Forget Hormuz. The shadow fleet is the next maritime crisis

The oil tanker "Grinch", suspected of belonging to the Russian's shadow fleet, is seen outside the coast of Martigues near the port of Marseille-Fos on January 25, 2026, as it's surveilled by the French Navy.
France on January 25, 2026 took into custody the Indian captain of an oil tanker suspected of belonging to Russia's sanctions-busting "shadow fleet" for the vessel failing to fly a flag, prosecutors said.

The 58-year-old captain was in charge of the tanker, the Grinch, which was seized by the French navy in the Mediterranean on January 22, 2026 and is now moored, under guard, at a southern French port near Marseille.
(Photo by Thibaud Moritz / AFP via Getty Images) 

From Forbes By Jill Goldenziel,

An illicit "shadow fleet," often linked to Russia and China, is actively sabotaging critical subsea cables and evading sanctions, imperiling global data and commerce.
These vessels exploit outdated international laws and enforcement gaps, employing tactics like AIS blackouts and false flags for plausible deniability.
Recent incidents in the Baltic Sea and near Taiwan highlight the escalating threat.
Law-abiding nations must establish shared legal frameworks, including boarding stateless vessels and implementing domestic safety zones.
A crucial step involves cutting insurance for these vessels, as most reinsurance relies on US and European markets, effectively denying them market access.
Protecting 99% of international data demands urgent, coordinated action and political will.

The Strait of Hormuz reopened for a fleeting moment.
Meanwhile, a longer-term threat to maritime commerce is escalating.
The shadow fleet, aging tankers and cargo ships that break US sanctions and sabotage subsea cables with impunity, are increasingly disrupting global trade and data flows.
Russia and China use these vessels to cut cables with plausible deniability, exploiting gaps in international law that hamstring the US and its allies.
Law-abiding states must agree on legal and technical frameworks to stop the shadow fleet and protect subsea cables and cross-border data flows.

What is the Shadow Fleet?

The shadow fleet comprises old, opaquely owned, often falsely-flagged tankers that evade sanctions and engage in illicit activity.
Their operational hallmarks include automatic identification system blackouts, false position broadcasting, ship-to-ship transfers of goods, flags of convenience, and frequent reflagging and renaming.
China also uses similar tactics with fishing vessels in state-owned fleets.
Shadow fleet vessels have been involved in or suspected of several recent subsea cable-cutting incidents in the Baltic Sea and near Taiwan.
In October 2023, the Newnew Polar Bear a Hong Kong-registered and Chinese-owned ship, dragged its anchor over 100 nautical miles and damaged the Balticconnector pipeline and cables before a port call in Russia; China claimed the incident was due to a storm accident.
In November 2024, the China-flagged bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 dragged its anchor and severed two Baltic Sea cables.
Its Russian captain allegedly acted on Russian intelligence and a Russian corvette ran reconnaissance.
In early 2025, the Belize-flagged, Russian-operated Vasili Shukshinloitered approximately four weeks near Taiwan.
Contemporaneously, the Cameroon-flagged, Chinese-crewed Shunxin-39 severed a cable off Taiwan.
Shunxin-39 had used as many as six AIS identities and two names.
Recently, France has seized at least five Russian shadow fleet vessels, but efforts to prosecute have been hindered by legal gaps.

How Russia and China Are Exploiting Gaps In International Law Using the Shadow Fleet

The case of the Eagle S illustrates how gaps in international law are stopping NATO allies from countering the shadow fleet.
On Christmas Day 2024, this Cook Island-flagged ship linked to Russia’s shadow fleet cut an electricity cable connecting Finland and Estonia and damaged four data cables in Finland’s EEZ.
Estonia did not investigate or board, interpreting the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to mean that a ship in international waters is excluded from investigation.
Finland invited the vessel into its territorial sea and boarded it.
A Finnish court later held that the boarding was improper because the cable cutting occurred outside Finland’s territorial waters.

The case is on appeal.

