Friday 28 March 2025 · below the Index · spike
Container ship North Sea collision; cargo ship grounding
Multiple maritime incidents detected across the window: a container ship collided with another vessel in the North Sea and was towed to Aberdeen; a Chinese cargo ship grounded near Sakhalin Island with Russian assistance; and a fire-damaged cargo ship arrived in Aberdeen. Headlines also reference an LPG carrier stranding and a collision between a Chinese bulker and tug with two seafarers killed. The spike reflects coverage of these overlapping incidents rather than a single event.
Peak 62.0 on Friday 28 March 2025. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Media-led, both over the window and on the peak day.
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 59% of all days since 2020, and the highest since Friday 21 March 2025.
How far it spread
No vessel type moved — 0 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
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 0% 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 64% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor; 1% of it was strongly negative in tone.
What the coverage said
- North Sea collision: Damaged cargo ship towed to Scotland – DW – 03/28/2025dw.com · 2025-03-28
- Container ship damaged in North Sea collision arrives in Port of Aberdeenstandard.co.uk · 2025-03-28
- Container ship involved in North Sea collision being towed to Aberdeenhulldailymail.co.uk · 2025-03-26
- Container ship that collided with North Sea tanker arrives in Aberdeendailyrecord.co.uk · 2025-03-28
- Container ship damaged in crash with North Sea oil tanker arrives in Scotlandsky.com · 2025-03-28
- Container ship damaged in North Sea crash arrives in Port of Aberdeenheraldscotland.com · 2025-03-28
Gold rule = a national or international outlet, not a trade title.
- tier C: only a Wikipedia article, GDELT sub-vocabulary term, or social per-term query fired — not yet confirmed as a real maritime incident (Phase C naming/is_maritime_incident does that).
- naming step found more than one plausible cause in the headlines (alternatives: ['North Sea container ship collision', 'Chinese cargo ship grounding near Sakhalin', 'Fire-damaged cargo ship arrival', 'LPG carrier stranding', 'Chinese bulker-tug collision']) — attribution.confidence is low; label may be an honest compound
- coverage scored on title only (no excerpt) — measured ~8pp frame precision cost vs title+excerpt (docs/HANDOVER-incidents.md §2.3)
- coverage filtered to articles matching this incident specifically (159/282 kept) — see coverage.filter.terms
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Container ship North Sea collision; cargo ship grounding, peak 62.0 on 28 March 2025. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2025-container-ship-north-sea-collision-cargo-ship-grounding/