The Strait of Hormuz: 21 Miles That Broke the World's Oil Supply

Twenty-one miles of water. This year, it caused the biggest disruption to the world's energy supply in history. Here's the Strait of Hormuz, to scale: how narrow it really is, how big the ships are, how much of the world's oil depends on it, and what happened in 2026. 0:00 21 miles of water 0:39 How small is it, really? 1:20 Supertankers, to scale 2:04 A fifth of the world's oil 3:01 Why there's no way around it 3:49 Whose water is it? 4:42 The Tanker War 5:28 2026: 2,000 ships trapped 7:13 What happens next Subscribe for the world, to scale. SOURCES U.S. EIA – Strait of Hormuz oil flows (2024): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.p... U.S. EIA – Brent spot price (daily): https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/RBRTEd.htm IMF PortWatch – daily chokepoint transits: https://portwatch.imf.org IMO via AFP – ~2,000 ships / 20,000 seafarers stranded (April 2026) Al Jazeera – Hormuz traffic and bypass pipelines (May & Oct 2026) Wikipedia – 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis (timeline summary, with primary citations) Reuters / Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore – ships sunk, 14 Oct 2026 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – 12 nm territorial sea, transit passage Naval History and Heritage Command – USS Samuel B. Roberts (14 Apr 1988), Operation Praying Mantis (18 Apr 1988) MAPS & IMAGERY NASA Blue Marble and ASTER GDEM relief via NASA GIBS (public domain) GEBCO Compilation Group (2024) GEBCO Grid Sentinel-2 cloudless – https://s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0 Made with Natural Earth (public domain) MUSIC Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Lightless Dawn", "Floating Cities", "Static Motion", "Unseen Horrors", "Interloper" #StraitOfHormuz #Oil #Geography