Russia and China are using lawfare—strategically and intentionally exploiting gaps in international law—to thwart law-abiding states’ attempts to stop the shadow fleet.
The core problem is a gap between where violations occur and where enforcement authority sits, which leaves victim states and cable owners with few tools to investigate or prosecute.
The international convention dealing with protection of submarine cables dates to 1884—well before the dawn of the Internet.
UNCLOS grants law enforcement jurisdiction to states to protect submarine cables only within their territorial waters.
Otherwise, authority to prosecute cutting of subsea cables lies with the vessel’s flag state.
Many states sell “flags of convenience” for ships to fly but lack the intention or capacity to prosecute crimes upon them.
To evade arrest, shadow fleet vessels use tactics like disabling their AIS after crossing cable sites and anchoring in international waters to prevent boarding.
Some use warship escorts.
UN mechanisms are structurally incapable of addressing the cable cutting threat because of Russia and China’s roles on the Security Council.
The legal framework surrounding subsea cables is also complicated by the private sector’s role.
Content providers and hyperscalers like Google and Meta own approximately 60 of the world’s major subsea cables, and the law is murky on their liability for damage and their state’s responsibilities to protect them from damage by adversary actors.

How Law-Abiding States Can Counter the Shadow Fleet

Law-abiding states should build shared legal frameworks to respond faster to shadow fleet provocations.
A first step would be to come to a shared understanding of international law involving boarding regimes.
If a state is manipulating its AIS or switching names or flags, that provides reasonable grounds to suspect the vessel is without nationality.
Under Article 110 of UNCLOS, stateless vessels belong to no nation, so any state’s warship may exercise the right of visit and board the vessel to check its papers.
The warship’s state must then make a final determination that the boarded vessel is stateless by verifying its flag with its claimed flag state.
If the vessel is found to be stateless, it may be subject to seizure, enabling lawful disposition of cargo to legitimate buyers.

To grant coast guards immediate law enforcement authority within exclusive economic zones, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand have adopted cable safety zone legislation.
UNCLOS articles 56 and 60 permits such legislation only if it is narrowly tailored to protect a state’s sovereign rights in its EEZ and does not restrict freedom of navigation.
While safety-zone laws must be passed domestically by individual states, law-abiding nations should coordinate to avoid fragmentation of legal regimes and gaps in authority.
Some analysts fear that cable safety zone legislation would create risk that China could launch reciprocal measures against European-flagged ships in the South China Sea.
However, China already claims law enforcement jurisdiction over almost the entirety of the sea, so additional risk is unlikely. 

Practically, states can adopt cooperation measures to curb the shadow fleet.
US Treasury Department’s January 2025 sanctions designation of 183 oil tankers, combined with UK and EU actions, reduced Baltic-terminal shadow fleet loadings drastically by March 2025, although Russia subsequently adapted.
States can also counter flag-of-convenience laundering by using financial intelligence to trace flag payments, reveal risks to insurers and financiers, and push rapid-deflagging for AIS-manipulating ships.
Diplomatically, states can push flag states to create online, verifiable flag registries.
The Guiding Principles for Underwater Infrastructure Defence Exchanges, a 17-nation initiative announced on the sidelines of the recent Shangri-La Dialogue, provides a framework to collaborate and secure cables.

How States Can Work With the Private Sector to Counter the Shadow Fleet

States can work more closely with the private sector to track and counter the shadow fleet.
Cable operators and cloud giants already detect anomalies in their infrastructure.
Together, the public and private sectors can build the architecture to move that intelligence to those with the authority to act.
States and the private sector could pool satellite imagery and maritime domain awareness data that tracks shadow fleet behavior.
They could quantify violations and losses and create a public vessel database to empower the private sector and even individuals to name and shame shadow fleet vessels and the states behind them.
A mechanism can be created to place cleared security officers at every major cable consortium, a common suspicious-activity threshold, and a direct real-time feed into NATO’s operations Baltic Sentry and Nordic Warden which are designed to protect subsea cables.

