Could Fanciful Nicaragua Canal Project Really Be Going Forward?
An extremely impractical, if not completely impossible, project to create competition for the Panama Canal may be begun before the end of 2014. A concept that has been around for centuries might come to pass by the end of the next decade.
How daunting is this undertaking? The Panama Canal is 51 miles long. The latest proposed route for the Nicaragua Canal is more than triple that, at about 170 miles. But hey, that is misleading because more than a quarter of this (approximately 44 miles) would be across Lake Nicaragua, right? Well, there are some rather serious problems with that:
The lake is shallow - its average depth is about 30 feet - so a channel would need to be dredged through parts of the lake bed, in some places as deep or 50 or 60 feet.
Ok, doubling the depth of a large lake could be tough. But then there is also:
“There are times of the year when the wind is such that waves are 4 meters (13 feet) high,” says Salvador Montenegro Guillen, the director of the Center for Research on Water Resources at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua.
And:
Two volcanoes tower from Ometepe Island within the lake, a reminder that Nicaragua straddles a geologic hot spot. One of the volcanoes, Concepcion, spit out ash in 2009 that coated three villages. Its last major eruption was in 1880. The other volcano, Maderas, is dormant. Earthquakes and hurricanes also afflict Nicaragua. A 1972 earthquake shattered the capital, Managua, and Hurricane Joan lashed the nation in 1988.
Aside from that:
Even a small oil spill would ruin the lake as a resource for irrigation or drinking water, and Montenegro said a spill might take two decades to clean up.
So why is an extremely poor country seriously contemplating such an enormous project at an incalculable cost? Chinese money of course.
Read the whole thing from The Christian Science Monitor:
Nicaragua forges ahead on canal plan, but skepticism abounds
And check out the amazingly long history of this concept in the Wikipedia article on the topic.