CONCLUSION
It is shown in this research that there is no correlation
between the ship traffic density and the grounding
accidents, while there is slight correlation between the
grounding accident and the traffic distributiveness.
The results are based on the historical grounding
accidents that took place in the Gulf of Finland within
the years 1989‐2010 and the ship traffic of the same
area in 2010. Thus, it is worth to highlight again that
the obtained results are only valid for the studied
area, and they cannot be generalized over other
locations without further investigation.
There are some levels of uncertainty involved in
the presented result, which are mostly related to the
utilized algorithms to extract the required data from
the databases. Some assumptions like the used grid
cells should be tested against the different sizes in
order to find the effect of the size of the grid cells in
the final result. Besides, the effect of the winter traffic
and size of the ships on the results, which are
neglected in this study, have the potential of further
investigation. More importantly, the non‐existence of
any causal link between the ship traffic and the
grounding accidents cannot be merely concluded
from the result of this research, and it needs further
research and discussion.