Global shipping « World Ocean Review. Growth through globalization Throughout history the oceans have been important to people around the world as a means of transportation. Unlike a few decades ago, however, ships are now carrying goods rather than people. Since the rise of intercontinental air travel, sea travel has become limited to shorter trips (ferry services across the Baltic and North Seas, the Mediterranean, Japan and Southeast Asia) and recreational cruises. The latter have recently experienced a tremendous boom and represent an increasingly lucrative source of tourist income. As markets became increasingly globalized, shipping volumes soared.
From the 1950s to the latest global economic crisis, the growth rate of international trade was almost consistently twice that of economic activity as a whole. World Airports A-Z. Global Map of Accessibility. Data sources As seen in the description of the accessibility model, the cost or friction surface is derived from several spatial datasets that represent roads, terrain, shipping lanes, land cover and any other geographic features that should be considered when estimating the travel time to the target locations.
This webpage lists the data sources that were used in this particular accessibility model, data for the target locations and data for the friction surface. Target locations Populated places with a population of 50,000 people or more in the year 2000 were selected from the human settlements database provided by CIESIN, Columbia University (CIESIN, 2004). The human settlements database is one of many available from the Global Rural and Urban Mapping Project (Balk et al., 2004) and comprises a global dataset of about 55,000 cities and towns with populations of 1,000 or more. Friction surface components Road network data were extracted from the Vector Map Level 0 (VMap0).
Geography of Transport Systems. The mobility of people, freight and information is fundamental to economic and social activities such as commuting, manufacturing, distributing consumption goods, or supplying energy. Each movement has a purpose, an origin, a potential set of intermediate locations, a destination. Transport systems are the support and driver of this mobility and are composed of infrastructures, modes and terminals. This system enables the socio-economic life of individuals, institutions and corporations.
Understanding how mobility is linked with geography is main the purpose of this textbook. The third edition of The Geography of transport systems maintains the overall structure of its predecessors, with chapters dealing with specific conceptual dimensions and methodologies, but the contents have been revised and updated. Like the previous two editions, the third edition is articulated along two core approaches to transport geography, one conceptual and the other methodological. Ship Photos - Container Ships. A Year of Global Shipping Routes Mapped by GPS. Scientists have come up with the first comprehensive map of global shipping routes based on actual itineraries. The team pieced together a year’s worth of travel itineraries from 16,693 cargo ships using data from LLoyd’s Register Fairplay and the Automatic Identification System, which tracks vessels using a VHF receiver and GPS.
A few hot spots logged the majority of journeys. The busiest port was the Panama Canal, followed by the Suez Canal and Shanghai. “There is a strong similarity of statistical properties between shipping and aviation networks,” lead author Bernd Blasius, a mathematical modeler at Carl von Ossietzky University, wrote in an e-mail. “But different ship types (e.g., container ships vs. bulk carriers or oil tankers) are characterized by different movement patterns.” The study will be published in a forthcoming Journal of the Royal Society: Interface. Image: Bernd Blasius See Also: Visualized Flight Paths of the World.