Issue 9 | 23 May 2021
Hello, curious people, and welcome to the ninth issue of the Curiosity Catalogue. This has been delayed by two weeks and a day, but I’ll explain that at the end. First, we talk about canals.
Going Canal Crazy
It’s been two months since the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, triggering one of the most expensive traffic jams in history, and inspiring a whole lot of humour (my favourite - this Austin Powers GIF below).
The fiasco itself been talked about enough. Instead, I’m going to look at why the world is obsessed with canals, and some ridiculous plans to build more.
Shipping out
The ‘why’ of canals is simple. It starts with the ‘why’ of global trade - people want to buy things that are made really cheap really far away. Though sea trade has been around for millennia and formed the basis of modern colonialism, it’s a whole new beast today. Very little is produced completely locally today, with supply chains for single products requiring the movement of something or the other across the globe. This is because shipping things across the world is so cheap that many economists who study international trade don’t even bother with its cost.
Also: watch the video above for more context on global supply chains, and read issue #3 where I talked about the origins of modern shipping during the Vietnam War
Shipping from East Asia to the west coast of the USA (which is how modern shipping began in the 1960s), or from the east coast of the USA to western Europe is straightforward, since you’re crossing open ocean. In other situations, these pesky things called land-masses get in the way, and going around them is expensive and time-consuming. Sometimes we get lucky with natural shortcuts that connect major waterways - straits - and port cities near them are basically winners of the geopolitical lottery. Think of Singapore - it’s become what it has because it was at the Strait of Malacca, on the trade route from South East Asia to Europe.
Humans haven’t always been lucky with straits, with many sea routes blocked-off by continents. When we’ve found places close to perfect, with large water bodies separated by thin strips of land, though, our can-do, we-own-this-place attitude has kicked in and we’ve plowed right through. Lo and behold, we dug our way between the Mediterranean and Red Seas (Suez canal) and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (Panama Canal). These two made traveling around Africa and South America, respectively, redundant, saving a lot of time and resources.
These two are critical to global trade annually, but also suffer from a critical flaw - the very one exposed by the Ever Given. One mistake with one ship shuts the entire system down. It’s the global trade equivalent of the death star being blown up by a single well-aimed shot.
Problem? Nuke it all
Countries have been worried about this for decades. The USA, with its grand global ambitions at the height of the Cold War, tried to do something about it in the late 1950s. Especially after the Suez Crisis of 1956 (when the canal was blocked for six months), they knew a system so fragile needed reinforcement. They same applied to the Panama Canal. Their solution to this, as was their solution to far too many things at the time? Nuclear weapons.
And no, they didn’t mean deploying weapons to defend these canals or some such. They wanted to create parallel canals by detonating nuclear weapons in the ground. If a few big booms saved them the dirty, sweaty work of digging, why not?
Their plans went beyond canals. Under Project Plowshare, they wanted to use ‘peaceful nuclear explosions’ (PNEs) for anything that needed big holes in the ground - dams, harbors, you name it.
Ideation was in full-swing in the 1960s. They found sites for the Panama canal-alternative (to be called the Pan-Atomic Canal) in Nicaragua, Columbia and Panama itself. The math for this was mammoth. According to this article in Forbes, “the best of these would still require as much as 1.53 billion cubic meters (2 billion cubic yards) of material to be blasted out of the way. That’s roughly equivalent to throwing 592 Great Pyramids of Giza into the air in all directions…”. Estimates for the number of bombs varied quite a bit, ranging from 26 to 764.
Similarly in the Middle East, according to a declassified memo from 1963, they hoped to create a “strategically valuable alternate to the present Suez Canal.” Unfortunately, “[c]onventional methods of excavation of this magnitude are prohibitively expensive…but it appears that nuclear explosives could be profitably applied to this situation.” By their estimate, “130 of the 160 mile length of the route are in virtually unpopulated desert wasteland, and are thus amenable to nuclear excavation methods.” Tragically, the memo warned that “Arab countries surrounding Israel would object strongly to the construction of this canal.”
These nuclear ambitions never turned into reality, as we now know. Even then, Frederick Reines, a scientist involved in Project Plowshare acknowledged that these could only work “if the radioactivity is overlooked,” (no big deal, really). Tides turned decisively against nuclear bombs in the 1970s, even for ‘peaceful’ uses, and these plans became little more than trivia to be dredged up by me half a century later for your weekend reading.
While nuclear detonation might have been like injecting a caffeine drip in your arm just because you feel a yawn coming, these plans had identified a fundamental flaw with canals that remained. A small mishap (or in the case of the Ever Given, a literal gust of wind) would knock them out of action.
There have been attempts to rectify this. Egypt dug parallel channels along large sections of the Suez (unfortunately not those which the ship got stuck in), and after March’s crisis plans to widen it further. The Panama Canal was also widened not too long ago, but remains too small for the largest trade ships in the world to navigate.
