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Howard-
Da fuq
Yeah, I was expecting it to be much more than flying (water has more drag than air, what with Atlantic sea water being about 2500 times as dense as the air at cruising altitude), but 10 times was news. Cruise ship just aren't built for minimum fuel consumption the way aircraft are.
I guess if you reduced the accommodation to airliner levels, you could build a ship with similar fuel burn per passenger mile, but it's bad enough for 8 hours, never mind 8 days 🤮
gbj_tester
As I said before, your first order approximation for resource consumption is how much something costs. Flying is a thing because it's much cheaper than sailing.
Just in terms of fuel burn, modern wide body jet airliners are of the order of burning 1-2 times your own weight in jet fuel for an East Coast to Western Europe crossing (100-200kg, depending on aircraft type, capacity and load factor). QE2 burns nearly 2 tons of bunker oil per passenger to get from NY to Southampton.
For comparison, a single-occupant motor car doing 50mpg burns about 250kg of petrol or diesel to cover the same distance.