Should marine insurance companies take seriously chaos theory?

The purpose of this article is really to provide an answer to the question: Why have marine accidents that result in ships lost have, over the years, been concentrated in two main areas by numbers? Indeed in the British Isles/North Sea/E. Channel‐Biscay Bay 367 ships were lost between 1992‐1999 and in S. China and E. Indies 433 ships also were lost. In contrast, in Cape Horn and in the Panama Canal only five ships were lost over the same period. This strange “attraction” of accidents to only two sea areas has induced us to assume that this phenomenon cannot probably be explained by random walk statistical/ mathematical methods, but by non‐linear chaotic methods and especially that of Hurst Rescale Range Analysis and Spectrum Analysis. Our numerical results – on rather limited data – have shown that in these ships lost a non‐random factor or factors have acted that further investigation may reveal. We consider this as an important fact with wide applications, e.g. in accidents in national highways that strangely enough the majority of road accidents occur mainly in certain locations! Another important conclusion is that man cannot and wishes not to interfere with “randomness” and simply accepts it doing nothing, transferring responsibility from his shoulders over to destiny. Things that are not random must be prevented. If they are random or not chaos/complexity theory helps us to see. Our analysis, we believe, is of special interest to the marine insurance companies.