Perhaps the strongest lawfare move for the US and its allies is to cut insurance to the shadow fleet.
Most Russian shadow fleet insurance runs through European markets.
Most of the world’s reinsurance touches either the US or Europe.
States can press the international group of P&I clubs for a unified, real-time blacklist of vessels with AIS-manipulation history or other legal violations, fed by NATO’s operations Baltic Sentry and Nordic Warden.
Cutting insurance coverage would sever market access for the shadow fleet.
The market will enforce what the law cannot.

Subsea cables carry 99% of international data, including Internet, financial transactions, and military communications.
China and Russia have been using the shadow fleet to exploit gaps in international law and sabotage that infrastructure.
Closing those gaps requires a shared understanding of what international law permits and the institutional courage to build accountability mechanisms that work.
Nothing less than the safety of global commerce is at stake.

The Pacific Ocean is running a fever. Why that’s an ominous sign.

 

A massive marine heat wave covers the Pacific Ocean.
It could contribute to severe storms and extreme heat across the United States this year.
(Ben Noll/The Washington Post; NOAA/Coral Reef Watch)-

 

From WashingtonPost by Ben Noll

A marine heat wave covering an area eight times the size of the United States could soon fuel serious storms and extreme heat.

 

Across the Pacific Ocean, there’s a massive marine heat wave covering an area more than eight times the size of the contiguous United States — and it could have profound ripple effects for weather events around the globe in the coming weeks and months.

This area makes up about 13.5 percent of Earth’s total surface, stretching from the Philippines to Peru — where people are flocking to the beach during the Southern Hemisphere winter — and northward to the coasts of Hawaii and California.

Marine heat waves are a strong, sprawling and sustained warming in the ocean, sometimes near the surface and other times extending deep.
They are ranked on a scale from 1 (moderate) to 5 (beyond extreme), reflecting both their intensity and duration.

The enormous Pacific marine heat wave formed as two separate marine heat waves combined: one in the North Pacific and another associated with a developing super El Niño along the equator.
While warmer seas might sound nice to some beachgoers, what happens in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean — and this marine heat wave is an ominous sign for weather patterns to come.
“Months and months of warmth could mean stark impacts this winter and next spring,” said climate scientist Dillon Amaya, who has been closely monitoring the warmth near California.

How this ocean fever could affect the weather

 
Two significant weather events in the next two weeks are connected to this marine heat wave: a super typhoon in the western Pacific Ocean and the potential for a profound heat dome in the western United States during mid-July.

The typhoon, named Bavi, will be powered by the bathtub-like warmth of the western Pacific.
This dangerous storm will pass near the Northern Mariana Islands, north of Guam, on Monday local time and could also bring destructive impacts to Taiwan and China late in the week.
Meanwhile, thunderstorms bubbling over the marine heat wave could promote the formation of a powerful heat dome thousands of miles away in the western U.S.
during mid-July, sending temperatures soaring there.

Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb said in an X post that this pattern could “greatly increase heat/wildfire risks north of New Mexico and Arizona.” That’s an area where wildfires have recently been raging.
But there may be much more extreme weather after that.
In a recent live stream, climate scientist Daniel Swain said the very warm Pacific seas are expected to drive sea levels 6 inches to 2 feet higher near California.

Winds from storms this fall and winter will elevate the sea even more, potentially resulting in dangerous rises of 2 to 3 feet or more near the California coast.
“This is the time for local governments, for county governments and for the state government to start to prepare for a significant likelihood of much higher than average sea levels, more disruptive coastal flooding and potentially record-breaking coastal water levels during winter storm events and king tide events,” Swain said.
“This coming winter, right now, does look like one where there’s an increased likelihood of historically unusual to unprecedented rain and storm events,” Swain said.

But he stressed that while the odds for such scenarios are higher, they are not guaranteed.

 

An intensifying El Niño and marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean could fuel serious storm events in the United States this year.
(Video: Ben Noll; ECMWF)

 

California isn’t the only place that could experience such profound effects.
The vast amount of heat stretching across the Pacific will be released into the atmosphere above, turbocharging the subtropical jet stream from fall into winter.
That may form a storm highway across the southern and eastern United States, elevating the potential for flooding rainfall and severe thunderstorms.

