The biggest ones don’t, but a lot of ships, called Panamax, are built to the precise dimensions of the existing locks.
Yes, there are a number of factors involved in whether it is more efficient for a container ship to transit the canal, or offload the containers and ship them across via the railroad. One can also break down an original cargo and send it to multiple destinations by offloading and reloading on other ships.
The Nicaragua Canal also needs to be a lock canal, since the route transits Lake Nicaragua, which is actually slightly higher in elevation than Lake Gatun that forms the center section of the Panama Canal.
Given that it will require something like five times the length of excavation of the Panama Canal, and is supposed to be wider and deeper, I can’t see it being viable economically on it’s own terms. It can only be done if the Chinese government supports it as a prestige project. Given the present economy, that seems doubtful.
The introduction of lionfish as a destructive, invasive species has been attributed to to ship ballast water taken up in the Pacific and then discharged in the Caribbean.
Where did you hear that? I’ve never heard any such thing. Ballast water is a pretty toxic environment and not really a suitable environment for fish of any size. The organisms that are transferred this way are mainly invertebrates that don’t have large oxygen requirements.
Lionfish first appeared in Atlantic waters in the 1990s off Florida, possibly in part due to fish that escaped from aquaria during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but probably also due to released pets. They have spread rapidly southward into the Caribbean and also northward along the eastern US coast. In Panama, they first appeared in northwestern Panama and then spread eastward along the coast, not near the mouth of the Panama Canal.
You are assuming too close an association between time and efficiency. Changes of transport mode tend to be personnel and equipment expensive. Likely it would be cheaper and more efficient to not change mode and just have the ship wait for some period. In the transport industry there is an oft quoted allegation that it is cheaper to load a ship at Long Beach, sail it around the world and discharge it back at Long Beach than it is to load the ship, leave Port, immediately return, discharge and repeat.
I don’t understand this. The difference in this supposedly illustrative anecdote is that in case one, the ship travels thousands of miles, in case two, it travels a few miles. How is case one supposed to be cheaper? It simply cannot be true, or there’s an element missing.
The “repeat” at the end is the clue, I think. The repeat adds another loading and unloading of the ship, so the point is that sailing the ship around the world is cheaper than one load/unload cycle at the port.
Ok. So two load/unloads are more expensive than one load/unload and sailing around the world. It would be simpler just to say one load/unload costs more than sailing around the world outside of the loading/unloading costs.
I didn’t put it very well, sorry guys. And it’s not just load/unload. It’s also port dues, tugs, pilots etc. And of course in the train across the isthmus idea it’s worse because it’s also load onto train/unload from train.
I crossed the canal on a cargo ship when I was pregnant with my daughter. I hope to be able to cross it again some day without having to go to the toilet every 10 mins.
That’s not an uncommon phenomenon. Other examples are the German-German border and the buffer area around the Hanford Reservation. The area around Fukushima Dai-ichi will also become one.
The US has a number of areas reserved for military training that are sort of like this. They’re not perfect, since they get messed up some by bombing practice or maneuvers with tanks, but they have little permanant development or farming.
Also, there are now some New Panamax ships that are the precise dimensions of the new locks they’re building.
There are some extensive areas in the former Canal Zone that were used as bombing ranges when they were on US bases where development is pretty much precluded due to unexploded ordinance. (It’s particularly difficult to clear it in tropical forest areas without cutting down the forest.)
