Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner paid $4M to skip the line
fortune.com
fortune.com
Apparently they had a huge lake reservoir for storing freshwater that was then used to fill the locks in the canal. And then subsequently release into the ocean.
They haven't gotten the usual rainfall and this is causing serious issues.
> https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-ne...
Why would you need freshwater to go through a canal that connects two bodies of water? This seems like very poor planning and infrastructure creation. why can't they pump sea water through the locks?
The new locks have added mechanisms to decrease water loss, but they do require water.
Not to mention that there are lakes in the interior part of the canal.
Here is a cross-section diagram of the canal showing the lakes:
https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/pan...
https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/68621
"Natural bowl higher than sea level" could be called a lake.
Ecological concerns wouldn't just be pumping seawater into a large freshwater lake but questions of where to intake water, cross contact between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans there at a new location, etc. Not a trivial set of issues.
And this one explaining how reservoirs can be used to trade-off water consumption for land requirements using side ponds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBvclVcesEE
Calculating the approximate wattage to lift all that water 26m:
9.8 w/s * 200000000 Liters * 26 m /60/60/1000/1000
200 000 000 liters was reported on wikipedia as amount of water used.
Its a very crude calculation probably of by quite a bit.
It's allot of electricity but the cost of that electricity would be essentially nothing when compared to what they charge. So I don't know why they don't install massive pumps. Maybe they don't want to contaminate the lake with salt water, but you would get small amounts of salt water with the current system to.
Supply and demand?
m = mass of displaced water h = height of displaced mass g = gravity
A Watt is 1 meter(lift) x 1 Newton / second. There are 30 meters of lift. Each liter is 1kg and gravity (9.8m/sec2) makes that about ~10 Newtons (9.8N due to gravity).
So you get 10^9kg x 10N/kg x 30m / 3000 sec = 100MW continuous. That's about 100, 000 horsepower. Each lock would need more than 16MW of pumping.
Solar/hydro power from the rain in lake Gatun is well over 100MW. Due to leakage it's probably 5-10x that or equivalent to a larger nuclear power plant.
The vertical rise is about 26meters and there are 3 10meter locks (33mx300m in size) in each direction. 40 ships travel through each day (~3ksec per fill bidirectional) and each fill is ~1Billion liters or 250Million gallons in less than an hour. Lifting 1B liters through 30m would need 100MW to power 100% efficient pumps continuously for leakless locks. The solar/hydro power of rain is significant.
Also, everything in the lake would die once it was contaminated with sea water, and you would be contaminating the Pacific with Atlantic water, vice versa, or both.
Maybe dig a third reservoir adjacent to the lock mechanism, as a buffer between the two levels, to give you more flexibility with the timings.
[late edit]: Apparently this is in fact a thing, in some cases:
- "The hydraulic cylinders enable the water used by the locks to be pumped back. Up to 48,000 cubic metres of water are displaced in a single lockage operation. In periods of low discharge on the Meuse, the screws can pump back the water lost due to the passage of a ship through the lock to the upper canal reach. In normal periods of enough discharge at the Meuse, the screws are used to to generate green electricity from hydropower."
Too little head for good efficiency.
Ahh that's what must be making the Drake Passage so angry.
That sounds like a lot until you realize the largest ships are charged up to $150,000 for a transit.
A 10% price increase is nothing to scoff at, but it's not outlandish to deal with congestion...
But once you’re talking about anything near 100% efficient pumps, you can have generators too, and a lot of that water is, in principle, recoverable. A bigger issue may be doing any of this without bringing too much salt along with the upward-moving ships.
(Hmm. How about picking up the ships, sans water? I wonder if a way to do this safely could be engineered. Sounds quite challenging.)
However, there are solutions to things like this called a "water slope" and one has been built (notably 100x smaller than needed for Panama) and they would (need to) be much quicker as well. Basically, they push a giant slug of water up hill. Notably, one could probably make this regenerative (and you could likely reuse most of the water). That's important since it would certainly be in the multiple GW of power, but it could push/pull (two moving locks up/dn) in <1000sec so traffic through the canal could be more than 5x higher. Of course it would require massive widening, completely new infrastructure (a new giant power plant), and completely new technology.
Here's video of one (and a link to the original) with an explanation. My point is not that this is easily doable, but if you're going to spend the many $10Bs of you might as well get more boats through.
