The Strait of Hormuz, long the pulse point of global energy commerce, has fallen nearly silent in the visible sense — yet the silence is deceptive. As US-Iran tensions hold the waterway in a state of suspended conflict, trackable vessel transits have collapsed by more than ninety percent from pre-war norms, leaving a corridor that once moved a fifth of the world's oil and gas supply looking, on the surface, almost abandoned. What moves through it now moves in darkness, as regional producers switch off their transponders and carry on exporting beyond the reach of the systems built to watch them