Seawise Giant

Seawise Giant was a supertanker of about 458 metres, longer than the Empire State Building is tall. It was built in the 1970s and scrapped in 2010 under later names.

Context

The ship was built at a Japanese yard in the late 1970s and was later lengthened in the early 1980s. It was damaged during the Iran-Iraq war, then repaired, and over its life carried several names, including Happy Giant, Jahre Viking and Knock Nevis. As Knock Nevis it served as a floating oil storage unit off Qatar for years.

Its length of about 458 metres exceeded that of the Empire State Building, which is about 443 metres to the tip. At full load the ship sank so deep that it could not pass through the English Channel or the Suez Canal. Figures for length vary a little, with 458.45 metres commonly quoted.

The ship was sold for scrap in 2009 and cut up at Alang, India, in 2010. The record for longest ship ever built is now held by this vessel in most lists, although floating structures such as Prelude, a gas production platform of about 488 metres, are longer and are usually counted separately because they are not ordinary ships. For comparison, today's largest container ships are around 400 metres long, so modern vessels come close to this old tanker's length without matching it.