute manipulation. Openly corrupt.
heavyset_go9 hours ago
Putting bounties on people's heads and public lynchings are the wisdom of crowds and its obscenity in action.
FrustratedMonky9 hours ago
Humans need entertainment.
Running Man was a prediction, coming true.
ggm12 hours ago
Maps can be so misleading. It looks like a dredging operation in Omani waters could alleviate this, if we'd started decades ago.
Moving to a topographic view, it becomes clear the neck of land at "two seas view" is narrow, but tall. It would literally be moving a mountain.
Panamax and suezmax boats are smaller than ULCC supertankers.
Ferdinand De Lesseps time has passed. This would be ruinously expensive. Better to negotiate with rational intent.
dylan60412 hours ago
> This would be ruinously expensive.
I bet it could have been done with the money spent on the "war"
ggm12 hours ago
Yes, but in circumstances where no war is in the offing, digging a giant hole next to 50km of open water begs questions. It would be impossible to get "it's a hedge against the future" over the line.
The same to a lesser extent applies to pipes. You could construct pipes for gas, for some of the heavier oils and crude (what I read suggests pumping crude long distance is painful, it has to be down-mixed with lighter stuff to make it sufficiently fluid) but the fertilizer? that would mean converting dry to wet and back again (nobody ships fluid weight if they can avoid it) -Or ship the inputs: ammonia, and sulphur in some liquid form, and produce the dry goods on the other side.
But, I think pipes have a stronger case than a canal: move the things which are amenable to pipes, into pipes, and bury the pipes.
In times past, this would have been done as a convoy. China and other nations would have stepped to the fore, conducting safe passage with their own ships on the outside edge. But we're not in a world where this kind of thing works for anyone involved. Even offering to cover insurance risk doesn't look to have motivated ship owners to pass. (in times past, the US wouldn't have put itself or it's allies in this position, hence the reference to China)
Don't be fooled by mental images of what a convoy looks like: ships like these maintain massive separation. There's almost suction between hulls moving at this scale, if they were within 500m of each other there'd be chaos if one had to take any evasive action. In reality (I believe) even a convoy consists of a a lot of discrete, clearly demarked and targetable things, not a large mass you can "hide" in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traffic_separation_sch... (and a lot of links off this)
analog3111 hours ago
We could have spent the money on windmills without raising any suspicions.
On the other hand, fertilizer is fluid -- either ammonia or ureal ammonium nitrate.
ggm11 hours ago
If the fertiliser production has a point in manufacture when the fluid is amenable to transport, then for sure, that would make sense.
And you are right, if the same amount of capital and energy was invested in Solar/Wind as in Oil, we'd be in a totally different world. It's cents to dollars, considering the size of the tail AND the current investment.
Here in Australia the problem is the royalty stream to the states. Oil and Gas windfalls when the price of equivalent supply (brent crude I believe for oil, not sure what LNG world price defines the limit) hits $100 is just amazing. The revenue stream to the states is enormous. Their motivation to transfer money into alternatives, instead of sucking on the teat, is zero. States without significant oil revenue seem to do more (SA) -States isolated from the national grid seem to do more (WA) but a site with both high insolation, and good wind, but also massive oil, gas and coal fields (Qld) does as little as possible. It's political reductionism. The crony economy is huge, Mining funds the government and the government reflects mining sector interests over all others.
acomjean9 hours ago
It always amazed me they made ships that just fit the Panama canal. I went though the locks years ago, it was quite a trip (and how a friend got met to go on a cruise)
truelson12 hours ago
Really liked this. Made me laugh even if not intentionally funny.
Also, given how markets and news cycles are moved with words not actions these days, I really like this site.
There are still so many misaligned interests; this is a much tougher situation that may get some local stability for a period, but will likely return to chaos again.
tehjoker10 hours ago
It’s worth remembering that the chaos is fully coming from America and Israel. The great satan indeed.
4ndrewl12 hours ago
You might want to rethink scraping marinetraffic before you get a call from their lawyers?
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
Fair enough, I'm actually not scraping it on any automated cycle currently, I just manually copied the JSON from their site to get some ships on the map.
There's a few live ship tracking APIs I considered but they are expensive or their free offering just straight up didn't work. I sent a few an email if they would consider sponsoring the project, no replies yet.
- AISStream.io — https://aisstream.io — Down/not working
- DataDocked — https://datadocked.com — Ran out of credits on a single failed request
- VesselFinder — https://www.vesselfinder.com/realtime-ais-data — Enterprise contact form, asked if they wanted to sponsor in exchange for a link
- MarineTraffic — https://www.marinetraffic.com, their API is like an enterprise contact form, same as above, waiting for response.frm886 hours ago
Associated Press cites a service called Windward for their shipping data. I'm completely ignorant on the subject, but might that be of help for you? https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-04-08-2026#000... (second paragraph).
Your site is very cool. Will test further.
anonfunctionop5 hours ago
That’s actually a great find, this page[1] from them I found seems to have more recent data than I’ve otherwise been able to find. I’ll reach out to them to see if they can provide some data to power my site as I don’t like the current setup of old data and prediction market odds. Thanks!
ananandreas4 hours ago
May be possible to improve the delay by reviewing ship geolocation data. Those are open to public and there is probably many apis for it
spwa444 minutes ago
Obviously the situation has significantly improved since then, your website is given outdated information.
https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=OMKHS001 (click on map, zoom out). At this moment ~18 ships transiting. Not sure what the normal capacity is, and I think it's probably a bit more than this ... but it's at least mostly open.
ainiriand3 hours ago
Open to whom? AFAIK some nationalities can cross freely.
frogperson12 hours ago
https://warescalation.com/ is also a good source of info.
starik3612 hours ago
It says US-Israel Bloc military deaths - 74. Iran military deaths - 10,500 It has no information what is the source of information. Seems like made up numbers.
fraywing12 hours ago
Very cool, thanks for sharing!
What's the threshold function? Do you have graduating `No --> Partially --> Mostly --> Open`?
Also what's the update cadence?
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
So if it's under 25% of the prior year's crossing it goes to NO, otherwise it's counted as open.
The update cadence kinda sucks because I didn't spring for the $200 a month live ship tracking data, so I'm using https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a... which lags by 4 days which isn't great for a site like this, but was fine for me on a little side project. Open to other data sources or ideas, of if anyone wants to sponsor an API key (I did reach out to a few vendors already if they would give the project api key in exchange for a link to their site).
The original idea was to track ships and see how many crossed the strait but as mentioned above I didn't find any free sources so I went with what I did.
davidguetta29 minutes ago
4 day delay kinda kills the point of the map no?
MiSeRyDeee12 hours ago
This will be inherently inaccurate because data was based on public AIS signal, but ships are turning off their AIS to avoid detection.
> In an attempt to evade detection, many ships appear to be deliberately switching off their tracking system - known as AIS (Automatic Identification System). https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4geg0eeyjeo
krisoftan hour ago
Everyone talks about the AIS signal being turned off in the strait as if it is an insurmountable problem.
Ships had their AIS on before the war, and will turn it on again once they left the area. So we can just filter for ships which previously reported a location in the Persian Gulf, and now are reporting outside of it. Similarly we can count ships which were outside of the Gulf and now are inside. We don’t need the AIS to be on while they are transiting.
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
Great point and something I didn't consider, I should make a big disclaimer it's not meant to be fully accurate or live data. Thanks for the comment!
MiSeRyDeee10 hours ago
not to discredit what you've built though, good work!
spaghetdefects11 hours ago
It was mentioned in this thread and quickly flagged, but Israel broke the ceasefire today by attacking civilians in Lebanon so Iran closed the straight. It was open prior to the ceasefire violation.
France's Macron actually just commented on this: https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/2041990505760772551
globalnode10 hours ago
israels only option is to get america involved since they cant achieve their goals by themselves. trump unwittingly got a punch in the face last time he let himself get dragged in so doubt hell go 100% in again, maybe just lip service attacks to try and appease israel while backchannel appologising profusely to iran as he does it lol
edit: actually im likely completely wrong, what i wrote above is what i hope would be the case but sadly in reality the violence will never end and oil prices will go up and up and up. this is just a temporary blip. the fighting will continue until something more substantial happens to sort it out in favour of one side or the other.
xdennis10 hours ago
> Israel broke the ceasefire
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Israel didn't sign any ceasefire. The ceasefire was between Iran and US. Israel separately announced (not part of any deal) that it would stop attacking Iran. It honored that self-imposed limit. Israel attacked Lebanon (Iran's proxy).
