From a beach, the sea horizon often looks like a clean line drawn across the world. Its distance is much shorter than the view suggests. For an adult whose eyes are about 1.5 meters above calm water, the geometric horizon is roughly 4.4 kilometers away. A higher deck, cliff, or mast extends that line of…
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Twenty-three merchant sailors were at work aboard the Stena Impero on July 19, 2019, when the British-flagged tanker was intercepted in the Strait of Hormuz and taken toward Iran. The event became a sharp, human-scale episode in a regional crisis: a crew from India, the Philippines, Russia and Latvia suddenly found their voyage to Saudi…
The explosion began beneath the hull of a U.S. frigate in the central Arabian Gulf on April 14, 1988. USS Samuel B. Roberts had entered a recently laid minefield while returning from an escort mission. A moored contact mine detonated, punching a vast hole into the ship and turning an ordinary patrol into a fight…
Wind, heat and the shape of the Atlantic basin squeeze seawater into a swift ribbon called the Gulf Stream. For the everyday question of which ocean current has the greatest measured flow speed, that ribbon is the usual answer. Its fastest water runs near the surface and can reach about 9 kilometers per hour, or…
