So the Houthis have been firing missiles and drones at cargo ships for a few months now. But cargo ships are big, and the Houthis are a bare-bones outfit with limited weapons.
But, they did repeatedly hit, and sink a British owned freighter (under a flag from Belize, with a mostly Asian crew) last week. This is the first cargo ship sunk as an act of war since the 1980s.
Allegedly traffic through the strait was down before this, but I haven't seen a measure of this. No doubt it will decline further.
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No sinking is a good thing for the ocean. But this one may be particularly nasty.
First off, the Red Sea is not a particularly healthy body of water to begin with: long, narrow, closed at one end, with limited circulation through the other end ... and, at least historically, lots of traffic.
Secondly, the ship that sank was carrying fertilizer. Twenty-one thousand tons of it. Yeah, work out the math ... about a million of those bags they sell at stores.
Third, in the U.S. we have a problem with waterways with agricultural runoff. Basically, fertilizer washes off the ground into waterways ... and causes excessive plant growth in the waterways rather than in the fields. If you've seen a lake filled with algae, you know what I mean. Keep in mind that this problem is just from runoff. What's going to happen to the Red Sea when a million bags of fertilizer are dumped into it?
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