Perfectly fine when you have enough fresh water, you can even somewhat optimize by using same water multiple times. But if you run out of fresh water at high point you will have trouble.
Just Google a video of a ship passing through the Panama canel
[1] <https://maritime-executive.com/article/panama-canal-first-wa...>
This was (and is) not as much an issue with the old locks, as passage of ships there is ridiculously fast with the use of mules. With the new locks, it's mostly tug boats, and substantially bigger/slower ships obviously.
[0] Mostly on the Agua Clara side. The Cocoli side is generally fine, as the salt wedge doesn't reach the lake. Drinking/irrigation water intakes there probably have to be (or have been) moved though.
This current problem is especially bad because the dry season normally begins 4-6 weeks from now and there will be little rainfall to re-fill Lake Alajuela (or the lake its water flows into, Gatun Lake, the backbone of the canal).
(I previously worked for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and lived on an island in the Panama Canal)
So that lake is like the small open source project that supports the weight of all internet: critical for everybody, yet neglected.
The Canal moves such amounts of money every year, not to say over decades, that preserving the lake in better conditions ought to have been easy. Now the ball of mud is exploding in their faces. It's like if "we" (collectively) never learned.
coordination dilemmas, particularly resource allocation, are The Problem
(And it's a great service to society that people have been debunking the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons which was an armchair moralist article in scientific clothing that had no empirical basis when it was published and yet got widely cited for a while because it was emotionally appealing.)
The commons were well managed by local people and enclosure was a land grab by the rich.
The Tragedy of the Commons as a historical event in Medieval England has been criticized (hard to say debunked from this one article, but perhaps there are more).
The Tragedy of the Commons as an economical/social phenomena has not been debunked.
Since 99.9% of the uses of the phrase Tragedy of the Commons are referring to the second case, I'm not sure it is helpful to say that it has been debunked.
This was what I came here for too. I'm sure someone out there is more interested in the history of the phrase than the economics phenomenon it points to, but it sure isn't me. You could rename it the Doohickey, drop any historical precedent, and I'd still be very interested if someone said the Doohickey was debunked.
You should take it the other way around: the tragedy of the commons is a myth. Of course you could cherry pick some story of bad actors misbehaving. But that's not a general rule, it's not bound by fate, and you just have to shove your foot up their face to prevent it. But in the absence of egotistic capitalist pigs, most people are reasonable in managing shared resources and that's how humanity survived for so long before inventing private property. Anedotally, that's also my experience living in collectives for a few decades: there may be abusive situations dealing with shared resources (who ate all the tomatoes?!) but that's only mildly annoying because it's the exception rather than the norm.
There are plenty of examples of said exploitation, just look at water rights in the US. Your anecdotal and biased experience doesn't disprove it.
However, there is also the comedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons for that matter. Open source for example doesn't suffer from the tragedy of the commons as much as it is suffering from the tragedy of the anticommons.
The controlling entity clearly is failing, sans charging a cutting in line fee. It's in the best interest of the rest to do something. Yet nothing. Perhaps not a ToTC but it's nonetheless a tragedy, or soon to be. And The Commons elsewhere are sure to be the ones to bear the brunt of the blow.
That doesn't sound easy at all, even getting better resourced governments to care about things that will directly affect their voters in 30 years in big ways is already very difficult.
Let alone when it's multiple steps removed and the costs are so diffusely spread out across billions of consumers.
> The Panama Canal Authority is established under Title XIV of the National Constitution, and has exclusive responsibility for the operation, administration, management, preservation, maintenance, and modernization of the canal. It is responsible for the operation of the canal in a safe, continuous, efficient, and profitable manner.[1]
Emphasis mine
If that is wrong, naive or stupid I'd like to know.
This is, by a wide margin, the most interesting "casually made" comment I'd read in a bit. Any chance you can provide slightly more details? I didn't even know there _was_ an island in the Panama Canal; nonetheless people living on it (presumably all researchers?)
https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/pan...
Prior to seeing the image above, I always assumed the canal was just a single passageway between a narrow spot of land. In the image you can also see the mentioned Lake Alajuela in the top-right.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/9.2267/-79.5463&layers...
I read that the canal never got built at first because of mosquitoes. Are mosquitoes still a problem there?
