Why a Fifth of the World's Oil Squeezes Through a 21-Mile Gap

Why Does a Fifth of the World's Oil Squeeze Through One 21-Mile Gap? In 2026 a strait just 21 miles wide nearly stopped a fifth of the world's oil, and four centuries earlier empires fought over the same water. Subscribe to Globanomics Animated for the trade routes and chokepoints that run the world. 0:00 The Day the Strait Went Silent 0:47 A Sea With One Door 1:49 Hormuz, the Jewel in the Ring 2:59 Portugal Seizes the Doors, 1507 to 1515 4:30 Shah Abbas and the English Take Hormuz, 1622 5:19 Britain Guards the Door, Then Oil 6:16 The Tanker War of the 1980s 7:09 Pipelines: Building a Second Door 8:00 2026: The Door Nearly Closes 8:51 Who Really Holds the Door 9:46 The Scorecard and the Answer Why does so much of the world's oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a gap 21 miles wide between Iran and Oman? This animated map history follows the strait from the medieval port of Hormuz, which Marco Polo visited in the 1200s, to the 2026 closure that sent oil above 100 dollars a barrel. On 3D maps of the Persian Gulf, we trace how geography built a sea with a single exit: the Musandam peninsula, the islands of Qeshm, Hormuz and Larak, and two shipping lanes about two miles wide. Then come the powers that fought over that door: Afonso de Albuquerque and the Portuguese in 1507 and 1515, Shah Abbas and the English East India Company in 1622, the British after 1820, and the oil strikes at Masjed Soleyman in 1908 and in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1938. We look at why eight years of the Iran and Iraq war never closed the strait, why the pipelines built to bypass it can carry only about one barrel in eight, and how Saudi Arabia and Kuwait fared when the door nearly shut in 2026. It ends with a scorecard of geography, resources, history and decisions. Sources U.S. EIA, The Strait of Hormuz remains a critical oil chokepoint (2025) U.S. EIA, Oil prices in the first quarter of 2026 (2026) Encyclopaedia Iranica, Hormuz in the Islamic period (2004) Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hormuz AramcoWorld, Marco Polo's Description of the World (1982) Wikipedia, Portuguese conquest of Hormuz Wikipedia, Kingdom of Hormuz Strauss Center, Oil in the Persian Gulf (2006 figures) USIP Iran Primer, U.S. and Iran showdown in the Gulf, on the Tanker War (2019) Middle East Economic Survey, Lloyd's List tally of Gulf war shipping losses (1988) NAVSEA, USS Samuel B. Roberts ship history (2015) World Oil, Iran opens oil pipeline bypassing Hormuz (2021) Al Jazeera, Iran shuts the Hormuz strait (2026) Al Jazeera, How a 95 percent drop in Hormuz traffic changed shipping (2026) Al Jazeera, Hormuz attacks soar and oil flows crash again (2026)