Largest Ships On Earth

All around the world, ships in all sectors are seriously sizing up. With competing companies racing to build bigger, better, and bulkier vessels, these mega machines have become modern marvels of engineering. Some ships are almost 20 times taller than a truck, and some are so huge that they can carry an entire fleet of other ships!

HMM Algeciras

To start off our search, let’s head over to South Korea, where the record-breaking HMM Algeciras was launched back in 2020.

HMM - Maiden voyage of HMM Algeciras #0-Test Drive by HMM.official

This incredible container ship can carry almost 24,000 containers on its huge deck, which measures in 1,312 ft long and over 200 ft wide. That’s almost the same size as 4 football fields laid end to end! Although, you won’t be able to throw a pigskin around on this deck, because it’s usually loaded with standard 8 ft containers arranged in rows of 24 across. And when these are all fully stacked up, they can reach a staggering 109 ft high!

So, with space for all those containers, what can the HMM Algeciras lug over the lofty seas? Well, in a single voyage, it can transport more than 8.35 million microwave ovens, 223 million bananas, or, if you prefer your comparisons with a little more sole, 386 million pairs of shoes!

While all these impressive numbers make it the largest ship of its kind right now, it won’t be for long. Two brand new container ships, each able to carry an immense 24,232 containers, are being constructed in China’s shipyards!

Pioneering Spirit

Often decked out in cranes, oil pipelines, and even oil rig topsides, the iconic twin-hulls of the Pioneering Spirit make transporting these massive loads look like easy work! At 1,253 ft long and 407 ft wide, this supersized ship is considered to be the largest construction vessel in the world. It’s so huge that, if it were tipped on its side, it would be both taller and wider than the Eiffel Tower!

And like that wasn’t amazing enough, the Pioneering Spirit would have no problem hoisting up the 10,100-tonne tower, because its lift capacity reaches a phenomenal 48,000 tons! In fact, it’s so powerful that in 2017 it broke the record for the largest single-lift at sea by removing the 24,000 ton Brent Delta platform topsides. That’s more than 6 and a half times what that fancy French tower weighs!

Lifting things on land is a pretty simple process, as many machines can be grounded and counterweighted with ease. But marine lifting vessels require complex engineering to ensure the vessel, and its cargo, don’t suddenly capsize! And that’s where the semi-submersible secret of the Pioneering Spirit comes into play! By partially submerging itself up to 88 ft below the waterline, it can slip its hulls underneath both sides of an oil rig topside.

Centralizing the topside like this before cutting and lifting the entire installation reduces the chance of the ship capsizing from the swinging motion of top-heavy cranes. And by spreading the weight over those two hulking hulls, the ship can install or remove topsides even when faced with waves over 11 ft tall. The Pioneering Spirit makes astoundingly light work of these massive removals, before sailing away with its huge hauls safely, and ingeniously, secured on board!

Ramform Titan

At first glance, anyone looking at this next ship might be mistaken for thinking it had been sliced in half! But don’t let it fool you, because this is the full size of the Ramform Titan.

Though what it lacks in length, it makes up for in width. At 229 ft wide, this triangle-shaped-ship has a back end – or stern to use its nautical name, wider than any other single-hulled ship in the world. Unfortunately, its odd proportions have also earned it the title of ‘ugliest ship in the world’. Although people wouldn’t call it that if they knew what all that junk in its trunk was for!

The Ramform Titan is a seismic vessel used to detect and measure geological formations on the seabed. It manages this incredible feat by dragging 24 separate streamer cables lined with complex sensors over the tops of the waves. These are stored on a series of gigantic winches at the ship’s stern, but when they’re fully unraveled, each one is longer than 39,000 ft!

So, when they’re spread over the water, they can cover an area that’s over 4 ½ square miles in size! This data then builds a comprehensive 3D survey of the seabed below, the formations of which can indicate if gas or oil fields lay hidden in the deep dark depths!

But why does the Ramform Titan need to be so wide? Well, like the Pioneering Spirit, its extra width helps the ship stay stable in adverse weather, so it can gather clearer data from all those thousands of sensors. Its big behind also allows it to tow all 24 of those giant streamers without the risk of getting them tangled!

Seawise Giant, The World’s Longest Ship

If someone were to make a big-budget movie about the adventures of the aptly named Seawise Giant, no-one would believe it to be true. It would be a sensational story of the largest ship ever built being bombed, sunk, and then rescued from the bottom of the ocean to serve on the seas once again! Doesn’t sound real, right?

