The Problem with The Suez Canal

This week we’ve seen in the news that a large boat has gotten stuck in the Suez Canal. This is a high traffic area which means it’s holding up hundreds of boats crossing from Asia to Europe, or vice versa. The shipping industry is a big contributor to carbon emissions - specifically black carbon which are tiny black particles produced by burning marine fuel- which are terrible for the environment. This is why it's important for them to be efficient and burn the least amount of fuel. Having hundreds of ships waiting to pass through a canal is not good for emissions, especially when some are choosing to take the longer route around Africa which causes more fuel to be used. To fix the problem, a lot of people are saying to just pull it out, but it’s more difficult than that. I thought this was a really interesting physics problem that would be worth having a look at.


The Suez Canal


The Suez Canal is a manmade waterway connecting Asia and Europe. It is one of three of the most important canals in the world alone with the Panama Canal and the Corinth Canal that provides a shortcut between oceans/continents. The Suez Canal is located in Egypt connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It is 193km long, at least 55m and a depth of 24m. It is shaped like an upside-down trapezium, meaning that the sides of the canal are much less deep than the middle, making it quite difficult to navigate. It first opened in 1869. Before then, anyone travelling from Europe to Asia or vice versa had to travel all the way around Africa, adding weeks to the trip. 




The Ever Given


The Ever Given (Also known as Ever Green, whom it is owned by) is one of the largest container ships in the world. It is 399.984m long (comparable to the empire state building) and 58.8m wide, with a depth of 39.2m. It weighs 220, 940 gross tonnage and has a capacity of 20,124 TEU (TEU is an inexact unit translating to approximately one shipping container). 

Fig 1: The Ever Given


 
The Problem


The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) reported on the 23rd of March that a strong wind and a dust storm had caused the Pilot of the Ever Given to lose the ability to steer and had gotten the ship stuck in the banks for the canal . The pilot was an employee of SCA; to this is a requirement to pass through the Suez Canal. These pilots require bribes of cigarettes to drive safely, and it’s been hypothesised that the pilot had been careless because of this. Either way, the ship ended up with its bow wedged one edge of the canal and the stern nearly touching the other, blocking the entire canal. This completely stopped traffic going through the Suez Canal for 6 days, blocking about 400 ships. This has cost $400 million dollars in trade for each HOUR that the ship had blocked the canal, or $57.6 BILLION over 6 days.  


What Are Some Ideas?


A lot of people on the internet are saying “Just Pull it”, as in, pull the bow forward out of the canal and maybe also pull the stern backwards into the canal. This isn’t as simple as it seems like a boat of that size creates a large frictional force that acts in the opposite direction to the pulling force so a very large pulling force would be needed. It is probably not possible to get such a large force but it’s also dangerous to try. The large amount of mass would be difficult to stabilize once it is out of equilibrium, and the consequences might be severe rocking, losing containers overboard, capsizing, or getting stuck again, all of which would make the delays longer.


People also suggest taking off the cargo to reduce the mass, making the ship easier to dislodge. This is also risky due to the logistics of shipping containers. The weight must be well balanced on either side so that the ship doesn’t lean in one direction, and well balanced through the length so that increased mass in the centre doesn’t cause the ship to snap in half. You need to be really careful loading and unloading shipping containers for this reason, and it would be difficult to be this careful while it is diagonal in the Suez Canal without any of the necessary infrastructure. However, they are looking at removing its fuel as a way to reduce the mass. 


It has also been suggested to dig out the Ever Given to Reduce the frictional forces that is making it hard to remove. They have sent a relatively tiny excavator to begin digging out the large ship so that it would be easier to pull it.


Fig 2: Memes inspired by the tiny excavator 


What Did They Do?


The Ship was freed on Sunday. They used dredgers; ships that are equipped with machines that dig on the sea floor to remove sediment. This lessened the contact of the boat with the side of the canal. This made it easier for the tugboats – small boats that help to park or move larger boats- to pull the ship out of potion using heavy cables called tow lines. 14 tugboats in total were used. There was also a full moon, which caused spring tides meaning that the tides were higher and lower than average. The high tide helped to float the boat a bit more which made it easier to pull it out of the canal bank. 


It took 6 days in total to free the Ever Given, which is optimistic considering some rescue companies predicted that it would take weeks. Although the canal is now traversable, there’s now a logistics problem of clearing the backlog of ships waiting to get through the canal that is so big it can be seen from space! The SCA has allowed double the volume of ships allowed through the canal to help ease the traffic jam and are working day and night to help to get ships through. It might take 10 days to get all the traffic cleared. This might cause a further loss in revenue of several hundreds of millions. Interestingly enough, some ships decided that rather than waiting, they would take the longer (plus two weeks) trip around Africa as ships did before the canal was built in order to deliver their goods on time. This lessens the traffic jam, but causes more carbon emissions and is also a more dangerous route due to pirates and unpredictable seas. 


Final Thoughts


I don’t think there’s any lesson to be learnt from this apart from how you can apply physics problems to current events to further your understanding. It’s a really interesting physics problem, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see “How much force would it take to free a ship lodged in the Suez Canal at 20 degrees with a mass M and a frictional coefficient μ?” in next years A level physics paper. If any students are reading this, I’d really encourage you to ask your physics teachers to go through the equations relating to this to further your understanding of real life physics!




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