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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could get in touch with GP by googling for his company (see profile), finding his name through the company website (he's the CEO), and then googling for his LinkedIn/X accounts.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
It's impossible to know right now. Some are saying Pakistan messed up by not specifying properly to both sides what would constitute a cease fire. And US (Israel's proxy) is probably a bit unreliable in how their military command and political leadership separately interpreted the agreements as well
/S trying to highlight how stupid it sounds when you try to retrofit sense into this conflict
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!
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.
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.
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 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....
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]!
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