YZF10 hours ago
[flagged]
spaghetdefects9 hours ago
Israel murdered almost 200 innocent people today. They are bombing civilians.
dr_robert12 hours ago
What did you use for the map ? Mapbox ??
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
CartoDB and Leaflet. Source is available here btw: https://github.com/montanaflynn/ishormuzopenyet
pietervdvn11 hours ago
As an OpenStreetMap-contributor: you have to add attribution as per our license agreement: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
CartoDB packages this data into tiles you can use, but that doesn't lift this requirement.
anonfunctionop9 hours ago
Thank you for this comment, I just fixed it[1], don't know why claude code decided to hide it, I actually should have known this requirement and checked!
1. https://github.com/montanaflynn/ishormuzopenyet/commit/70a8c...
SparkyMcUnicorn10 hours ago
I was implementing OSM the other day (with attribution of course) and noticed Carto seemed to be one of the only players with good dark tiles.
Seems like we can't use them for free, even with attribution, unless I get a grant?
rc_kas10 hours ago
I shorm uzo pen yet also!
Doohickey-d12 hours ago
Looks like it's using leaflet + map tiles from https://carto.com/
I think Mapbox also provides a similar looking basemap style.
iqbalabd6 hours ago
Is it also possible to show similar movements for ships in the Red Sea, and make the types of ships colour coded?
luxuryballs12 hours ago
So apparently the reason they don’t just go for it is due to insurance. Because Iran technically isn’t suppose to just sink a civilian vessel, but the risk is there so the ships are ordered by the owner/stakeholder not to go due to the insurance coverage. Kind of interesting, they could technically call Iran’s bluff but it would mean, they violate the insurance contract and lose coverage? I’m just reading about this so probably not the full picture.
roncesvalles12 hours ago
The capability is very real. And they don't have to sink the ship, just one Shahed drone exploding on the deck and injuring/killing a sailor is deterrence enough.
HiroProtagonist9 hours ago
The Shahed drone is a 'set it and forget it' device where you program a stationary target and launch it. It would not work well for moving targets, like ships.
FpUser8 hours ago
Russia has been modifying Shahed drones for quite a while. May be they've shared back or Iran got creative on their own
worik9 hours ago
> The Shahed drone is a 'set it and forget it' device where you program a stationary target and launch it. It would not work well for moving targets, like ships.
The Iranians are quite handy at modifying their drones....
tokai12 hours ago
No insurance has been fixed for a while now. Its as simple as shipowners not wanting to lose their boats and their future earnings potential.
cwillu12 hours ago
And their crews not wanting to lose their lives.
amusingimpala759 hours ago
Missed opportunity for “arewehormuzyet.com”
[deleted]9 hours agocollapsed
anonfunctionop12 hours ago
Another funny thing about this was this morning I checked if the domain isthestraitofhormuzopenyet.com was available and it was, and by the time I made the site locally, put it on vercel I went to buy the domain to point DNS to it someone had bought it! I renamed it to the current site url / repo which i think might be a little nicer to type, but crazy that we had same idea on apparently the same day. I was also just telling a friend about simultaneous invention aka multiple discover[1] a few days ago, so another case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[2]!
soco12 hours ago
I was also surprised to see that arewegreatyet.com is in use already...
insane_dreamer9 hours ago
Very cool. I agree with some others that the YES/NO is confusing since we actually don't know due to the lag.
And wtf is a _fishing_ ship from Panama doing in the middle of the straight?
seattle_spring10 hours ago
Cool! Heads up, you're probably running afoul of some TOS by hiding the map data attributions.
anonfunctionop9 hours ago
Ahh, thanks I'll remedy that now, wasn't intentional I'll blame Claude.
goodluckchuck11 hours ago
I think there’s difference between A) whether ships are traversing the straight, and B) whether the straight is open / closed / could be traversed.
