One way to analyze complex problems is to break them into smaller components. In the case of merchant shipping, we can hypothesize that various factors, such as the cargo type, the size of the vessel (GRT) , and the age of the vessel have an impact on incident rate. MARIN researchers have examined many such factors. These figures show, for each of three commodity categories, the number of merchant vessel trips in Eastern Canada trips over several years (blue bar chart), the number of accidents associated with this traffic (red bar chart), and the incident rate (yellow bar chart).