What Is the Weight of the Largest Cruise Ship?

By Alice Nichols

The world’s largest cruise ship is the Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas. It is 230,000 tons and 1,188 feet in length.

That’s almost four football fields long and can carry up to 6,680 passengers and crew. It is an astounding feat of engineering, but what does that mean in terms of weight?

The weight of an object is determined by its mass and its buoyancy. Mass is a measure of the amount of matter contained within a given object.

Buoyancy is the force that keeps an object afloat depending on how much it displaces water when it enters a body of water. The two combine to produce an overall weight, usually measured in metric tons or pounds.

In the case of the Symphony of the Seas, its overall weight can be estimated by using a few simple calculations. First, we need to know how much mass the ship contains – this includes everything from its metal hull to any cargo or passengers it may be carrying at any given time. According to Royal Caribbean, the ship has a gross tonnage (GT) of 228,081 tons – that’s how much mass it has when fully loaded with people and cargo.

Next we need to calculate how much buoyancy it has when submerged in water – this is known as displacement tonnage (DT). This can be calculated by taking into account elements such as hull shape and size as well as other factors such as temperature and pressure. Royal Caribbean estimates that the Symphony has a displacement tonnage of 63,540 tons – this means that when submerged in water, it will displace 63,540 tons worth of water.

Finally we can calculate the total weight by adding together both figures: 228,081 + 63,540 = 291,621 tons (291 metric tons). This makes Symphony of the Seas’ total weight nearly 300 times heavier than an average car!

To put this into perspective: if you laid out all 291 metric tons worth of steel from ‘Symphony’ on top of each other it would reach approximately half-way up the Eiffel Tower in Paris!

So what is the weight of the world’s largest cruise ship? It comes out to almost 300 metric tons – that’s equivalent to more than 600 elephants!

In conclusion, weighing almost 300 metric tons or 600 elephants worth of steel and able to carry up to 6 680 passengers and crew members – ‘Symphony Of The Seas’ is truly one remarkable feat engineering!