For a minute there, the title fooled me into thinking the actual vessels were bypassing panama via rail…
There have been systems like that to replace locks in the past. Not for the whole of the country of course but essentially wide rails that lift a shift up a hill along some rails.
The ships will be pulled overland Fitzcarraldo style.
Thank goodness for this sentence:
The Panama Canal Authority has reduced the amount and weight of vessels passing through based on current and projected water levels in Gatun Lake, the rainfall-fed principal reservoir that floats ships through the canal’s lock system…
I mistakenly thought the locks were filled entirely with seawater, so I didn’t understand how the canal could be affected by drought.
Locks do not work that way, at least not unless you want to use them to go below sea level.
Locks always have to be fed from reservoirs on the upper side of the lock and each lock cycle transports one lock full of water to the lower side of the lock. This is the reason locks are so energy efficient, because we do not need to do the lifting ourselves, we just let the water do it.
There are some lock designs that store part of the lock’s content in some side-reservoir to use e.g. the upper half of the water to refill the lower half on the next cycle but that is about as much as can be done to conserve water without installing huge pumps that would require a lot of energy.
Oof, so we’ve got a drought in Panama, and terrorists in the suez? Spicy
C’mon Gibraltar, do your thing!
And a rapidly destabilizing situation in the SCS.
And contention over the Essequibo.
Edit: by terrorism, you must mean the unilateral military action taken on by the US and UK without UNSC authorization, right?
I guess they got taken off the official terrorist designation in 2021, but they’re trying to redesignate them, so idk, semantics.
unilateral […] US and UK
How is it unilateral if two countries are coordinated?
(Yes, I’m being pedantic. My apologies.)
Also, it’s not the job of the UNSC to “authorize” military action of individual nations. UNSC authorization of force (Article 42) refers to sending UN peacekeeping forces, like in the Korean war. This hasn’t happened many times.
Article 51 allows member states to use force to defend themselves. US and UK military ships were being attacked.
International law also allows a country to protect its own territorial waters and enforce sanctions through them. Sovereignty supercedes the right to self-defence: if a US warship sails into Chinese territorial waters and gets beat down, international law sides with China.
What was the location of the US and UK ships? What are the treaties governing access to the Red Sea?
Are you sure that counts as territorial waters for Yemen?