It’s very well possible that the straight is safe, but the vessels are unnecessarily cautious.
anonfunctionop11 hours ago
Totally, and I've heard a lot of it comes down to insurance!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/shippers-...
stavros12 hours ago
I'm not really very up to speed on this, can someone explain how the strait is actually closed? Are the Iranians threatening to sink any ships that pass by, or what? How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?
roughly11 hours ago
> How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?
Because the cost of failure is death and the crew aren’t going to risk it, and the other cost of failure is a couple hundred million dollars in ship and cargo and the insurance companies aren’t going to risk it either. This is like asking why your DoorDash driver wouldn’t just try to run the police blockade to get you your burrito.
Quothling10 hours ago
Kattegat where I live is probably double the width of Hormuz and if you're in a small ship you can probably sail most of those 140 km. Not without risk, but you'd be relatively safe for the most part. Big ships can't though, so even though there might be 50km on each side of them they could potentially have a shipping lane which is only a few hundred meters wide.
I can't say that I know anything about Iran, but if we were to close our straits off so you couldn't enter the north sea from the baltic sea then our navy would rapidly deploy various different mines that lay on the bottom on the shallower parts and control the shipping lanes with things like suicide drones. I imagine Iran would do something similar, only they've probably been preparing for it a lot more than we have.
MattDamonSpace12 hours ago
They’ll sink ships or cause damage with low cost drones or missles
The strait isn’t wide enough, Iran can see any ships attempting
stavros12 hours ago
I see, thanks. Looks like the strait is 77 km wide, which isn't one ship's width but probably not wide enough that binoculars wouldn't see everything.
cwillu12 hours ago
The navigable width where it is deep enough is significantly narrower.
stavros12 hours ago
Good point, thanks.
luxuryballs12 hours ago
From what I was reading Iran likely wouldn’t sink a civilian vessel but because the risk is there due to the threat they don’t do it because it would violate the contact for their maritime insurance, meaning even if you had a brave crew and orders to go, you lose all your insurance coverage against the loss if something goes wrong.
megous11 hours ago
I'm sure tankers are huge and show up easily on naval radars.
croisillon12 hours ago
[flagged]
blobbers11 hours ago
IRGC targeting systems have entered the chat.
einpoklum12 hours ago
Iran (and various news sources) have claimed that the straights are not now, and in fact never have been, closed - provided the relevant ship was not involved/linked to the attacks on Iran, and that it coordinated with Iranian authorities.
So, it could be that:
* Iran is lying and that has not actually been an option.
* A lot of the ships which would otherwise have transitioned are involved with the war somehow.
* The relevant parties have decided not to coordinate transitions with Iran, for various reasons
* The data displayed at the link is partial for some reason.
sethops111 hours ago
No need for baseless speculation, it's well known that no insurance company is willing to insure transit through the straight while it's an active war zone.
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sidraarifali2 hours ago
[dead]
cramsession12 hours ago
[flagged]
ktallett12 hours ago
Not the first time they couldn't keep to a ceasefire for even a day, let alone 24 hours. Exactly the same as what happened with Palestine last year as well.
mandeepj12 hours ago
> Not the first time they couldn't keep to a ceasefire for even a day,
They are obsessed with wars, murders, and chaos
cramsession11 hours ago
Yes, and they're actively monitoring this site to flag and bulk downvote anything that sheds light on their crimes (like this whole thread).
megous11 hours ago
Last year (March 18) Israel killed 174 children and 412 people in total in a day when violating a Jan 19 ceasefire to restart the genocide. Then proceeded to starve hundreds to death and severely compromise health of tens of thousands during the following months, while killing 1000s of aid seekers, that they forced into killing fields under starvation, like this:
https://t.me/hamza20300/375017
After this, they'll certainly not stop at bombing a few cities, or leveling villages today, that they can get away with because of western support.
xdennis10 hours ago
Please tell me what ceasefire Israel signed? Is it in the room with us?
LAC-Tech12 hours ago
It doesn't matter - Israel was able to ethnically cleanse and occupy large parts of Southern Lebanon, without undue Iranian interference. Mission accomplished for MIGA.
The "Israel First" administration of the US will happily trade Iran's permanent control of an international waterway for the expansion of Israel.