Iran announced a restricted maritime area running from the port city of Chabahar into the Gulf of Oman, and published no coordinates with the declaration1.
Maritime restrictions normally travel as a navigational warning with a boundary expressed in latitude and longitude. That is the format because of what happens downstream: a master loads the box into a chart plotter, a war-risk underwriter prices the water inside it, and a flag state decides whether its vessels may enter. Chabahar sits east of Hormuz on Iran's Gulf of Oman coast, which places the declared area across approaches that diverted traffic uses. Iran already told mariners on 2 September that it had laid fresh mines south of the strait, a hazard announced in the same style and with the same missing numbers.
A warning issued in prose still changes behaviour, and it does so more broadly than a plotted one would. A prudent operator who cannot draw the boundary avoids the whole approach, so a single sentence from Tehran can clear more sea than a precisely bounded exclusion zone. Whether that breadth is the intent or a consequence of haste, the effect on a chartering desk in Athens or Singapore this week is the same.
