MSC Monterey, a 4,892 TEU container ship, was bound from the Belgium port of Antwerp to Newark, NJ, but diverted to Newfoundland after cracks in her hull were discovered. The ship is now at anchor south of Newfoundland, near Trepassey Harbour. Four passengers were airlifted off the ship. The crew of 20 remains aboard. MSC Monterey was built in 2007 in Daewoo Mangalia Heavy Industries in Mangalia, Romania.
In June, the 2008 built, 8,110 TEU container ship, MOL Comfort, broke in two about 200 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen. The aft section sank of the ship on June 27th while the bow section stayed afloat until July 11th. The MOL Comfort’s five sister ships were also found to have bottom plate buckling deformation, suggesting that they were experiencing excessive hull loading. A few weeks ago the Committee on Large Container Ship Safety of the Maritime Bureau of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism issued an interim report on the casualty. Interestingly, in the structural modeling of the hulls the ships, the engineers were not able to replicate the conditions that would have caused the MOL Comfort to break in half. The report found that the calculated loading was only 67% of the allowable design stress of the ship.
Two recent items on sharks in the news — a photobombing shark off the coast of California and Australian sharks posting warnings on Twitter.
By definition, shipping is the ultimate offshore industry. For most, the business of shipping is largely invisible, literally beyond the horizon. I recently came across two representations of global shipping – a plot developed from ship’s logs from the 18th and 19th centuries and an animation of a week’s shipping traffic using AIS and satellite technology from 
The Chinese icebreaker 
On July 9, 1866, Captains Hudson and Fitch with their dog, Fanny, sailed from New York in a three masted full-rigged 26 foot long boat named “Red, White, and Blue.” They arrived in Margate in in East Kent, UK on August 16th. While the rigging was conventional, if diminutive, “Red, White, and Blue’s” hull was a galvanized metal lifeboat. The trip was intended to publicize a new metal lifeboat design by New York boat builder, O.K. Ingersoll. The words “Ingersoll’s Improved Metallic Life Boat” were written on both sides of the hull.
The brochure for for the cruise liner 
There was a 
President Obama recently nominated 
A recent article in 
Got a minute? Here is an animation of the world’s weather across the globe, showing the winds blowing across our ocean planet, as forecast by supercomputers and updated every three hours. You can also rotate the globe in any direction or zoom in and out by clicking and dragging with your mouse, so if you want to look specifically at the North Atlantic or the Southern Ocean, you can do do so. Be careful, however. The display can be mesmerizing.