Plain-English explainers and data on ship identity, compliance, decarbonisation, safety and the world fleet — each grounded in the 41-article library and the Marifest registry.
The company named on a ship's registry is almost never the whole story. Behind it sits a chain of managers, operators and holding companies — and the only reliable way through that chain is a stable identifier for each entity.
Read →A ship's flag is more than a colour at the stern. It decides which country's law governs the vessel, which rules it must meet — and, through the white, grey and black lists, how much that flag's word can be trusted.
Read →A vessel can be hit by sanctions in two ways: named outright on a list, or reached through the company that owns, operates or manages it. Checking properly means following both routes — and the one fact that ties them together is the IMO number.
Read →When a ship spills oil, loses a cargo or injures a crew member, the bill can run into hundreds of millions. Protection & indemnity clubs are the mutual insurers that carry that risk — and the International Group is how they share the very largest claims between them.
Read →When a flag state's oversight falls short, the port that a ship calls at becomes the backstop. Port State Control is the inspection regime that keeps substandard ships off the sea lanes — and the Paris MoU is the agreement that made it work across Europe.
Read →On 1 January 2020 the world's merchant fleet had to switch to far cleaner fuel almost overnight. The IMO 2020 sulphur cap, set under MARPOL Annex VI, slashed the allowed sulphur in marine fuel sevenfold — and inside Emission Control Areas the limit is tighter still.
Read →A company can be blocked by US sanctions without ever appearing on a list. Under the OFAC 50 Percent Rule, an entity owned half or more by blocked persons is itself blocked — and in shipping, that owner can be hidden several holding companies deep behind a single vessel.
Read →The price cap is not a tariff and not a ban on the oil itself. It is a ban on the services that move oil — insurance, shipping, finance — with a carve-out that only applies below a set price. That single design choice reshaped the tanker trade and conjured a shadow fleet to dodge it.
Read →A parallel fleet of ageing, anonymously owned tankers now moves the oil that mainstream shipping will not touch. It hides in plain sight by switching off its transponders and trading hands at sea — and learning to read the signals is the first line of defence.
Read →The dark tanker fleet that moves sanctioned oil is most often pinned at 400-plus vessels — but the honest answer to "how big is it?" begins with "depends what you count." Here is the flag breakdown, with the source and date attached to every number.
Read →Not every flag is treated equally at the quayside. The Paris MoU ranks flag states into white, grey and black bands by their inspection record — and a ship's band decides how hard it gets checked. Here is where the 2024 lists landed.
Read →MARPOL is the single most important treaty standing between the world fleet and a polluted ocean. It governs what a ship may and may not put into the sea or the air — oil, chemicals, sewage, rubbish and exhaust gases — and it is enforced on every vessel that calls at a port that has ratified it.
Read →Every ship ends the same way — dismantled for its steel. The question is where, and the answer is overwhelmingly a stretch of tidal beach in South Asia, where the great majority of the world's tonnage is broken up by hand.
Read →Tankers used to be scrapped at around twenty. Sanctions changed the maths: a generation of old hulls that should have gone to the breakers is instead carrying barrels the mainstream market won't touch — and the over-21 fleet has more than tripled.
Read →The largest container ship ever built carries enough boxes to stretch from London to Birmingham. This is the record-holder, the unit that measures it, and why the giants have stopped getting bigger.
Read →Greece owns more shipping than any other country on Earth — roughly 398 million tonnes of carrying capacity. But the answer flips depending on one accounting choice, and on a far older distinction: who owns a ship is not the same as whose flag it flies.
Read →A handful of Asian mega-hubs move a staggering share of the world's containers. In 2024 Shanghai became the first port ever to pass 50 million TEU in a single year — and the gap to the rest of the field tells you a great deal about how global trade is wired.
Read →Two ships share the title of largest cruise ship afloat — Icon of the Seas and Star of the Seas, each measuring 248,663 gross tons. The figure is enormous, but it is a measure of volume, not weight, and that distinction explains the whole table.