It's like the universe said wait a minute, slow down. I'll tell you when that container ship can move.
This article from 2003 talked about two-way traffic on the canal: https://pancanal.com/en/panama-canal-begins-tests-of-simulta...
- On the new locks they recycle ~60% of the water used already, it's a smart system.
- Another commenter pointed out that they have to allow fresh water through the lock system to prevent salt water contamination of the lakes.
I guess a reason they haven't retro-fitted (yet) the 60% water saving mechanism to the older locks is the scale of the engineering efford involved, plus they can charge people $4.5 million to jump the queue ;)
Also, anything taking the old locks out of operation for a few weeks/months is basically a no-go. That's just too costly.
As a side note, do keep in mind that water is already "saved" a little by going up in a convoy. With the three lock chambers, you get to reuse the same water three times. Not exactly true of course because convoys start and end, but you get the idea.
> A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in recent months amid a deep drought. To manage the situation, the canal’s managing authority has announced increasingly drastic restrictions for the depleted thoroughfare. The Panama Canal Authority also holds auctions for those wishing to jump to the front of the line.
It’s in there. :)
It's the only logical explanation.
1. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Proble....
I know the new one has one that recovers something like 60 percent from the article in the bottom of this comment, but they didn’t retrofit the old one?
I’ve never seen anyone give a straight answer on this one, so I’m genuinely curious if this is entirely a natural disaster or foreseeable but not economically viable or what?
They also could use salt water for the downward leg to the sea as it won’t flow back to the lake, couldn’t they? I saw nothing about this anywhere. But it makes complete sense and would cut lake usage in half in both directions. I’m sure that a surcharge for such a system would be welcomed by ship owners at this point, because the economic impact is considerable. That wouldn’t have a negative environmental impact as you’d just be introducing brackish water to brackish or salt seas at the bottom.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-ne...
The U.S. used a nuclear generator on a ship for that purpose back when they controlled the Canal Zone.
Today I don’t see why they don’t just install a bunch of solar and use the hydroelectric as energy storage to smooth out the production.
And see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38256185 for why the water saving basins are not as great as you would think (at least for the new locks). For the old locks, adding them would probably just add too much too the leveling time. And the construction would take those locks out of operation for at least a couple months, and they just cannot afford that.
In the Netherlands there are locks with pumps for directly leveling, reducing/preventing salt intrusion, or "evening out" the loss of water with a separate pumping station (look up Krammersluizen and Kreekraksluizen). But we're talking a meter or 2 water level difference, not a whopping 26 meters. And those locks are generally not as big, and even then we tend to get rid of those systems where we can (Krammersluizen) as it's just too expensive to operate and maintain.
Keep an eye on whats going on at the Panama Canal. An LNG carrier just paid $4 million to jump the line. This will likely be more common for LNG carriers as their cargo will literally boil off sitting in the hot tropical sun, but it will be interesting to see if container ships end up having to resort to similar measures as transits continue to be restricted due to the ongoing severe drought.probably about $4MM/(anticipated duration of long wait) =)
https://www.econnectenergy.com/articles/how-does-an-lng-plan...
LNG is almost all methane which is the lightest hydrocarbon. Methane is so light a gas that it does not liquefy even under thousands of PSI of compression. And at room temperature it only practically exists in a gas form, pressurized or not, so in that case it needs to be handled like oxygen or nitrogen, other light gases where the heavy-walled steel storage cylinders weigh more than the contents even at maximum pressure.
You just can't get that many kilos of such light molecules into a certain space as a compressed gas compared to how dense a liquid gets.
So they liquefy the gas instead before transport and that requires cryogenics rather than pressure. The chilled liquid can then be stored or transported in tanks of much thinner-walled steel since gas pressure is not a major issue. These low-pressure tanks are thickly insulated with lightweight materials to keep in the cold as much as possible.
And unlike the heavy-walled things like the welders use for their pressurized oxygen, cryogenics are handled like the tanks of liquid oxygen, where you can't completely close the cryogenic storage tanks or pressure would build up beyond the bursting point of their relatively thin-walled construction. The cryogenic tanks are constantly hissing as they release excess gas for this reason.
Since no insulation is perfect, the cargo does pick up heat gradually and this causes a certain amount of steady boiloff. Rather than physically becoming warmer, the cargo self-refrigerates by evaporation.
