Maritime corpus
Chokepoints and waterways
The 13 maritime chokepoints World Monitor tracks — narrow straits and canals where a disruption removes optionality from global trade, energy and food flows.
Red Sea ↔ Gulf of Aden Bosporus Strait
Black Sea ↔ Sea of Marmara Cape of Good Hope
Atlantic ↔ Indian Ocean Dover Strait
English Channel ↔ North Sea Kerch Strait
Black Sea ↔ Sea of Azov Korea Strait
East China Sea ↔ Sea of Japan Lombok Strait
Indian Ocean ↔ Java Sea Panama Canal
Atlantic ↔ Pacific Strait of Gibraltar
Atlantic ↔ Mediterranean Strait of Hormuz
Persian Gulf ↔ Gulf of Oman Strait of Malacca
Indian Ocean ↔ South China Sea Suez Canal
Mediterranean ↔ Red Sea Taiwan Strait
East China Sea ↔ South China Sea
Why chokepoints matter
A maritime chokepoint is a narrow passage with no cheap alternative: when one closes or degrades, ships reroute onto longer, costlier paths and freight, insurance, and energy prices move within days. A small number of straits and canals carry a disproportionate share of the world's seaborne oil, LNG, grain, and container traffic, which is why traders, supply-chain teams, and analysts watch them continuously.
How the status badge works
Each chokepoint page combines a static reference — what the waterway connects, which modelled trade routes depend on it — with a live disruption score computed from active warnings, AIS signal disruptions, congestion, and transit counts. The score is a monitoring signal, not an operational closure declaration; the chokepoint methodology documents the inputs and bands. Daily transit counts and baselines come from IMF PortWatch data.
Source: src/config/chokepoint-registry.ts. Methodology: chokepoint disruption scoring.