This ocean fever will have global consequences, too.
As sea temperatures rise, evaporation increases, adding more water vapor to the atmosphere — which is fuel for extreme rain events.
“Water vapor amounts go hand in hand with sea surface temperatures, mostly,” said climate scientist Kevin Trenberth.

That extra moisture is carried by winds that circulate around high- and low-pressure cells and can be carried thousands of miles from where it originated.
Following a deadly June heat dome, a marine heat wave also recently formed near Europe, including across the Mediterranean Sea.
More extreme heat will affect that region into mid-July, with the unusually warm waters helping to reinforce the heat.

The area covered by marine heat waves is surging

Marine heat waves form in different ways.
Sometimes, winds weaken and the sea turns calmer, preventing colder water from being churned up to the surface from below.
Other times, changes in atmospheric circulation patterns cause more sunshine and fewer clouds, heating up the sea.
Changing ocean currents can play a role, too.

The one currently in the Pacific is linked to a natural climate variation called the Pacific Meridional Mode, or PMM, that formed because of weaker winds and less evaporation.

Amaya said that as El Niño continues to grow, it can combine with the PMM to generate massive swaths of heat.
These warm ocean blobs are growing in both coverage and intensity as the climate changes.
“The heat capacity and mobility of water makes the ocean the main sink of excess heat from human-induced heating of the planet, mainly from increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Trenberth said.

How the coverage and intensity of marine heat waves have changed

The portion of the global ocean experiencing marine heat waves has more than tripled since the late 1980s, increasing from about 9 percent to more than 30 percent.
Over that same period, the global coverage of strong to beyond extreme (Category 2 to Category 5) marine heat waves has increased nearly sixfold.


Marine heat waves also spike during El Niño events.
In January 2024, during an El Niño event that contributed to the planet’s warmest year on record, more than 46 percent of the global oceans simultaneously experienced a marine heat wave — the highest amount on record.
Currently, more than 37 percent of the global ocean is covered by a marine heat wave, but a record may be set this year or next as this ocean fever — and its potential impact — intensifies.

Goblin shark caught on camera for the first time ever

Scientists have captured the first-ever footage of a goblin shark swimming deep beneath the ocean's surface, providing an unprecedented look at one of Earth's most mysterious predators.

Goblin sharks are rarely seen alive, making this discovery a major breakthrough for marine researchers.

Their unusual appearance and extendable jaws have fascinated scientists for decades, and this footage reveals how these ancient sharks move through the darkness of the deep sea.

One of the ocean's most mysterious sharks caught on camera in world-first: 

One of the ocean's most elusive creatures, described by scientists as "the ugliest shark on the planet", has been filmed alive in its deep-sea habitat for the first time.
The footage captures goblin sharks swimming at depths previously unknown for the species, extending the species’ known range into the Central Pacific, and revealing just how little scientists still know about the deep sea.

The first underwater jet pack designed for hands-free propulsion

With Kikfin, you steer by tilting your head and control speed with a wireless glove remote.

The new geography of subsea cables

photograph: reuters

From The Economist

The AI boom and geopolitics are rewiring Asia’s oceans
New cables between data centres are avoiding China and chokepoints

“The seabed is a battlefield,” Australia’s defence minister told a room full of admirals and generals in Singapore at the end of May.
Richard Marles, citing several subsea cables that have been cut in the Baltic Sea and around Taiwan in recent years, joined 16 of his counterparts in announcing plans to protect the submarine tendrils of the digital world: the nearly 700 communications cables which mostly lie exposed on the floor of the world’s oceans.

Governments and armed forces in Asia have only recently awoken to the importance of subsea cables.
Some of their fears of subterfuge may be overblown; to date, no conclusive evidence has been shared to suggest that the cuts highlighted by Mr Marles are sabotage.
But they are right about the vulnerability of these arteries of commerce.
And the private firms which build and operate almost all of the world’s subsea cables are not waiting for governments to better secure them.
They are increasingly taking steps on their own to avoid Asia’s most contested waters.

