Bering Strait
The only route here that closes and reopens every year.
Far above normal +473% against its 2019–2023 baseline
This route carries too few vessels for a percentage to mean much; the counts below are the honest figure.
Reading for — 6 days ago. Figures are a 30-day mean, so one quiet day does not move them.
Two years of daily transits
Month by month
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | 7 | +633% |
| September 2026 | 4 | +356% |
| August 2026 | 4 | +289% |
| July 2026 | 2 | +67% |
| June 2026 | 0 | −89% |
| May 2026 | 0 | −89% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 0 | −89% |
| March 2026 | 0 | −78% |
| February 2026 | 0 | −89% |
| January 2026 | 0 | −89% |
| December 2025 | 0 | −67% |
| November 2025 | 1 | +11% |
| October 2025 | 3 | +211% |
| September 2025 | 4 | +289% |
| August 2025 | 3 | +200% |
| July 2025 | 1 | +44% |
| June 2025 | 0 | −89% |
| May 2025 | 0 | −89% |
| April 2025 | 0 | −89% |
| March 2025 | 0 | −100% |
| February 2025 | 0 | −89% |
| January 2025 | 0 | −89% |
| December 2024 | 0 | −78% |
| November 2024 | 1 | +0% |
Record high 5/day (October 2026), record low 0/day (April 2019), on the 30-day mean since January 2019.
Source
Daily transit counts derived from satellite AIS positions by IMF PortWatch, covering 2841 days from 1 January 2019.
Source: IMF PortWatch, https://portwatch.imf.org. PortWatch is published under IMF terms rather than CC BY 4.0, unlike the rest of the data on this site: the figures here are derived and transformed, and the underlying series is not republished.
A season, not a disruption
Every other route on this board is read against the question “is something wrong”. The Bering Strait has to be read differently, because it empties and refills on an annual cycle and always has.
Averaged across the record, April, May and June run at roughly 0.07 transits a day — effectively nothing. August, September and October average around 2.2. September is the busiest month in every year of the series. Twenty-five of the 91 months on record average exactly zero.
Why the board’s percentages mislead here
The route is flagged low-traffic, and the flag matters more here than anywhere else. A comparison against a baseline of about one vessel a day produces large percentages from changes of one or two ships, and — worse — the figure depends almost entirely on which month you happen to be reading.
A reading taken in May and a reading taken in September describe the same functioning route and would differ by a factor of thirty. Neither is a disruption. The board makes no seasonal adjustment, so this page states the seasonality rather than letting the percentage imply something it does not mean.
What it is for
The Bering Strait is the Pacific entrance to the Arctic. It carries very little traffic today, and the reason to keep a baseline for it is that the interesting question about this route is a future one: whether the season lengthens.
Seven years is not enough record to answer that, and this page does not attempt to. It establishes what the season currently looks like, which is the necessary first half of the answer.