Originally built back in 1979, this crude oil tanker underwent an extensive 2 year refitting to become the largest ship in the world. Just how big did this make it? Well, its rudder weighed a colossal 208 tons, it could carry almost 565,000 tons of cargo, and it reached a staggering 1,503 ft long. If it had been propped up on one end, it would have been taller than the Empire State Building!

With all that size on its side, The Seawise Giant could transport approximately 4.2 million barrels of crude oil at a time. For perspective, the same amount of water takes about 4 minutes to plunge over Niagara Falls! Or, for a deeper comparison, that’s about 270 Olympic swimming pools filled to the brim with oil.

But when it was fully laden with all that oil, it sat more than 80 ft below the waterline. This meant it was so heavy it couldn’t pass through the English Channel or Panama Canal, because its lack of maneuverability threatened to beach the ship on the shallow seabed! But it wasn’t this that ended up sinking it.

Back in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, the tanker was callously bombed and sank into the shallow waves of the Iranian coast. But it was just too precious to leave rotting on the ocean floor, so it was miraculously salvaged, repaired, and renamed the Happy Giant.

Once the 2 extensive years of repairs were complete, it was sold and renamed as the Jahre Viking. Then, in 2004, it was sold yet again to First Olsen, who renamed it, one final time, as The Knock Nevis. The tremendous tale finally came to close in 2009, more than 40 years after it was first built, when the tanker was eventually decommissioned and scrapped. After all that drama, the Seawise Giant makes the Titanic look like a drop in the ocean!

MS Ore Brasil

When it comes to vessels that carry non-liquid cargos, like heavy iron ore, there’s only one class of ship that really puts the “ore” in “more”! The Valemax fleet are a class of very large ore carriers owned by the Brazilian mining company Vale S.A. The largest ship in the fleet, known as the MS Ore Brasil, measures in at almost 1,200 ft in length and more than 213 ft wide.

This colossal steel ship has 7 separate holds which are each the size of an entire tennis court. In one voyage, it can transport 11,150 trucks worth of iron ore from Brazil all the way to China! But with all that ore on board, it can’t get there all that quickly. With a top speed of just 15.4 knots, or nearly 18 mph for those of you who prefer roads to oceans, it takes around 45 days to reach its Asian destination.

But just because ships of this size don’t go super-fast doesn’t mean they can’t crash. Unfortunately, one such ship, called the Shinyo Sawako, tragically proved this back in 2008. At nearly 1,070 ft long and 185 ft wide, it was only a little smaller than the MS Ore Brasil.

The bulk carrier was travelling across the high seas off southern Japan when it suddenly collided with the Lurong Yu 2177. Even though neither vessel was traveling at a breakneck speed, the little vessel didn’t stand a chance against the mighty hull of the Sawako and it was all but destroyed!

After the tanker was rescued by a salvage team, it was revealed that 16 crew members from the Lurong Yu had tragically been sent to sleep with the fishes. It just goes to show that out in the ocean, size really does matter.

Freeport Chief

Some super-sized ships start out with a bright and promising future ahead of them, but it can all take an ugly turn depending on what they’re used for. And no ship knows that better than the 45,000-tonne oil tanker once named the Freeport Chief.

Built in Russia back in 1980, this 750 ft long, 105 ft wide vessel was a moderately sized tanker with a decent service history. But, in 2008, the vessel was hauled into a Chinese shipyard where $100 million was spent converting it into a huge, floating fish factory. It was renamed as the Lafayette.

The old tanker had been completely redesigned to suck up fish from attendant trawlers with a massive hose before freezing them into huge blocks. They were held in the ship’s 232 massive vertical freezers, which could freeze a whopping 1,500 tons of fish in just 24 hours! If it worked every day, it had the capacity to process 547,000 tons of fish, making it the largest floating fish factory in the world!

It seemed like an ingenious way to repurpose the old tanker, but there was a huge catch; The Lafayette was operating illegally! Its army of trawlers were plundering the South American seas and overfishing Pacific mackerel, but their suspicious movements put them in the cross hairs of the Peruvian Government.

In a stunning blow, the Lafayette was declared an “illegal unreported unregulated” ship, which is government talk for ‘pirate ship,’ and were slapped with a huge $800,000 fine. Though instead of paying up, the ship’s name sneakily changed to the Damanzaihao, and it continued its illicit operations.

But this exceedingly dumb plan wasn’t enough to hide it from the authorities! In 2018, the giant ship made waves in the media after federal agents boarded the Damanzaihao while it was in a Peruvian port and detained the vessel! It cost the ship a further $570,000 in fines and it was banned entirely from entering Peruvian waters. Hopefully, that’ll teach any future pirates not to mess with the South American’s mackerel ever again!