Basically they are loading metric shiploads of really cold LNG and it just slowly evaporates as they go. The cargo temperature is kept constant by self-refrigeration where the condenser is the plant on shore and the evaporator is the ship on its way at sea.
> The prospects of a growing wait reportedly prompted one company to bid a record $4 million for one of the open slots bringing their anticipated total transit costs to $4.5 million and still they have to wait another week to get their empty gas carrier on its way.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/panama-canal-auction-...
Later in the article, it says that they might give up their bid, which sounds to me like they had contracts that needed fulfillment with expensive penalties. Probably made the bid to hedge their bets, and are working right now to renegotiate penalties to account for unforeseen circumstances.
In case of tankers, even more so. The spot market prices, and corresponding delivery contracts, make 4 million peanuts basically.
Sort of like how failures to the ATC system very rapidly expand until the whole system grinds to a halt.
No redundancy, no buffers, no fallbacks.
The issues are manifold:
- the Panama Canal has already been built at the shortest site possible, dito for the Suez Canal
- constructing a new canal is (virtually) impossible due to the enormous amounts of rock you'd have to move on the Panama side - there's a reason why the existing canal is raised so much above sea level
- both Egypt and Panama lack the financial resources to construct a new canal or meaningfully expand the existing ones, and public funding from the Rest of World isn't really there either
- the impact to nature is just as massive, which makes that a no-go for environmental reasons - why destroy so much of nature just for even more cheap trinkets from China?
- climate change is looming to kill off polar ice, which would enable ships to use polar transit routes without icebreakers and significantly impede the business of the canals
And rivers still flow from that downstream, likely entering the water table of a much larger area than the lake itself. Despite it being "artificial", the water still passes through it to downstream ecosystems, as it did before any dam construction. While they may be lower volume due to the drought and limited releases from the lake, replacing that with "Salt water or nothing" would still be a massive change.
If you don't think that would have much impact, start advocating to alleviate western US water concerns by pumping from the Great Lakes and reversing the course of the St Lawrence River to flow from the Atlantic into the lakes. I'm sure people will be very receptive.
200,000 tons of water per ship, 26 metres above sea level, about 200MWh, so call it 500MWh. With 20,000 ships a year that's 50 a day, or 25GWh. A 2GW solar plant
A large solar farm would can reach that capacity (you don't need to run the pumps 24/7, so Solar is perfect)
How much more to desalinate the water?
Ecology problems aside, you need water at the higher elevations to operate the locks, and the lacks have to retain enough water to remain navigable. It's not practical to pump that much water up hill, so we're at nature's mercy for the water supply.
If there isn't enough water in the system to operating the existing locks, there's no point adding a parallel set to draw from the same limited water supply.
If you were to line these up end to end it would be 96 miles long.
The Panama Canal is only 50 miles long.
You could do it but the entire length of the track would be completely full of containers twice over.
I somehow feel it would not be cost effective in the long run.
Panamax ships carry up to 5,000 TEUs; Neo-Panamax, introduced after the canal's expansion, 14,000.
Beyond that, I think OP was referring to a hypothetical piece of infrastructure that would dwarf anything we've ever built on this planet: drydocking the entire loaded ship and moving it across Panama on a massive rail system capable of moving entire ships across the land.
TBH, I have no idea how a rail compares to a canal in terms of terrain pressure and building viability. Without further information, it's a promising alternative that is very obviously limited by the (area) density of those ships, but obviously a major investment. Somehow, the ship is able to sustain its weight, so it's not an absurd idea, but they can just barely sustain it, so it's only a just barely not absurd of an idea.
One coupd use starship so, sub-orbital or even orbital would be so much faster! /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_machines
The ships look like they're over an order of magnitude heavier than anything on land.
By my calculation, "The Captain" is just under 5 tons per square meter. Contrast that to the neopanamax, almost 6.5 tons per square meter (some uncertainty here -- I'm going by DWT which apparently doesn't contain the ship itself). So yeah, it's certainly heavier, but the areal density isn't an order of magnitude greater.
Serious question, surely it's expensive to unload but so is waiting for the canal. For some loads it seems like it'd make sense to bridge the oceans using rail.
This does mean that you would like to work with the same shipping line at both ends, to address the matching of ship capacities.
