Yo dawg...

Close to ready for the ultimate game of Jenga

That's some Iain M. Banks 'Culture' shit right there.

I just read a fascinating book about shipping called "Ninety Percent of Everything" by Rose George. She rode the Maersk Kendal from Felixstowe to Singapore, through the Suez Canal and the Somali pirate zone. It's a pretty interesting world that gets no attention but delivers everything you eat, wear, and use.

Far from robots, there are something like a million seamen at sea (a third of them Philipino), on a hundred thousand ships (6,000 of them container ships like these).

A dinky little port like Seattle gives no clue as to the scale of shipping. Go to the live view at www.marinetraffic.com and scroll the map over to Xiaoyushan Harbor outside Shanghai, or Hong Kong, or the Singapore Strait, or Rotterdam, if you want to see what the world afloat really looks like. Keep zooming in.

Also, that photo is somewhat misleading; those are not jumbo container ships stacked on MV Blue Marlin, but some kind of ferries or something. The Blue Marlin is a big ship, with an unusually broad beam, designed for carrying ships, but it's not really that big compared to the largest class of container ships, which are close to 400 meters long (twice as long as this ship), close to 200,000 gross tonnes (four times as big), and can carry more than 18,000 containers. You'll never see any of those in Seattle; they're too big for our cranes (or those in any American port). The ships we get here are typically in the 200-300 meter range, occasionally larger.

Fnark, that site is a-m-a-z-I-n-g. Thanks

Fnarf, that site is a-m-a-z-I-n-g. Thanks

How many ships can a ship-shipping ship ship?

The beginning "this is" is sorta redundant and it would be more emphatic without these two words.... just a thought..;-D GBSEGWW

Just Ship It!

Very interesting all around. Thanks!

I thought this looked familiar: http://vimeo.com/45812623

Better views of the Blue Marlin, plus timelapse of loading/unloading for this voyage.

Most of the hulls seen are river barges.

@ 6, I wonder what fnark dot com would be like.

Re: 12—

Sorry, offloading in Rotterdam is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVqji1vIF…

@7, I know. I can't stop looking at it. I'm even looking ahead -- the 350-meter Hanjin Spain, carrying possibly as many as 9,900 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalents) is due in Seattle tomorrow very early AM (it's approaching the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca now). That's about as big a ship as has ever been in port here, maybe the biggest, I dunno.

Anthropocene today:

"California’s gold rush ended more than a century ago, but the contamination it caused will last thousands of years, a new analysis shows.

Some hydraulic gold mining processes use the toxic metal mercury to separate gold from gravel. In the mid-1800s, gold mining released more than a cubic kilometer of mercury-laden sediments into Northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills. The sediments fanned out and inundated rivers that flow into the San Francisco Bay. Researchers estimate that 90 percent of the mercury is still trapped within the sediments.

To understand how flooding and erosion may trigger future releases of the poison, researchers led by Michael Bliss Singer of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland measured mercury levels in sediments at 105 locations upstream of the bay.

Drawing on historical flood data to predict sediment flow, the team reports October 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the mining sediments will continue to release mercury into waterways over at least the next 10,000 years. As climate change intensifies the area’s rainstorms, the researchers predict, the flood-driven discharges should become more frequent. "
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/merc…

@16: the S.S. Kauai will be coming in sometime Friday night or Saturday morning, 2300-0400 ish, worth noting both because its U.S. Flag and steam instead of motor

@18, steam, really? STEAM? That's cool. What kind of boiler? Diesel? Surely not still coal.

But don't you mean her sister ship the SS Maui? The Matson vessel tracker is kind of primitive, and it's too far out still to be picked up on AIS.

She's also carrying a bellyful of Hawaiian molasses -- unfortunately too extracted and bitter to use for rum; it goes for animal feed.

My bad it IS the Maui, I laid the Kauai up in Sacto a month ago, but then today was the King County Labor Council lunch at the the Catholic Seaman's center, with free wine.

The fuel for the two boilers is bunker oil, same as a motor ship burns, bunker oil is one grade up from asphalt, but in a boiler you can get your stack as clean as about three cars (true fact)

And yeas She will have a two tanks full of molasses, Matson is the last company to carry molasses.

Someday clean a molasses strainer.