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Tankers and cargo ships are currently jammed in front of the European ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, based on a snapshot from FleetMon, an online tracking portal for ships. Further north off the mouth of the Elbe, a number of cargo ships are also moored and waiting to be allowed to enter the port. This map illustrates how the global economy is once again suffering from delays in container shipping. You will find more infographics at StatistaAccording to the “Kiel Trade Indicator” compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy...

Environmentalists are threatening legal action in an attempt to halt the development of a new gasfield in the North Sea that has been given the green light by the UK government. Climate experts reacted with anger after the government announced it had given the Jackdaw field, to be developed by the oil multinational Shell, “final regulatory approval” on Wednesday. The business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, said: “Jackdaw gasfield – originally licensed in 1970 – has today received final regulatory approval. We’re turbocharging renewables and nuclear but we are also realistic about our energy needs now. Let’s source more of the gas...

The British government will seek to construct eight nuclear power plants and expand domestic oil production in order to ensure energy security amid the global crisis. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s long-awaited energy strategy will include a major shift towards nuclear power and open up oil exploration in the North Sea in a tacit admission that so-called green energy sources will not be enough in order to secure energy security. The government said that it wants to see a “significant acceleration of nuclear” with the aim of producing 24GW of energy from nuclear by the year 2050, or about a...

Norway’s revenues from oil and gas production hit a record high this year and are showing no signs of slowing down Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre believes that a total end to oil exploration and production would harm the transition to renewable alternatives in a world still so reliant on oil and gas. He stated, "If we were to say from one day to the other that we close down production from the Norwegian shelf, I believe that would put a stop to an industrial transition that is needed to succeed in the momentum towards net zero . ....

'Biggest UK space impact found' By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News The impact occurred about 1.2 billion years ago. Evidence of the biggest meteorite ever to hit the British Isles has been found by a team of scientists. Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Aberdeen think a large object hit north-west Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago. The space rock struck the ground near the present-day town of Ullapool, they report in Geology journal. The scientists found what they believe to be debris which was flung out when the impact crater was formed. "If there had been human...

Much of the discussion has seemed like an egg-centered debate: soft or hard, but it won't be over easy. A soft Brexit means staying closely aligned with the EU on trade, and is favored by Britons who oppose leaving. Hard means a clean break, and that could cost an estimated 9% of GDP cumulatively, along with 450,000 jobs. Pro tip: If a Brexit discussion gets too detailed, scare the other party off by insisting that a hard exit would "force the BOE back to the ZLB with more QE." Just in case your bluff is called, that's Bank of England,...

The timing of Norway’s biggest oil project in decades is a bit awkward. Equinor ASA kicked off its massive Johan Sverdrup field, a rare mega-project in the aging North Sea, at a moment where the pressure on the oil industry and governments to act against the climate crisis has never been greater. The field is set to produce crude for 50 years, well beyond the time where the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions should be net zero to avoid warming of more than 1.5 degrees.

Deep beneath the North Sea, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest that could hold traces of prehistoric early humans who lived there around 10,000 years ago, before the land slipped beneath the waves a few thousand years later. The discovery gives the researchers new hope in their search for "lost" Middle Stone Age — or Mesolithic — settlements of hunter-gatherers, because the find shows that they have found a particular type of exposed ancient landscape.

Full title: Britain's Guardian newspaper tells staff to avoid saying 'climate change,' use 'climate emergency, crisis or breakdown' instead Britain's Guardian newspaper is officially changing its language concerning climate change, opting to call it instead “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown.” Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner advised the staff in an email Friday that the phrase “climate change” should be avoided because it “sounds rather passive and gentle’ and doesn’t capture the real threat to humanity. “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise and rooted in facts, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” Viner wrote. The...

China state oil company CNOOC on Tuesday announced a major new oil discovery at the Glengorm prospect in the U.K. sector of the North Sea.

A century ago, the two greatest fleets of the industrial age fought an inconclusive battle in the North Sea. The British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet fielded a total of fifty-eight dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, ships over the twice the size of most modern surface combatants. Including smaller ships, the battle included 250 vessels in total.