Boskalis MV Blue Marlin

It may not seem possible for a single ship to transport over 73,000 tons of cargo all at once, but with the Boskalis MV Blue Marlin, it absolutely is!

At 712 ft long and 138 ft wide, this Heavy Transport Vessel boasts a deck area bigger than a full soccer field, and it puts every last inch to good use! It was built back in 2000 to lug around oil rigs, aircraft carriers, and even other cargo ships. So, once it’s loaded with all those other shipping ships, this ship becomes a shipping ship that ships shipping ships!

Although, that’s nothing compared to the headache the Marlin’s designers must have suffered from. In order to load up huge shipments like these, the designers decided to remove the bow, stern, and even the sides of the ship so that she could transport huge items with overhang.

But accommodating massive cargo was only half the problem, after all, most cargo this size is far too heavy to be lifted by the world’s strongest cranes! To solve this, engineers built in a revolutionary feature, a semi-submersible system!

When loading, the ship partially submerges its deck up to 33 ft underwater so that the cargo can be floated on top. The six huge, water filled ballast tanks on either side are then emptied and the deck floats back up with its cargo lifted on board!

But if you thought the Blue Marline was big, get ready to feast your eyes on its much bigger brother: The BOKA Vanguard! Able to carry an incredible 117,000 tons, and with a deck that’s astoundingly 70% larger than the Marlin’s, it dwarfs the Marlin in both capacity and size.

So, while the Marlin was busy shipping ships, the Vanguard was breaking world records by transporting an entire fish farm measuring almost 1300 by 200 ft! That made this 36,000-ton fish farm the largest cargo ever to be transported by a sea vessel!

Boka Vanguard record-breaking transport by Boskalis

Queen Mary 2

Cruise ships today are so large they’ve practically become floating cities! But they didn’t always start out this huge. Back in 2004, the iconic Queen Mary 2 revved up her 4, near 217 ton engines and set sail on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England.

When she launched, this transatlantic ocean liner was the largest of her kind, reaching a colossal 1,132 ft long. That makes her about as long as 10 Boeing 737’s lined up from nose to tail! But it isn’t just length that she boasts. At 232 ft high, she holds a huge 17 separate decks, complete with 1,310 staterooms, 7 restaurants, and even 5 swimming pools! Altogether, this means she can accommodate up to 3,090 guests and more than 1,250 crew, making her more of a massive ocean hotel than a ship.

But it’s the view below the waterline that really shows you just how big this liner is! The four propulsors that hang off the ship’s stern, that’s the back of the ship for those who don’t speak sailor, hold huge propellors that measure almost 20 ft across! And if that wasn’t enough to put its gargantuan size into perspective, the image below shows the bottom of the ship next to one of London’s famous, 16 ft tall, double-decker buses! That driver clearly took a wrong turn somewhere.

But all this size didn’t come cheap. At the time, the Queen Mary 2 cost approximately £550,000 million to build, which is a staggering $1 billion in today’s money! Although, that’s nothing compared to the biggest cruise ship currently sailing around the world: The Symphony of the Seas.

At 1,188 ft long, 238 ft tall and 154 ft wide, the largest passenger ship on earth cost a colossal $1.35 billion to build back in 2016! With an amazing 230,000 gross tonnage, that is to say, its overall internal volume, this luxury liner can carry a whopping 5,600 guests and almost 2,400 crew. That’s over 3,650 more people than the Queen Mary 2 could shuttle across the seas!

And as you’d expect, there’s absolutely nothing about it that you could call ‘small’. With 18 decks hosting 22 restaurants, 42 bars, theatres, an ice rink, and even the world’s tallest slide at sea, it’s more like a sideways skyscraper than a ship!

But with all that junk in the trunk, this mammoth vehicle can only reach a top speed of 22 knots, which is little more than 25 mph at best. She may not be speedy, but maybe that’s why they call it a Cruise ship and not a Rocket ship!

USS Enterprise Aircraft Carrier

Aircraft carriers have been symbols of naval power and prestige for decades, and the bigger they are, the more intimidating they look. But while some look terrifyingly large, none can compete with the sheer size of the USS Enterprise. No, not the fictional flying starship, but the longest navy vessel ever built!

At 1,123 ft long, if the Enterprise stood on its end, it would be more than 100 ft taller than London’s famous Shard building! Launched all the way back in 1961, she was designed to carry up to 90 aircraft, along with 4,600 crew on board. Her flight deck had almost 4 ½ acres of usable space, which is about the same amount of area as 2 ½ soccer pitches.