Read →One ship dwarfs every other tanker that has ever floated. The Seawise Giant was so large that no port on earth could take it fully laden — and nothing built since has come close. Here is how tankers are measured, why the record still stands, and what the largest tankers afloat today actually carry.
Read →The world merchant fleet is bigger than almost anyone outside shipping imagines — about 109,000 ships, carrying enough capacity to move 2.44 billion tonnes of cargo at once. Here is what that fleet is made of, and where the bulk of it sits.
Read →The Carbon Intensity Indicator is the IMO's annual report card for operational efficiency. It puts a single letter — A through E — on how much carbon a ship burns to move its cargo, and that letter is starting to decide which ships get chartered.
Read →EEDI and EEXI judge a ship by how it is built — a single design number per hull. CII judges how the ship is actually run, every year. Mixing the three up is the most common mistake in maritime decarbonisation, so here is the clean version.
Read →For the first time, a ship's carbon has a bill attached. Since 2024 shipping has been inside the EU's carbon market, and operators must buy and surrender an allowance for every covered tonne of CO₂ — a cost that lands directly on the voyage.
Read →FuelEU Maritime does not tax carbon directly. Instead it caps the carbon intensity of the energy a ship burns — and then tightens that cap, step by step, until only near-zero fuels can clear it. It is the rule that decides which fuels still have a future.
Read →In 2023 the world's shipping nations agreed, for the first time, to aim for net-zero. The IMO's revised strategy turned a vague aspiration into a dated trajectory — with checkpoints in 2030 and 2040 and binding measures now being built to enforce it.
Read →Before Europe could put a price on shipping's carbon, it had to measure it. EU MRV is that measuring stick — the rulebook that makes large ships using EEA ports count, report and independently verify their greenhouse-gas emissions, year after year.
Read →Two of the most quoted numbers on any ship's spec sheet look like they measure the same thing — and they do not. Gross tonnage measures the space a ship encloses; deadweight measures the weight it can carry. Treat them as interchangeable and the figures stop making any sense.
Read →They look similar — a string of digits attached to a ship — but they answer different questions. The IMO number names the hull for life; the MMSI names the radio station and changes the moment the ship swaps flags. Knowing which is which is the difference between tracking a vessel and losing it.
Read →Almost every commercial ship is defined by one thing: what it was built to carry. Sort the world fleet by cargo and the bewildering variety resolves into a handful of clear families — and that is exactly how the Marifest registry groups it.
Read →An IMO number is the closest thing a ship has to a passport that can never be reissued. It is the single fact that survives a sale, a rename and a change of flag — and it is the key Marifest uses to keep every vessel on the record.
Read →Every ship is eventually broken up, and for decades most of that work happened on tidal beaches in South Asia with little oversight. The Hong Kong Convention, in force since 26 June 2025, sets the first binding global rules for how a vessel reaches the end of its life.
Read →Two short acronyms decide whether a ship can trade: ISM, the code that makes a company prove it manages safety, and ISPS, the code that makes it prove it manages security. Both live inside SOLAS, and both come down to a plan, a certificate and an accountable person.
Read →More than a million seafarers keep the world's fleet moving, often months from home and under flags far from their own. The MLC 2006 is the treaty that sets the floor beneath their working lives — the fourth pillar of maritime law, completing the framework that SOLAS, MARPOL and STCW began.
Read →Almost every safety feature on a modern merchant ship — its lifeboats, its fire doors, its watertight bulkheads, its distress radio — traces back to one treaty. SOLAS is the most important international agreement on ship safety, and it was born from the loss of the Titanic.
Read →Most ships do not fly the flag of the country that owns them. They fly a flag of convenience — a registry chosen for cost and flexibility rather than nationality. Here is what the label means, who keeps the list, and how to read a flag on a vessel file.
Read →For decades the answer to "which flag flies on the most ships?" was Panama. As of UNCTAD's 2024 data it is wrong. Liberia is now the world's largest register by tonnage — and the gap is real, not a rounding artefact.
Read →41 explainers across 11 topics — free, no account, each grounded in the Marifest registry.