Britain announced Thursday a L250 million (325 million euro, $350 million) package of funding to boost the oil industry in northeast Scotland, which has been hit hard by slumping prices. Prime Minister David Cameron visited the oil city of Aberdeen and met industry bosses for talks on the current situation. "Obviously it's a difficult time for the oil industry because of the oil price decline, but what this shows is that the British government is 100% behind this industry, behind Aberdeen, behind Scotland," Cameron said. "We want to see this port expand, we want to see an energy innovation centre,...

Stone Age sites found under North Sea Date released 12 September 2003 Experts have discovered the first ever evidence of Stone Age settlements in the British North Sea, dating back as far as 10,000 years. Subject to further investigation, one of them could be the earliest underwater archaeological site in the UK. The exciting find, discovered by accident by a team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, could lead to a rewriting of the history books and revolutionise our understanding of the way our ancestors lived. The discovery of several stone artefacts, including tools and arrowheads, have pinpointed...

The UK's oil industry is in "crisis" as prices drop, a senior industry leader has told the BBC. Oil companies and service providers are cutting staff and investment to save money. Robin Allan, chairman of the independent explorers' association Brindex, told the BBC that the industry was "close to collapse". Almost no new projects in the North Sea are profitable with oil below $60 a barrel, he claims. "It's almost impossible to make money at these oil prices", Mr Allan, who is a director of Premier Oil in addition to chairing Brindex, told the BBC. "It's a huge crisis." "This...

The Cimbrian flood (or Cymbrian flood) was a large-scale incursion of the North Sea in the region of the Jutland peninsula (Denmark) in the period 120 to 114 BC, resulting in a permanent change of coastline with much land lost. The flood was caused by one or several very strong storm(s). A high number of people living in the affected area of Jutland drowned, and the flooding apparently set off a migration of the Cimbri tribes previously settled there (Lamb 1991)... The Cimbri were a tribe from Northern Europe, who, together with the Proto-Germanic Teutones and the Ambrones threatened the...

The Opec meeting of Nov. 27 brought new strategic thinking to Opec's deliberations and redirected its fixation away from short-term oil pricing toward greater commercial transparency and market-based commodity pricing. This was due in no small measure to Saudi Arabia's determination to eliminate ill-advised oil price manipulations and restore Opec's credibility as the price setting leader of international oil markets. This reality check became inevitable when Opec finally focused on the stark facts of a weak global economy and soft oil demand at a time of abundant oil supplies and inflated prices. The kingdom was forceful in advocating the reality...

Norway's Statoil said it has postponed a decision to invest 40 billion crowns ($5.74 billion) in a mature field, saying that it needed more time to refine the project as its profitability was under threat. Statoil said it would decide in October next year instead of March whether to go ahead with a new platform at the Snorre field in the Norwegian Sea as it hoped to cut costs and get more precise cost estimates. The project, which could squeeze another 240 million barrels of oil out of the field, has been in doubt due to high costs, and uncertainty...

Scotland’s oil and gas sector is facing a bright future as half of oil reserves remain to be exploited, the Scottish Government's Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism Fergus Ewing said Wednesday, commenting on a new study. Earlier, world leading oil expert Professor Alex Kemp, by using detailed financial modelling, predicted significant discoveries in Scottish oil sector made over the next 30 years. “His new predictions – based on that modelling – show a bright future for Scotland’s oil and gas sector for decades to come – with 99 new economic discoveries over the next three decades,” Ewing told RIA...

As a specialist in prehistoric underwater archaeology, Dr Jonathan Benjamin looks at rising sea levels differently from most people and his fascination with this global phenomenon began when as a PhD candidate at Edinburgh University he came across the work of the Danish archaeologists Anders Fischer and Søren H Anderson. In the 1970s and 1980s, Fischer and Anderson recovered some of the most well preserved material ever seen from sites such as the 6,500-year-old settlement at Tybrind Vig. This was the first submerged settlement excavated in Denmark and from 1977 was the scene of intensive archaeological activity. Lying 300m from...