Although this ship was much more than a glorified sports pitch. At the time it was commissioned, it was the only aircraft carrier to be nuclear powered, and eight separate reactors drove the four massive propellors on either side! These allowed the carrier to achieve a top speed of just over 33 knots, or, if you prefer your rates a little more grounded, almost 38 mph. Truly, this vessel was one of a kind, although she wasn’t meant to be.

The Enterprise Carrier class was originally meant to consist of 6 other sister ships, however its escalating construction costs put a quick end to that radioactive dream. That’s because this colossal carrier took three years and approximately $451.3 million to construct on its own. That may not sound like much compared to the previously mentioned cruise ships, but that was back in 1961! Today, inflation puts that figure at a gut-busting $3.9 billion!

Fortunately, the US Navy really got their money’s worth, and Enterprise served as a part of the fleet for 56 years until it was decommissioned in 2017. It had a good run, but it was probably time this ship faced its final frontier.

USS Zumwalt

Despite looking like a Star Destroyer gliding through the water, the USS Zumwalt's job is completely different!

The uniquely angular vessel is a guided missile destroyer that was first commissioned by the US navy back in 2016. Compared to the classic silhouettes of other naval destroyers, such as the Arleigh Burke and Kidd classes, you might be wondering why the Zumwalt looks more like a floating pyramid! That’s because this state-of-the-art destroyer is designed, above all else, for stealth.

Radar systems detect objects by sending out bursts of radio energy. When this energy hits an object, it’s then reflected back to the radar, relaying how far away and what size the object is. Most metal, sea-faring vessels have a rounded design, which makes them very efficient radar reflectors.

However, stealth ships like these incorporate plenty of sharp angles into their designs so that radio signals are reflected away from the radar, making them much harder to detect. So much harder in fact, that the Zumwalt is an astonishing 50 times harder to spot on a radar than a regular destroyer, and that’s despite its colossal size!

At 610 ft long and nearly 81 ft wide, this thing is a phenomenal 40% larger than the US’s current Arleigh Burke destroyers, making it the largest Naval destroyer in the world. Originally, the US wanted to build 32 of these incredible ships, with $9.6 billion set aside for their research and development. However, construction costs for the ships were vastly underestimated, so this number was reduced down to just 3.

Even so, with research and development expenses on top, the ships cost an outrageous $7.5 billion to complete each! That’s more than five and a half times what the colossal Symphony of the Sea’s cost to build! The Zumwalt may not be the biggest thing out on the ocean, but it’s certainly one of the most expensive!

Prelude Platform

When it comes down to sheer size, there’s one vessel that really looks like it’s going for the title of biggest ship in the world. Although, despite all its floating features, it isn’t really a ship! It’s called Prelude, a floating liquefied natural gas, or FLNG, platform.

At more than 1600 ft long and 240 ft wide, this impossibly vast vessel was constructed using more steel than the entire World Trade Centre complex! Not only that, but even its height, which is arguably its least impressive metric, still makes it taller than London’s iconic Big Ben! Or, if you like your comparisons a little more American, that makes it taller than The Statue of Liberty.

Although, unlike these monuments, this platform doesn’t just sit around looking pretty! It floats out to underwater gas fields and is secured to the seafloor with massive mooring chains. These are made up of more than 25,000 links and are some of the largest chains in the world! These are attached to a central turret which allows the ship to rotate like a weathervane in adverse weather.

Once secured to the seafloor, the facility then draws up and produces liquid natural gas and other petroleum products from the gas fields below.

Currently, it’s installed atop Browse Basin, 330 miles off the Australian coastline, where it works to dredge up about 3.6 million tons of liquid gas every year. But just how much can it carry in one go? Well, it has the capacity to process a staggering 175 Olympic swimming pools worth of liquified gas! And this is done over a deck that’s longer than 4 soccer fields laid end to end!

But while it does have three incredibly powerful, 6,700 horsepower thrusters to help position it, it doesn’t have any kind of propulsion system. This means it technically classes as a barge rather than a ship, so it relies on a series of tugboats to sail it into position.

However, don’t be fooled. The Prelude may look like any other large barge in comparison to tiny tugs, but each one is actually a whopping 250 ft long! And the Prelude needs all the help it can get, because when fully loaded, the floating facility weighs about the same as 6 of the largest aircraft carriers!

If you were amazed at the largest ships on Earth, you might want to read about the most important waterways. Thanks for reading!