I made a video recently highlighting some of the maritime chokepoints around the world.
Places where geography has played a little trick by funnelling really important shipping
routes into really narrow waterways.
I love looking at maps so, here are some more.
The Danish Straits twist between Germany in the South, Sweden in the East and among the
various islands of Denmark.
They connect the countries of the Baltic Sea to the North Sea.
They can get pretty narrow, with the Swedish mainland only 4km away at its closest point.
Unless of course you take a shortcut - the Kiel canal, or Nord-Ost-See Kanal will let
you cut down the length of your journey by avoiding most of the straits.
So, why are the Danish straits so important on a regional scale?
Well, it’s the only route by which some of the Baltic countries can transfer sea freight,
as well as the usual answer - oil.
Russia produces a lot of oil, and about 3 million barrels-worth per day gets shipped
through the Danish straits.
Another chokepoint that Russian oil has to navigate are the Turkish straits - the Bosporus
and the Dardanelles, which are both in Turkey.
These straits connect the Mediterranean to the Black Sea.
More accurately, the Dardanelles connects the Aegean Sea, which is part of the Mediterranean
to the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus connects the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea.
If you’re from around here or know a bit about World War One, these names might be
familiar to you - but for anyone needing a refresher - the Dardanelles is formed by the
Gallipoli peninsula protruding parallel along the coast of the Biga peninsula.
It’s little more than 1km wide at its narrowest point, and is subjected to strong currents,
making it a challenge to navigate.
The Bosporus on the other hand is even narrower, at only 700m wide at its narrowest point.
It’s straddled by the city of Istanbul, but is still an important shipping route,
connecting the countries of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and beyond.
Although, in the coming years it could share that burden with the Istanbul Canal - a proposed
waterway that Turkey is planning to build to the west, which would divert ships away
from the Bosporus.
Inside the Black Sea we find yet another chokepoint - the Kerch Strait.
The Kerch is sandwiched between the Kerch peninsula, which is a part of the Crimean
peninsula in the west, and the Taman peninsula in the east.
It connects the Black Sea to the mini mediterranean Sea of Azov.
Mediterranean here used as an adjective meaning surrounded by land, and not as a proper noun
as in, the Mediterranean Sea.
That’s right it’s a mediterranean sea connected to a mediterranean sea, connected
to a mediterranean sea, connected to the Mediterranean Sea.
In fact a ship travelling from Ukraine to the UAE could pass through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6 mediterranean seas, as well as travelling though a chokepoint within a chokepoint, within
a chokepoint, within a chokepoint, within a chokepoint before getting to the Indian
ocean and completing the journey with yet a another chokepoint.
Isn’t geography fun?!
The final set of chokepoints for this video requires a bit of illustration.
Imagine you’re shipping goods between Europe and Asia.
You could navigate the meandering, tortuous mess of chokepoints that is Europe, Africa,
and Asia.
You could spend extra fuel, money and time traversing the breadth of the Pacific Ocean,
going via the Panama canal and onwards across the Atlantic.
OR you could take a more northerly route - cutting across the Arctic Ocean, between the continents
of North America and Asia, and dipping through the Bering Sea, into the North Pacific and
on to East Asia.
This route is much, much shorter than going via the Indian Ocean or the Panama Canal,
and could save ships a lot of time and money.
There are a couple of options when transiting the Arctic.
The North-West passage cuts between Greenland and Canada, and then winds between Canada’s
Arctic islands.
The North-East passage peels around the northern coast of Norway, before following the Northern
Sea route along Russia’s Arctic coastline.
Of course the viability of both of these sea routes is dictated by the amount of sea ice,
which varies by time of the year.
A side effect of the sad reality of climate change is the diminishing sea ice in the arctic
ocean, which will inevitably increase the shipping traffic through the arctic.
In fact, if sea ice continues to melt, the shortest route of all could open up to shipping,
the transpolar sea route, which cuts across the middle of the arctic ocean.
So now we know about these 3 possible routes to get us between Asia and Europe - we can
see that they all funnel into this little stretch of water that sits between Russia
and the US, the Bering Strait.
It’s technically about 83km wide, but thanks to this little pair of islands that helpfully
sit in the middle, it’s actually about 35km wide on either side.
35km is definitely not the narrowest of global chokepoints, but because of its proximity
to 2 superpowers and its increasing global importance in the decades to come, as shipping
through the Arctic increases, it definitely deserves a spot on this list.
A chokepoint of increasing importance, sitting right between Russia and the US.
What could go wrong?
Well thanks for joining me for part 2 of this virtual tour of global chokepoints.
Of course if you haven’t seen part 1, you can have a look at that next.
Thanks for watching.