Three bottlenecks choke the titans

Two canals and one strait allow the shortest possible sailing routes between the world’s most important ports. But as container vessels grow, the passages become bottlenecks, and the largest ships must find alternative routes. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, the sluices were dimen-sioned for ships the size of the Titanic. Following an expansion in 2016, they have become 72 m longer and 22 m wider, but the canal is still too narrow for the biggest container vessels, which are forced to take a 12,500-km-long detour around South America.