While typical transits through the waterway are paid by a flat rate via reservations, the Panama Canal Authority also offers customers an auction process in order to bypass the regular queue. Ship owners are shelling out millions of dollars to use the auction workaround as the Iran war forces more congestion at the Panama Canal, which links the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific.
It’d be an absolutely huge cost, mind blowing huge-
But I’ve often wondered why the US doesn’t just extend the Rio Grande through to the pacific. They’d have their own Canal, a natural border to Mexico and it’d be a jobs program for decades.
Besides having to raise boats over 4000 feet. The Rio Grande looks like this:
Bugs bunny sawing off Florida, but it’s most of the Americas.
Similarly, the Rio Grande is pretty shallow, and doesn’t go all the way across. It would take a cartoonish amount of effort to get that done.
It may actually be easier to build a giant solar mirror and use it to melt a path through the Arctic ice, or to hoist the boats into sextouple-wide train tracks and literally run an overland boat train, or possibly to use the money to try to invent teleportation (they would probably fail, but the discoveries generated in their failure would at least be more useful for humanity).My first thought was I believe people wade across the rio grande at parts.
Imagine the amount of work it’d take just for maintenance of a 2800-mile-long canal big enough for ships. And the logistics of one broke down in the middle. And…
I’d imagine the reason is the rocky mountains but idk.
Must have been one of those JP Morgan Chase owned boats full of cocaine again.
