Live AIS positions for merchant ships around the world. The map opens on the Red Sea, between Suez and Bab el-Mandeb. Drag and zoom to anywhere else, and click a ship for its name, type, speed and destination.
Positions come from land-based AIS receivers. Ships far offshore can drop off the map, and some ships switch their transponders off. In the Gulf most of them have, and GPS jamming there scrambles what's left.
Where to point the map
Most of the world's seaborne trade squeezes through a handful of narrow passages. Close one and ships go the long way round, freight rates jump, and the bill turns up months later in fuel, food and consumer prices. In 2026 more of these passages are under strain at the same time than at any point in decades.
| Chokepoint | Links | Narrowest point | Oil flow, 1H 2025 (m b/d) | Status, September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strait of Hormuz | Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea | ~39 km | 20.9 | Closed to normal traffic since Feb 28 |
| Strait of Malacca | Indian Ocean and South China Sea | ~2.8 km (Phillips Channel) | 23.2 | Open, record traffic |
| Bab el-Mandeb | Red Sea and Gulf of Aden | ~29 km | 4.2 | Houthis hold the Yemeni shore |
| Suez Canal and SUMED | Red Sea and Mediterranean | Canal, 193 km long | 4.9 | Recovering, still below 2023 |
| Cape of Good Hope | Atlantic and Indian Oceans | Open ocean | 9.1 | Busier as the main detour |
| Danish Straits | Baltic and North Sea | ~4 km (Øresund) | 4.9 | Open, shadow fleet flashpoint |
| Turkish Straits | Black Sea and Mediterranean | ~0.7 km (Bosphorus) | 3.7 | Open, Black Sea war risk |
| Panama Canal | Atlantic and Pacific | Lock-limited | 2.3 | Slots and draft cut for El Niño |
| Taiwan Strait | East and South China Seas | ~130 km | n/a | Open, under heavy coast guard pressure |
Oil flows are pre-war figures for the first half of 2025. Panama's number is for its 2025 fiscal year.
Strait of Hormuz
This is the one that broke. Before February 28, about a fifth of the world's oil and a fifth of its LNG went through here, on somewhere between 85 and 140 ships a day. Now some days see a single transit. War-risk cover runs at about 40 times pre-war rates, Iran wants permits and tolls, and the US says paying them breaks sanctions.
Watch the transit count and the insurance market. Ships come back when underwriters do. A political announcement on its own won't move them.
Bab el-Mandeb and Suez
These two work as one route. Every ship using Suez to or from Asia also passes Bab el-Mandeb. On September 10 and 11 the Houthis took Mocha, Dhubab and Perim Island, so they now hold the Yemeni side of the strait itself.
The container lines are going back to Suez anyway. Fuel is too expensive to keep sailing around Africa. The canal handled 1,358 ships in August, up 27 percent on a year earlier, and earned $567 million. That's still about a third below August 2023, before the Red Sea attacks began.
Watch the Houthi target list. For now they say Western ships are safe and point their threats at Saudi shipping, including crude loaded at Yanbu, the Saudi bypass for Hormuz. If that changes, the Suez recovery reverses in a week.
Strait of Malacca
The biggest oil chokepoint in the world, and one of the busiest straits by ship count. Traffic hit a record 102,525 transits in 2025, about 281 ships a day, and a quarter of them were container ships. With Gulf crude replaced by cargoes from the US, Brazil and West Africa, even more Asia-bound oil comes through here now, on longer voyages.
Malacca is open and calm. The risk is crowding. About 28 deeply laden giants pass each day, twice as many as ten years ago, through a channel under 3 km wide at its tightest. A single grounding or collision would jam one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth.
Cape of Good Hope
Technically not a chokepoint, it's where ships go when the chokepoints close. Oil moving around the Cape rose by 3 million barrels a day between 2022 and 2025, and that was before Hormuz. The detour adds 10 to 15 days to Asia-Europe voyages and burns a lot of expensive fuel. South African ports and bunkering hubs have gained from it, although weather off the Cape in the southern winter makes it a hard route.
Danish Straits
The Baltic's only way out. Around 70,000 ships pass each year, and roughly 40 percent of Russia's seaborne crude, about 1.6 million barrels a day, goes this way, much of it on ageing shadow fleet tankers. Europe has seized nine suspected shadow fleet ships so far, and Russia has started arming some of its own.
Watch for boardings in the Øresund and the Great Belt. A confrontation between a boarding party and an armed Russian ship would happen in some of Europe's busiest water.
Turkish Straits
The Bosphorus is under a kilometer wide at its narrowest, and it runs straight through Istanbul. More than 45,000 ships a year go through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, carrying Black Sea grain and Russian and Kazakh oil. Turkey bars LNG carriers from the Bosphorus on safety grounds and controls traffic under the 1936 Montreux Convention. The strait is open. The risk sits north of it, in the Black Sea war.
Panama Canal
Panama doesn't have a security problem. It has a water problem. The locks run on rainfall stored in Gatun Lake, and El Niño is back. Since September 3 the Neopanamax locks take nine bookings a day, and maximum draft drops to 47.5 feet on October 1. An LPG carrier paid a record $5.3 million toll on September 1 to jump the queue.
Watch the lake level and the auction prices. They tell you before anyone else when shippers start giving up on the canal.
Taiwan Strait
No oil figure here because the strait isn't an oil route. It's a container and electronics route. In some years nearly half the world's container fleet has passed through it, and most of the world's advanced chips are made on the island next to it. There's no easy way around it for ships serving northern China, Korea and Japan.
It's open, but the pressure is steady. Taiwan counted 244 Chinese government ships in its waters in July, against 58 a year earlier. Since May, China has kept permanent patrols east of the island, and its coast guard has pushed into restricted waters around Kinmen and Pratas several times in August. Nobody's stopping merchant ships yet. A coast guard "inspection" regime would be the first sign that's changing.
What ties them together
Each of these passages used to be a local risk. This year they've linked up. Hormuz pushed Gulf crude into longer routes through Malacca and around the Cape. The Cape detour made fuel more expensive, and that pushed container lines back toward Suez and the Houthis. Panama's drought made US exports to Asia slower just as Asia needed them most.
The map above shows the result in real time. Look at where ships are bunched up, and where they aren't.