What if a shadow-fleet tanker breaks apart at sea?
An uninsured shadow-fleet tanker breaking apart triggers port/flag bans that strand sanctioned-origin crude, tightening physical supply and bidding Brent and freight while VIX pops. Closest analogues are the 2002 Prestige break-up (which drove EU single-hull bans) layered onto post-2022 Russia sanctions enforcement. Forward angle: ~10% of seaborne crude now moves on dark tonnage, so a single casualty that legitimizes enforcement could remove far more barrels than a normal spill — asymmetric upside to oil.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. An uninsured shadow-fleet tanker breaks apart, prompting bans that strand sanctioned-origin crude. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.