A Map Showing Every Cargo Ship

The latitudes between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula are the only latitudes that have no land (barring the area around the North Pole, which are usually locked in sea ice). As a result, there is a very strong current and very strong winds that make shipping dangerous. Note that most ships prefer the Straits of Magellan--a cramped, dangerous corridor, to passing the open water south of Cape Horn, which should tell you just how dangerous the area is.

> Control of the nine-dash-line area would yield huge economic influence to the controller.

The Strait of Malacca is the real chokepoint, not the South China Sea. The concerns about the South China Sea are largely related to natural resources that may lie in the area. It should come as no surprise that Malacca was traditionally the worst area for piracy--before they started cracking down on it in the early 2000's, it was pretty much as bad as the Somali hijackings that gripped press (and those made press largely because the hijackings had spread from the Gulf of Aden, a consistent pirate menace as far back as Roman times, to the Indian Ocean off of Somalia).

Narrator is unnecessarily alarmist here, and sounds like we should be concerned about the contribution of cargo ships to the greenhouse. I would say we should celebrate the shipping industry for being so much more beneficial to humanity per unit of CO2.