Isn’t the ship’s ton a unit of volume?
It’s still a lotta steel. And stuff.
How could a ton be a measure of volume? It’s the mass of the water the ship displaces, and thus, the ship’s weight.
From the Wikipedia article:
Gross tons, a unit of volume. Displacement tons: a unit of mass. Air conditioning tons: a unit of heat flow.
:: looks it up ::
Tonnage is not a simple thing.
Woah. Didn’t know that.
Was this a planned event? Did they know ahead of time how tight the tolerance was going to be to clear that bridge? Jesus…it just somehow seems irresponsible to have to take these kinds of measures to travel a route that could potentially be bypassed elsewhere.
If I was on that thing I’d have been quite a bit concerned!
I don’t get it. It looked like there was heaps of room to me.
Apparently having heavier passengers would be a virtue in this case. I would like to see an occasional cruise establish a minimum per-passenger weight of 175 pounds (not least because this would cut the number of children on board to zero).
I agree. On the video the clearance looked like tens of metres.
Well, either they are exaggerating the closeness of the ship to the bridge or the camera angle is giving us an optical illusion. It looked like there was plenty of room to me, too.
I doubt they had a choice. There are only three sounds allowing passage from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea (the Great Belt, the Oresund and the Little Belt), all bridged, and it looks like the Great Belt Bridge (the “Store Belt Bridge” in the video) is the one with the most clearance.
ETA: The ships are built in Finland, so they HAVE to get from the Baltic to the North Sea to deliver it to the home port. It’s not like they sailed the ship up there for kicks.
When I launch a $1.5 billion ship, I usually just hand the keys to the Captain and say “Head towards the Atlantic. Say, you don’t need any charts or anything, right?”
The Varangian Vikings were able to get from the Baltic to the Black Sea by water a thousand years ago (though they carried their boats across land part of the way). I wonder why Royal Caribbean didn’t just do that?
Non-American children, anyway.
I vote for publicity stunt.
If Americans were watching, there’d be lots of whoo-hooing when it passed under. Darn Finns.
While I certainly would not say a cruise ship company is beyond pulling a publicity stunt, this ship (and her sister ship, the Oasis of the Seas) were both built in Finland. Looking at the map, any ship built in Finland is going to have to get past Denmark and Sweden some way or another, unless it wants to spend its career sailing around the Baltic; while I’m sure there’s a market for Baltic cruises, I doubt it could support monster ships like these (which are intended for more tropical climes). You could use the Kiel Canal to bypass the Danish straits entirely, except that the locks are about 50 meters too short and 5 meters too narrow. As septimus suggests, they could go for a Viking-style portage, but the cost of the beer or mead needed to get everyone drunk enough to haul a 100,000 ton ship across Schleswig-Holstein would probably be prohibitive.
From a close-in view of the straits around the Danish islands, your choices are the Little Belt, the Great Belt, or the Øresund. The Little Belt Bridge has a clearance of 44 meters and the Øresund Bridge has a clearance of 57 meters; that leaves the Great Belt Bridge, with a clearance of 65 meters. I guess if anybody wants to build an even BIGGER cruise ship, they’re going to have to have it built in Korea.
Presumably Danes, actually.
Hm, maybe. But then again Finns seem to be speed demons - ever seen how much rally footage on youtube is crazy ass finns breaking the sound barrier in tiny little cars banzaing around sicily and malta?
Who needs youtube. I saw a couple of Finns in '86 racing for the world championship, in person, in cars that were so hot they were going to be banned the next year. Speed demons, yes, but also very polite. I’m sure they’d be just gushing apologies if they trashed somebody’s shiny, new suspension bridge.
The Øresund crossing also includes a tunnel. I wonder whether the depth over the tunnel was not enough for the ship?
…so have their passengers.
-d&r-
Which brings us back to the alcohol and cheesecake…