Sunday 5 March 2023 · below the Index · spike
Container ship runs aground in Suez Canal
A container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal on March 5, 2023. Egyptian tugboats worked to refloat the vessel. Canal authorities reported that traffic was not impacted and the ship was subsequently refloated after a breakdown.
Peak 59.0 on Monday 6 March 2023. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Media-led, both over the window and on the peak day. 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
This was above 52% of all days since 2020, and the highest since Monday 20 February 2023.
How far it spread
Stayed in one vessel type — 1 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
Car carriers (ro-ro) 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.
Car carriers (ro-ro) is a small readership base — normally about 478 readers a day, so a few hundred extra makes a large multiple.
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 2% 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 91% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor.
How the coverage sounded
Coverage ran 13% negative overall.
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.
Sample of the headlines
- Container Ship Refloated In Suez Canal After Breakdowngcaptain.com · 2023-03-05
- Cargo ship runs aground in Suez Canal, traffic not impactedyahoo.com · 2023-03-05
- Cargo vessel runs aground in Suez Canal, traffic not impacted: Authoritiesbusiness-standard.com · 2023-03-05
- Cargo ship refloated after running aground in Egypt's Suez Canal-Xinhuaenglish.news.cn · 2023-03-05
- Egypt refloats cargo vessel that ran aground in Suez Canalbignewsnetwork.com · 2023-03-05
- Suez Canal traffic not impacted after cargo ship runs agroundfox6now.com · 2023-03-06
Gold rule = a national or international outlet, not a trade title.
- social = X only before Bluesky (2024-07-01); not comparable with today's series
- Registered in a single underlying series only — one vessel-type article, news term or social query — and never moved the Index itself.
- The coverage panels count only articles matched to this incident specifically.
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Container ship runs aground in Suez Canal, peak 59.0 on 6 March 2023. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2023-container-ship-runs-aground-in-suez-canal/