After the cease-fire of 14 days accepted by the United States and Iran, there was talk of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, even if Tehran decided to close the passage to ships following the Israeli raids on Lebanon. The situation in shock point maritime therefore remains critical and the attention on traffic in the Strait is higher than ever. The main tool for monitoring the passage of ships is the naval geolocation portal Marine Trafficwhich offers the most comprehensive maritime database in the world and provides almost daily updates on crossings of the Strait of Hormuz.
The passage of ships at the moment can still only take place with the prior authorization of the Iranian navy, therefore – as Marine Traffic itself reports – there are still hundreds of boats stopped near the Strait waiting to cross it. At the time of writing, according to maritime data, only four ships used for the transport of dry cargo would have been able to cross the Straitof which the last at 10:45 on Wednesday 8 April (local time, le 09:15 in Italy).
Meanwhile, Iranian official media stated that due to the presence of minesboats must coordinate with the Iranian navy and use of designated routes to cross the Strait of Hormuz.
What the tracker is and how it works
By accessing the marinetraffic.com website you have, in almost real time, an overview of maritime traffic all over the world: the company actually has a database of hundreds of millions of boatscomplete with static data (name and characteristics of the vessel) e dynamic (position, route, destination). Marine Traffic, like other similar services (for example Vessel Finder), collects this enormous amount of data in a single database and offers a useful interface for monitoring global maritime traffic.
But where does all this data come from, in particular the dynamic data relating to the location of boats? They are supplied directly by individual boats via the tracking system AIS (Automatic Identification System), whose main objective is to avoid collisions between vessels present in the same area. Each ship is equipped with an AIS device that it sends at regular intervals radio signals at high frequency which reach other nearby ships but also ground stations. The same device also receives radio signals from other boats, with an average signal range of approx 40 nautical miles (74km). In particular, the position of the vessel is identified via GPS or from a similar sensor internal to the AIS device.
Data on passages in the Strait of Hormuz in the last month
Before the start of the conflict and the closure of Hormuz, the Strait was crossed by approx 130 ships per day. In the last month, however, the average has been well below 10, as reported by this histogram published by Marine Traffic:
There has been a certain recovery starting from the first days of Aprileven if we are well below the value of March 1st, which was already very low compared to the average pre-conflict crossings. The direction of crossings over the last month is mainly in exit from the Straitbut since the end of March there has also been a slight increase in incoming passages, as shown by this graph from Marine Traffic:
