The Insane Chinese Plan to Build a Canal Across Nicaragua

this video is made possible by brilliant learn complex subjects intuitively for 20% off by going to brilliant top org slash real-life floor so imagine that you're the captain of a boat with a lot of expensive cargo but you're stuck in LA and you need to get over to New York you currently have two or maybe three options of getting there you can a take the very long and somewhat dangerous route all the way down below South America be take the also really long but extra zany and cold route up through the Canadian archipelago or see take the shortcut across Panama through the Panama Canal but depending on the size of your ship this might not be an option for you the Panama Canal is only so wide and so deep so if your ship is too big you won't be allowed to cross which means that you still have to choose between either option A or option B as people have done for hundreds of years now but what if there was another option a choice D the flow of international shipping and trade across the world is for the most part determined by Earth's geography and Earth's geography has certain limitations for example there's an entire continent that kind of blocks the way between Europe and Asia and there's two entire continents that separate the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean boats don't really travel through land so you normally don't have any other choice but to travel around all of this land in order to get to the other side's but there's a few strategic areas around the world where it's theoretically possible to dig canals and create shortcuts between two sides of water some of these have already been built like the keel canal that allows transportation between the Baltic and the North Sea without having a sale around Denmark or the Suez Canal that allows transportation between the Mediterranean and red seas without having to sail all the way around Africa so in the Americas there are three locations where canal shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific could theoretically be built that map geeks have been talking about for centuries they are the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico the narrow stretches of land in Nicaragua on either side of the big lake in the middle of the country and Panama for hundreds of years all three of these areas were used to transport supplies overland from one ship in the Atlantic to another ship in the Pacific but this was still quite inefficient the land was full of rainforest mosquitoes and dangerous animals like wires that made the logistics of transporting supplies overland from one ship to another pretty dangerous and hard to do a canal will change everything and the easiest one to build was always going to be in Panama because it's the narrowest piece of land out of all of the three choices the Ted want to pick isthmus is 200 kilometres between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific the Nicaragua route is 153 kilometers across land between the Caribbean Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific while the Panama route is only 80 kilometres long and so the United States finished constructing the Panama Canal in 1914 and it changed the way the trade flowed forever afterwards allowing ships to just hop over land instead of traveling all the way around South America but there was a bit of a problem that I mentioned earlier the Panama Canal wasn't built very wide so not all modern ships can get through super big modern container ships aren't fitting in a canal that was built over a century ago and so they all still have to take the long route around South America if a brand new canal could be built across one of the other two potential canal routes it could be built up to modern standards with enough capacity for these big cargo ships to actually travel through this was the idea that came to the Chinese construction company H K and D in 2013 who entered into negotiations with the Nicaraguan government to construct a canal across the country that year Nicaragua gave H K and D a 50-year concession to build the canal and operate it with the potential to be extended for another 50 years afterwards if it was built this would have effectively given China a century of control over one of the most important strategic locations in the world for international trade later on in the 2020s growth and international trade is expected to cause significant congestion and delay issues in the Panama Canal so in 2013 the Panama Canal was simply not expected to be large enough to accommodate that increased demand in trade and shipping that would occur later on through the 21st century so the construction of another canal in the area to handle the higher demand appeared to be logical and HK indeed could just smell the opportunity the plan was rather straightforward H K and D would begin by constructing opposite ports on the Pacific and Caribbean sides of Nicaragua that could handle large container ships work would then begin on the first short portion of the canal between the Pacific and Lake Nicaragua a channel would be dug into the bottom of the lake to allow larger cargo ships to travel through it and then the second portion of the canal would be built from Lake Nicaragua out to the Caribbean where after the two ports would be adapted into international shipping ports on either side however there were so many ridiculous problems associated with a project that it's hard to even talk about all of them in such a short video first of all the cost of the project was estimated to be around 40 billion dollars by HK and D and H K and D never put forward a very clear case for how exactly they plan to come up with that much money and neither did Nicaragua for that matter the billionaire owner of HK & D lost eighty percent of his net worth in the 2015 Chinese stock market crash just two years after HK and D and Nicaragua came to their agreement to actually build the canal Nicaragua claimed that the project would create a quarter of a million jobs inside of the country and that it would lead to Nicaragua becoming a first world country while HK and D on the other hand suggested that it would only create around 50,000 jobs and that at least half of those would just be workers imported from China HK NV was further given the authority to expropriate land from Nicaraguan citizens around the canal construction site which would have led to the expulsion and relocation of around 100,000 people in the country or in other words about 1.5 percent of all Nicaraguans needless to say that wasn't exactly very popular with the 1.5 percent of the population that was getting forcibly relocated and then there's all of the potentially catastrophic environmental issues Lake Nicaragua is the largest source of fresh water for all of Central America and well introducing the lake to a canal that's connected to the salty ocean would be bad enough but imagine the potential disaster that could happen if an oil tanker moving through the canal happened to have a spill in the middle of the largest source of fresh water for 47 million people 400,000 hectares of rainforest were going to be destroyed that included habitats of at least 22 endangered species not to even mention the disruption caused in the migration routes of countless other species many people considered the Nicaragua canals construction to be an environmental catastrophe but the ultimate reasons for why it failed were economic ones not only did HK Andes billionaire owners lose 80 percent of his net worth in a single bad year of financial losses but the Panama Canal initiated an expansion project of their own that concluded in 2016 that doubles the canals capacity for ships now all but the absolute biggest of ships in the world can fit through the Panama Canal which made the prospect of blowing 40 billion bucks on another canal a Nicaragua a much harder pill to swallow eventually HK and D entered into severe financial difficulties themselves and in 2018 they shut down their home office in China without leaving any address or telephone number for anybody in e keurig WA or anywhere else to contact them at no construction on the canal ever began as looking like at this rate it's probably never actually gonna happen unless some other crazy company comes around with forty billion dollars to blow on something that might not even work out that well none of this was even considering the fact that actually digging and filling hundreds of miles of canals through the rainforest with tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria would be a massively difficult project to complete even with the money it's unbelievable to think about this today putts around forty thousand workers actually died over the course of the construction of the Panama Canal due to tropical diseases in the area can you imagine even ten percent of those deaths being acceptable to a modern construction company it's absolutely wild so insane costs would have to be put into developing the area in Nicaragua around the canal with modern hospitals and trained medical staff in addition to all the other necessary construction and labor costs the project is ultimately one of the most insane construction projects ever proposed during the 21st century it would have changed the shape of the world forever but in the end least for now it seems like we just don't really need it something that everybody needs though is a better understanding of math and science and how they relate to our everyday lives if you're bored stuck indoors all the time right now like me it's a perfect opportunity to do something productive and keep yourself entertained next by heading over to brilliance brilliance is a math and science learning platform that gives you new daily challenges every day that are not only fun but that also help teach you new concepts by applying them and if you like that challenge and you want to learn more you can check out the course quizzes that go into more detail it's the perfect way to learn a little something new every day without it ever feeling stressful or overwhelming so to start trying out the daily challenges and to learn more about brilliance go ahead and click the link down in the description or go to brilliant org slash real life lor you can sign up for free plus if you're one of the first 200 is sign up at that link you'll also get 20% off of a premium subscription and you'll be supporting real life floor at the same time and as always thank you for watching you [Music]

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 3,089,012

Rating: 4.8230476 out of 5

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, nicaragua, nicaragua canal, nicaragua canal 2020, panama canal, insane plan, insane plans

Id: fAfHtaRcTXc

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020