Andyana

This is now an ocean page

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since late February, after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran prompted the IRGC to declare the waterway shut.

Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd all suspended transits and over 150 tankers anchored outside rather than risk attack.

For the first time in modern history, both of the Middle East's major maritime corridors are simultaneously blocked- the Strait of Hormuz, carrying 20% of the world's daily oil supply, and the Red Sea route, already operating at roughly half its pre-crisis capacity.

The IEA has called it the largest oil supply disruption in market history, larger than the 1970s shocks.

The geography of this was always the vulnerability. The strait is 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, a chokepoint that the entire modern energy system was quietly built around.

The UAE's state-owned oil company estimates full flows through Hormuz won't resume until 2027.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 is the clearest admission yet that the U.S. government has no coherent framework for protecting the cables carrying nearly all of its transoceanic communications.

The bill mandates an interagency review of existing operational authorities — essentially an audit of who is actually responsible for subsea cable security — and calls for streamlining the licensing and permitting processes that currently make it slow and expensive to build redundant routes.

The Congressional Budget Office scored the whole thing at roughly $5 million over five years, which is a notable number given that a single cable repair vessel costs more than that to operate for a year.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Undersea cables carry roughly 99% of all transoceanic data. The U.S. introduced the Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 in February as a bipartisan bill explicitly framing subsea cable security as a national security issue, citing the threat of sabotage from Russia and China.

The vulnerability is structural and largely unsolvable at scale. Over 70% of cable faults aren't intentional — fishing nets, anchors, and sinking ships cause most of the damage — which makes it nearly impossible to distinguish accident from attack, a fact that anyone interested in deniable sabotage can exploit freely.

China revealed a deep-sea cable-cutting device in March 2025 capable of severing the most fortified underwater lines at depth, which clarified the threat in terms no one could misread. The ocean floor is the most critical and least defensible infrastructure on earth, and the answer so far has mostly been to ask fishing boats to be more careful.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Map of undersea cables

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The more interesting question is whether 37 million tons of freely delivered biomass is a liability or a supply chain. Researchers and startups are pursuing sargassum as feedstock for biofuels and sustainable aviation fuel, and a recent study published in Nature Communications demonstrated that bloom timing and location are now predictable enough to support offshore harvesting operations at scale.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Sargassum is a free-floating brown seaweed that has always existed in the Atlantic - the Sargasso Sea is named after it. What didn't exist until 2011 was the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, a transoceanic bloom now stretching over 8,000 kilometers from West Africa to the Caribbean, with biomass exceeding 37 million tons by 2025.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The environmental damage compounds quietly. Dense sargassum deposits smother coral reefs and seagrass beds, deplete oxygen levels, and leach arsenic into coastal waters. The bloom feeds on itself: the organisms living within aging sargassum mats recycle nutrients back into the water column, making the system increasingly self-sustaining rather than dependent on external inputs.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Atlantic Sapphire's facility in Miami is the PoC the industry watches most closely.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Norway is responsible for over half of the world's farmed salmon supply, and the reasons are less romantic than they appear. The fjords provide naturally cold, oxygenated, deep-water conditions that are nearly impossible to replicate artificially — the geography did decades of R&D for free.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The challenge is that the physical constraints keeping competitors out are also keeping Norway in. The introduction of a resource rent tax in 2023 has led to investment hesitations, with farmers delaying critical decisions on expansion and technology upgrades. Meanwhile land-based recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) are slowly eroding the geographic moat by moving production onshore entirely, closer to consumers, without the fjords.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Offshore aquaculture is capital intensive, the grow-out cycles are long, and generalist VCs have historically panicked somewhere between the first mortality event and the second missed harvest.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

China has exceeded 100 offshore aquaculture platforms and ships in operation, a number that barely registered in Western trade press.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The U.S. is actually running research platforms two miles off the coast of Mississippi. The gap between where China is operating and where everyone else is still conducting pilot studies is not a technology gap- it's more of a permitting and political will gap.

[Andyana @_andyana_]

https://t.co/zXggt6qbAJ

[Andyana @_andyana_]

The UN High Seas Treaty entered into force in January 2026 (started being enacted).

[Andyana @_andyana_]

Marine protected areas restrict extraction, but they also create legal clarity. This legal framework is what investors need to commit capital to offshore aquaculture, seabed mining, and deep-water energy projects at scale. The treaty was written by conservationists but may end up being most useful to the industry it was designed to restrain.