Seaspeak: the special jargon that helps sailors communicate

On ships worldwide, where mariners hail from many different countries, there is a standard “language” of shortcuts that are universally used to help sailors understand radio communications between people who may not share a common language. It’s called Seaspeak, and it’s based on English, the international language of aviation. Using these agreed-upon terms can avoid daingerous misunderstandings.

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Japan to release more radioactive water into the sea

Today we note the 10 year anniversary this week of the earthquake in Japan in 2011 that caused a devastating tsunami there and sent small tsunami waves across the ocean as far as the Pacific Northwest. A decade later, Japan still struggles with a damaged nuclear reactor and plans to discharge still more radioactive water itno the sea.

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Reducing Ship Pollution

Today we talk about international efforts to reduce ship pollution. If the world’s shipping fleet were a country, they would be the 6th largest polluting nation in the world. We’ll talk about efforts to get that under control.

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A local look at container shipping in the pandemic

Today we take a look at how the world imbalance in container shipping is affecting Pacific Northwest ports. Some ports have lots of empty containers while others don’t have enough to hold the cargo they need to ship.

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Shipping chaos

The pandemic has thrown international container shipping into a dilemma.

Changing consumer needs during the past year have thrown traditional product supply and demand patterns out the window. The result is that some ports have scads of empty containers sitting around, while other ports have cargo waiting to be shipped and no containers at hand.

Such a seeminly simple problem is turning out to have global consequences. The result has been shipping chaos.

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Miraculous rescue as overboard seaman clings to sea trash

An amazing rescue after 16 hours lost at sea: a ship’s engineer fell overboard in the middle of the night. He survived until his shipmates retraced their path and found him – by clinging to a piece of ocean trash floating in the sea.

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Distant earthquakes and tsunamis

What should we be considering, as coastal dwellers, when we hear about a distant earthquake across the Pacific somewhere? Today we talk about the dread we all feel when he hear about an earthquake, and what you need to consider (and don’t need to worry about) with a distant quake many miles away.

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What’s next for the cruise ship industry?

As we come around to what would normally be cruise ship season, what’s next for cruise ships in the pandemic?

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Iceberg ho! A really big iceberg breaks away from Antarctica

Last week a gigantic iceberg broke off an ice shelf in Antarctica. Really big, like 20 times the size of Manhattan Island, or about half the size of Clatsop County. It’s now floating in the Southern Ocean.

[Photo credit: Brunt Ice Shelf, Antarctica, photo courtesy Pierre Markuse from Hamm, Germany via Wikimedia Commons]

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