The Suez Canal blockage of 2021 caused a global trade disaster, and also gave us a fantastic
meme template.
But there are plenty more places on planet earth where a similar blockage or trade disruption
could happen.
Let’s find out where they are.
Sometimes, geography plays tricks, and global chokepoints are places where geography has
funnelled human activity into a narrow band through convenience or necessity.
For example - the Suez canal, which is an artificial waterway that was dug through Egypt
during the the 1800s, because that was way more convenient than going the long way round.
Without getting too bogged down by numbers, the Suez canal is super important for oil
from the Gulf countries and products manufactured in Asia getting to Europe and North Africa,
and vice versa.
But, looking at the map we can see that the Suez canal isn’t the only tight squeeze
on this journey.
Just at the other end of the Red Sea, nestled between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea is this
little stretch of water, called Bab el-Mandeb.
Other than those vessels that start or end their journey at one of the Red Sea ports,
every vessel traversing the Suez canal will also have to make its way through Bab el-Mandeb,
so any issue with this strait could have a devastating effect on global shipping in the
same way.
Bab el-Mandeb is about 30km wide, which is narrow for such an important piece of water,
but it’s nowhere near as skinny as the Suez, so one ship running aground won’t block
it.
However, there are loads of other potential threats to any waterway this narrow, such
as regional conflicts, piracy and extreme weather events.
As we cross the Indian Ocean, we get to our next chokepoint, the Strait of Malacca.
This narrow stretch of water between the Malay peninsula and the island of Sumatra, is responsible
for the vast majority of large-scale maritime traffic heading to or from East Asia in a
westerly direction - again, oil from West Asia is a big one here.
It’s a similar width to Bab el-Mandeb, but it feeds into the much much narrower Singapore
Strait.
Again, one ship won’t be able to block these straits, but at times visibility can be greatly
impaired by bushfires on Sumatra, and piracy has been an issue in the past, although the
neighbouring countries are working hard to stamp it out.
Likewise with the chokepoints of the Red Sea, if there’s a problem with the strait, you
can take the long-way round, although thankfully it’s not quite so circuitous as circumnavigating
Africa.
The next closest passage, the Sunda Strait is super shallow so that’s no good to cargo
ships, but the Lombok Strait is actually deeper than Malacca, so provides a good second option,
although a significant detour.
Continuing our journey east we cross the Pacific and get to the Americas, and of course, the
Panama canal.
Many, many videos have been made about this one, but in a nutshell it connects the east
and west coasts of the americas, as well as being another route between Asia and Europe.
While the Panama has multiple lanes and sections that traverse lakes, there definitely are
sections that could be blocked by a single ship.
The Panama Canal also has locks, rather than being a sea-level canal.
While the Suez canal may be more affected by the elements in the form of tides and sandstorms,
the Panama Canal’s locks do introduce another point which could fail and cause a blockage.
If the locks were to somehow massively fail, either mechanically or by another cause such
as violent weather, or cyber attack, it could cause a huge slow down in global trade.
Although thankfully none of these scenarios are very likely, given the thousands of ships
that safely transit the canal every year.
And finally, so the Europeans don’t feel left out, let’s cross the Atlantic and pick
one of the chokepoints over here to talk about.
The Strait of Gibraltar is the western outlet for the Mediterranean, just like the Suez
canal is the artificial eastern outlet, along with the Dardenelles and the Bosporous which
connect to the Black Sea in the north east.
The Strait of Gibraltar, has been strategically important for centuries, since the seafaring
nations of antiquity started trading in the mediterranean.
So much so that the British still manage to possess Gibraltar, a tiny fortified piece
of the Iberian peninsula to the north of the strait, otherwise the strait is bound by Spain
and Morocco.
These days it connects the Suez canal with the countries of northern Europe, and connects
the rest of the Mediterranean with the Americas and West Africa.
At around 15km wide, it is thankfully again not possible to be blocked by a single cargo
ship, you can see tiny cargo ships traversing the strait in this image, you’d need about
70 placed end-to-end to block it.
But it could certainly be blockaded by a fleet if catastrophic war were to somehow break
out in the Mediterranean.
In fact it, had been proposed in the 1920s to purposefully block the strait with a dam,
in order to generate electricity and lower the sea level in the Mediterranean - an interesting
but also very terrible idea.
These were just a few of the Global Maritime Chokepoints around the world, but there are
obviously more.
Like the Strait of Hormuz for example, which I have made an entire video on already.
If you’re interested in a part 2 video exploring a few more chokepoints, let me know.
Thanks for watching.