Canal-building ambitions aren’t dead yet, though. Israel planned to build a Suez alternative along its southern border, similar to the one the US proposed, and it’s revived these plans recently.
Where there’s money, there’s China
More interesting were a Chinese company’s ambitions to build a rival to the Panama Canal. The HKND group struck a deal with the Nicaraguan government in 2014 and gained the right to build and operate a canal for 50 years, with a possible half-century extension. From my limited understanding, this canal would change global trade. Not only would some traffic from the Panama Canal move here, but the really big ships that currently travel either north or south of the Americas to move between the Atlantic and Pacific would as well. China would control one of the most strategically important passages in the world.
Their plan was simple. Dig inland from both coasts and meet in the middle in Lake Nicaragua (shown in the map above). Implementing this plan - not as simple. For one, it would cost them an whopping $40 billion. They would also have to dig through 400,000 hectares of rainforest, which is a little bit of a logistical nightmare. The project would forcefully relocate 100,000 people, and they weren’t too thrilled about that. Labourers would likely work in terrible conditions, and be exposed to all kinds of diseases in the rainforest. About 30,000 people died building the Panama Canal - even a tenth of those fatalities today would raise global outcry (unless you’re the Qatari government hosting the football World Cup).
This doesn’t account for the ecological devastation the project would leave in its wake. Like I said, 400,000 hectares of rainforest, home to at least 22 endangered species, would be destroyed. Lake Nicaragua, the source of fresh-water for most of the country, would be tainted by salt-water from the oceans, and put at risk of oil spills from tankers.
The project did eventually fall apart, not for environmental or human-rights reasons, but because the HKND group went bankrupt, and the Panama canal was widened enough to accommodate most (but not all) ships.
There’s still more planned
This is by no means the only hare-brained canal-building plan around. China wants to dig through parts of Thailand to avoid the congested strait of Malacca. It’s part of their proposed Maritime Silk Route, and at $20 billion this is a relatively cheap proposal.
There’s also a lot of canal action going on in West Asia. Turkey wants to slice through its own land-mass to by-pass the congested Istanbul strait, which is Russia’s only southern sea-link. This might violate current international conventions and is beyond my comprehension, but is clearly a big deal. This is dwarfed by a ludicrous plan to cut through Iran and construct a 1,400 kilometer canal connecting the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, ambitious not only for its length but its need to cut through entire mountain ranges. Again, it’ll be a big boost for Russia, and in line with other not-so-great things its for its own benefit (more in the Round-up below).
The Round-up
In addition to pushing for canal connectivity, Russia’s also trying to push for the usage of Arctic shipping routes. They use nuclear powered ice-breakers to keep lanes open all-year round, and will actually benefit from global warming melting Arctic ice-caps because of increased shipping. Needless to say, this isn’t good for the environment here. They’ve also been flexing their military muscle here recently to cement their control over the region.
The Cargo Industry’s Quest to Curb Carbon-Belching Ships: Global shipping comes at huge environmental costs. Canals actually help cut that down, because they drastically reduce time and therefore fuel used for the journey. But, building canals is an ecological nightmare of its own. Still, there are plans in place to address the industry’s carbon footprint. As the WIRED article I’ve linked shows, it’s extremely complicated, but very worth it.
There’s clearly money to be made in the shipping industry, so it’s no surprise that Amazon’s getting in on the act. They’ve started launched their own freight services. These will be used not only for their own products, but also by anyone else who’s willing to pay.
I love YouTube. Maybe more accurately, I’m kind of addicted to YouTube. But that’s partly because I learn so much from it, and so easily. The quality of content available is sublime, and so in every issue I’ll share a couple of my favourite creators for you to check out. This week - Economics Explained, whose video I linked above. Then, the expertly crafted content of Tom Scott - like this video about how microwaves were once used to de-freeze hamsters for scientific experiments.
I’ve added a list of books I’m currently reading and also books that I highly recommended to the Curiosity Catalogue landing page. It’ll be updated regularly.
About me
I’m Shantanu Kishwar, and I recently started working at Educational Initiatives, an organisation that tries to improve education in India with the aim of every child learning with understanding. I’m working in communications for one of their teams, and part of my job is to take over production of their podcast, EI Dialogues. If you’re interested in understanding education in India, I’d highly recommend it. Episodes are available on YouTube, but also Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.
The transition into the new job has been hectic, and my workload looks sizeable. It’s why I wasn’t able to publish this last time. I’ll have to plan the newsletter better now, but I’m determined to keep it going. Also, it’s going to launch on alternate Sundays and not Saturdays, so I can use the Saturday to finish it.
I hope you liked this issue. If you’re new here and want the next straight in your inbox, subscribe above. Feel free to reply with thoughts, recommendations and suggestions. Do share this with other curious people you know. I’d really appreciate it, and hope they will as well. Feel free to follow my sporadic updates on Twitter and Instagram.