Worldwide Ship Traffic Up 300 Percent over Past 20 Years

Maritime traffic on the world’s oceans has increased four-fold over the past 20 years, likely causing more water, air and noise pollution on the open seas, according to a new study quantifying global ship traffic.  The research used satellite altimeter data to estimate the number of vessels on the ocean every year between 1992 and 2012.  The number of ships traversing the oceans grew by 60% between 1992 and 2002.  Shipping traffic grew even faster during the second decade of the study, peaking at rate of increase of 10% per year in 2011.

Traffic went up in every ocean during the 20 years of the study, except off the coast of Somalia, where increasing piracy has almost completely halted commercial shipping since 2006.  In the Indian Ocean, where the world’s busiest shipping lanes are located, ship traffic grew by more than 300% over the 20-year period, according to the research.

Ships powered by fossil fuels dump oil, fuel and waste into the water and pump exhaust into the air.  Shipping is also a major source of noise pollution, which is increasingly considered potentially harmful to marine mammals, said Jean Tournadre, a geophysicist at Ifremer, the French Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea in Plouzane, and the study author.

International trade and the sizes of merchant fleets have both enlarged rapidly over the past two decades, explaining the steep rise in ship traffic, the study reports.  The new analysis has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Burgeoning ship traffic has increased the amount of pollution in the atmosphere, particularly above the Sri Lanka-Sumatra-China shipping lane, where the study notes a 50% increase in nitrogen dioxide, a common air pollutant, over the 20-year period.

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