Asia and Australia are now connected to Europe by fibre-optic cables which tend to hug the coastlines of the Asian continent before heading up the Red Sea.
But a combination of the ai boom and geopolitics is rerouting cable traffic across the Indian and Pacific oceans.
This new geography avoids chokepoints like the Strait of Malacca and contested waters like the South China Sea.
Much of it avoids South-East Asia entirely, running from the Middle East and India to Australia and then onward through the Pacific Islands to America.

 

The first cable to run the new route was laid in 2022 between Oman and Australia, with spurs to the Anglo-American military base at Diego Garcia and the Cocos Islands, a tiny Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.
Then, last year, Google announced that Christmas Island, another Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, would become a hub for a new cable network between Australia and the Middle East.
Fibre will run from Oman via the Maldives to Christmas Island, and then onward to Australia.
Meta’s $10bn Project Waterworth, a global cable network still in development, looks set to follow a similar course in the Indian Ocean.

The first shift remapping cable routes is a change in who pays for them.
Subsea cables are expensive.
To defray the cost, for most of the last few decades big national telecoms firms would form consortia to build them.
Back in 1999, one of the first big fibre-optic cables between Europe and Asia to come online, known as sea-me-we 3, cost $1.3bn and had 92 consortium partners.
Financing and planning a cable among so many firms tended to increase costs and delay laying it.
Once it was funded, the number of partners involved pulled the route close to the Asian continent where the bulk of the customers were located.

But the ai boom is scrambling the economics of the subsea cable business and changing its geography.
Over the past ten years, internet giants have begun to finance and build cables single-handedly.
That has simplified the fundraising and planning process, and cut the lead-time for new cable projects.
Google invested in its first cable in 2008.
It has since funded at least 34 more, 18 of which it owns without partners.
Increasingly, firms like Meta, Google and Microsoft are building cables not to connect population centres but to connect their data centres.

And build them they are.
By one estimate, the next four years will see an average of $4bn a year in new cable investment, the bulk of it by so-called hyperscalers seeking to win the ai race.
While satellite internet service from firms such as Starlink is getting cheaper, it is still orders of magnitude more expensive to beam each gigabyte of data into space than it is to push light down a cable, and is likely to be so for many years yet.
As a result, subsea cables still carry 99% of the world’s intercontinental internet traffic.

As the subsea cable market consolidates vertically, it is expanding geographically.
Unshackled from the need to remain close to population centres, ships are laying subsea cables across the open ocean more than ever before.
The new routes have been drawn up to avoid seabed governed either by China or by governments that might seek to extract payment for laying or repairing a cable across a chokepoint, such as the Indonesian straits.

Geopolitical risk has become particularly acute in the South China Sea, where China has yet to effect full control on the surface but exercises de facto sovereignty over the seabed.
Under international law, states are not supposed to interfere with repairs to cables outside their territorial sea.
But repairs to any cables within China’s “nine-dash” line, which stretches over a thousand kilometres from China’s coasts (and which it claims as the extent of its waters) require approval from officials in Beijing.

Cables transiting through chokepoints like the Strait of Malacca run similar risks, says Samuel Bashfield, who studies subsea cables at La Trobe University in Australia.
Constantly shifting rules set by littoral countries like Malaysia and Indonesia are designed to extract value from cable operations through measures like requiring the use of local ships.
These can be expensive annoyances.
But recent musings by Indonesia’s cash-strapped president and finance minister about how the country could make money from its position astride some of the world’s great sea-lanes suggest that more aggressive measures could be coming.

To avoid these risky shoals, more and more internet traffic is simply going around them.
Google and Meta’s new networks run instead from the Middle East through Australia and onwards to Japan and South Korea or America.
In the Pacific, cables increasingly use Guam as a hub to connect American allies in Asia.
These new routes are part of an increasingly bifurcated internet infrastructure beneath the waves: no new cables between America and China have been approved since Barack Obama was in office.