Sunday 26 November 2023 · moved the Index · spike
Cargo ship sinks off Greece
A cargo ship sank off a Greek island on November 26, 2023, in stormy seas with 13 crew members missing. The incident was a weather-related maritime casualty unrelated to geopolitical tensions.
Peak 117.9 on Sunday 26 November 2023. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Mixed, both over the window and on the peak day. Mixed means no single signal dominated — the attention was spread across search, research, news and social. Social here is X alone — Bluesky only joins the series from July 2024 — so its level isn't directly comparable with today's series, though its share of this incident is real.
Bar = share of the extra attention over the whole window; the tick marks the share on the peak day alone, where the two differ.
How unusual it was
The #12 incident since 2020 by peak. Its peak day ranks #224 among all days — the higher days all belong to 12 bigger incidents.
How far it spread
Stayed in one vessel type — 1 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
Tankers rose on just one day of the window, staying flat either side — readership of a vessel-type article can jump for a day on one popular link or an unrelated story about the same vessel type.
Readers here means readers of the Wikipedia article on each vessel type — the same source as the Research signal, not news coverage — so an incident can dominate the news without moving this panel. Bars start at 1× — normal readership for that vessel type, the weeks before the incident. Grey = no clear lift. "Over time" shows each group's daily readers through the window; "All 12 articles" breaks the six groups back into their members.
How it was framed the frame glossary →
Lead frame: human drama. Trade press was 4% of in-scope coverage — the story had left the trade press and gone mainstream. (Historical coverage is scored on headlines only.)
Acting, or acted upon
In 72% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor.
How the coverage sounded
Coverage ran 78% negative overall; 66% strongly so.
Each article is scored on a five-step scale from strongly negative to strongly positive; the bar is the share of coverage at each step.
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Cargo ship sinks off Greece, peak 117.9 on 26 November 2023. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2023-cargo-ship-sinks-off-greece/