This is Qatar and this is Saudi Arabia.
And this is Saudi Arabia’s plan to dig a big channel effectively slicing off the border
with Qatar.
But could Saudi Arabia really make this happen?
Yes they could, and we’re about to find out how.
Qatar is a peninsula that juts out from the mainland, into the Persian Gulf.
Its only land-border is with Saudi Arabia, but it is also close to Bahrain in the west,
the United Arab Emirates in the east, and across the gulf, with Iran in the north.
In 2018 Saudi Arabia first publicly floated the idea of digging a canal, called the Salwa
canal, between itself and Qatar.
This obviously raises a lot of questions, which I’ll do my best to go through answering
in this video.
But first, we need to rewind a little bit.
To understand why Saudi Arabia might want to dig a literal trench between itself and
its neighbour, we need to know a little bit about the recent politics of the Persian Gulf.
In 2017 – Qatar’s 3 geographically closest neighbours, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the
United Arab Emirates, along with a handful of others denounced and cut-ties with Qatar.
Their main reasons were Qatar’s relationship with Iran, meddling in other countries internal
affairs, and Qatar’s perceived support of terrorist organisations.
These 3 countries banned Qatari planes in their airspace, banned Qatari ships in their
ports, and Saudi Arabia closed its land-border with Qatar.
Suffice it to say that political tensions in the Gulf have been high.
So that brings us back to Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a canal that would quite literally
slice off Qatar.
Why do they want to, and could they really do it?
First the why – and there are a few reasons.
Saudi Arabia claims the new canal will create loads of jobs.
This is probably not wrong, as spending hundreds of millions of dollars on construction usually
does create jobs.
They also claim that the Salwa canal will be a tourist attraction – complete with
beaches, water-sports and luxury villas.
Again, a hard claim to refute, as throwing loads of money at something can make a desert
into a luxury tourist hub.
Thirdly the canal would provide an alternate shipping route from the UAE, to Bahrain and
Saudi Arabia.
It will also let ships avoid navigating too close to Iran, with whom these countries have
a perpetually volatile relationship.
We’ll talk about the dimensions of the proposed canal in a moment – but there should be
enough room for cargo ships and for recreation.
And finally, the obvious reason sticking out like a giant peninsula of a sore thumb, regardless
of the reasons you do it, building a moat between you and your neighbour is a huge political
statement.
It could permanently close the land border between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as the remaining
land on the Saudi-side of the border would likely be reserved for military use, and possibly
even for nuclear waste.
So now we know the why, we need to know the how – can this huge political flex of a
project even be done?
The planned Salwa canal would be 20m deep, 200m wide and about 70km long.
It will most likely be dug at least 1km away from the border of Qatar, and follow the curve
of the border in an arc around from the Salwa area in the west, to the Inland sea in the
east, which empties into the Persian Gulf.
Saudi Arabia is suggesting this 70km of canal can be dug in only 12 months’ time.
That would be a huge effort, but definitely not impossible.
There are two main options when designing and building a canal – sea-level canals
and locks.
The choice is normally determined by the landscape through which the canal is built, and the
constrains of finance and labour.
The Suez Canal in Egypt is an example of a sea-level canal.
This means that the canal was dredged so that the whole canal is at sea level.
This prevents the needs for mechanisms such as locks, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Sea-level canals can be very expensive to build if the terrain is rugged, requiring
a huge amount of earth to be excavated.
The Panama canal is an example of a canal that is not at sea-level.
Instead, it has locks, which fill with water to allow ships to travel to higher elevations,
and empty water which allows a step-down to lower elevations.
This reduces the cost of building a canal in rugged-territory, as less earth needs to
be removed, but does slow the passage of ships.
It is not yet clear what kind of canal Saudi Arabia intends to build, but either way, it
would have geographical and political ramifications.
So are countries allowed to build canals willy-nilly that alter the geography of the earth?
Yeah, they kind of are.
The Panama Canal and the Suez Canal each cleaved continents, connecting bodies of water that
would not otherwise be connected for thousands of kilometres.
And despite evidence of invasive Red Sea species in the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal has been
expanded in recent years.
Even recently, the Nicaraguan government was serious about creating a canal to compete
with the Panama canal, that would have bisected the country’s own largest source of freshwater.
They could not secure funding for the project, and it may be just as well because an accident
or oil spill over lake Nicaragua may have been catastrophic for the people and animals
reliant on the freshwater lake.
The environmental impact of the Salwa canal would likely not be as drastic as this.
The landscape is arid, and sparsely populated, and the bodies of water that would be connected
are relatively close anyway, on a global scale.
A canal of comparable dimensions is actually the Kiel canal in Germany.
It is shallower and slightly narrower than the Salwa canal is planned to be, and it does
include locks.
But if we zoom out a little we can see that actually, the canal passes through the German
state of Schleswig-Holstein, and cuts off the Jutland peninsula, which is a part of
Denmark.
So what has Qatar’s response been to all this?
Well, they pretty much refuted the claims made by Saudi Arabia and their other neighbours,
and have turned to Iran and Turkey to rely on their imports, many of which would previously
have come across their land border.
So what impact is the canal likely to have on Qatar?
Probably not much more than a closed land border is already having.
At release of this video the land border between Saudi Arabia and Qatar is still closed, so
building a 200m wide canal on the Saudi side is kind of like making that situation a little
more permanent.
In terms of making Qatar into an island – it is not about to float off into the Gulf, it
is still attached to the continental shelf after all.
Similarly, asking a Danish person how they feel living on the island of Jutland would
probably only get you a few confused looks.
So the next time you see click-baity titles of articles about Qatar becoming and ‘island’
or Saudi Arabia ‘slicing-off’ Qatar, think about the Danes, and how little they probably
think about the Kiel canal.
What it WOULD mean though, is that Saudi Arabia followed-through on a plan which many see
not just as a ‘tourist project’ – but as a giant bird flip to Qatar.
It would indicate that Saudi Arabia has no intention of re-opening the land border, and
that they are done ‘building bridges’ so to speak, with their neighbour.
It may also leave many Qataris wondering how adept their own government is at dealing with
foreign policy issues, since they now have to deal with trade blockades, neighbourly
tirades and possible future canals being made.
Thanks for watching this video about the Salwa canal – if you enjoyed it, feel free to
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Thanks for watching.