Such a rail canal was suggested for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, though (the narrow waist of Mexico): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec#/media/...
I assume that there would be a current that would erode the surrounding environment, but how bad would it really be?
The locks are like a ship elevator. If they weren't there the inland waterway would drain and there wouldn't be water to float on anymore.
I'm not sure why they can't just pump ocean water up into the canal. Perhaps it's just too much water to be feasible.
Because that would wipe out the ecosystem there, the canal is freshwater while the ocean is saltwater.
The French did change their plans to use locks after a few years of work
But more seriously interesting to see that the New Jersey Style wins again.
like digging down 25 meters has been done numerous times all over the world. But having to do that for I think like 70 to 80Km distance wise from would not be cheap.
I thought about this maybe being a usecase for small modular nuclear, another commenter suggested that that has already been done (when the US was running the show).
Several others have commented on the environmental issues with pumping seawater into the freshwater ecosystems.
Cargo insurance, carrying cost of the capital tied up in the cargo, running cost for the ship, opportunity cost of doing another cargo run in that time…
As the gas heats, it will expand, boil off and be vented out. Meaning every additional day is more lost product.
This could be helpful for other ships though.
A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been that we will be encountering changes that are very hard to predict and plan for.
Climate change CAN impact availability of fresh water in the form of rain since warm air holds more moisture, but that's double edged - there's more evaporation from freshwater bodies as well, and the rain can be unpredictable and dangerous since some will be in the form of major storms dumping water nobody's equipped to store along with all the other storm damage.
Or is there something in particular that would make this connection into a disaster area if that flow got started?
The length of the canal is about 75 km, a few dozen cm across that distance would be on the order of 0.04 mm / meter, which is barely enough to make water flow in a particular direction.
You might even have to add a pumping system to the lock to ensure that it would fill up fast enough.
Ecologically, it's mainly about connecting the Atlantic and Pacific hydrologically. They're different temperatures, salinities, turbidities, etc.
Of course I'm not a subject matter expert on this, just wondering what options exist today that didn't before.
The Caribbean is facing seal level rise anyway if we don't find a way to reduce emissions. Again I'm not an expert on this subject, but it doesn't seem cut and dry that a canal would be an environmental disaster if it were possible to excavate.
Edit: Even I learned this[1] from this comment chain, so it seems to me like this isn't necessarily common knowledge.
2. Most of the sea level rise expected from conservative[1] projections of climate change will be hitting us decades and centuries from now. Sea levels have only risen by ~8 inches since 1900, but even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, we would have another 3 feet to look forward to by 2100, and 4.5 more feet by 2200.
3. Storm surges[1], caused by stronger storms, caused by climate change can make low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable, without actually drowning them due to sea level rise.
----
[1] Less conservative projections are dismissed out-of-hand as alarmist, but seem to provide a better roadmap for reality than fairy tales, like the 2C warming that the Paris Accord promised us.
[2] The sea level may have only gone up a few inches, but if an average worst-storm-of-the-year storm surge has gained a foot, it may be the difference between your house being fine, and having six inches of seawater in your living room for one day of every year.
Sea level rise, in itself, would not.
It's ice thats seeing the biggest declines. Freshwater is mostly just being redistributed.
It's also probably more in circulation. Way more. But it almost certainly also means that water will circulate through different places, making sure you have both catastrophic floods and droughts.
Is there any actual evidence that global warming increases droughts in central America? Or is this just another "every time a hurricane hits we blame it on global warming?"
It has long been known that drought is a major problem for the Panama Canal, and that climate change will increase the severity and occurrences of droughts. None of this is unexpected.
Droughts happen. This is a story not because of the drought but because of how busy the canal is and the cargo of the ship that paid to skip the line. It was time sensitive cargo.
So basically everything you said is wrong.
The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023". If we want to know specific local effects we need to run other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that should be enough to scare politicians into doing something, right? :P
To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not sure climate change is responsible yet". We will never have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this is part of why the response to climate change was and is so underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1].
The thing the average reader should take away is:
- We know global warming will be very, very bad for the majority of humanity, but...
- We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst, and attributing specific weather events to global warming is difficult[2], but...
- Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-c...
[1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now, I hear you. The fossil fuel companies also somehow brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear plants to replace with the dirtiest burning coal imaginable. Lignite balls.
[2] Like, Nobel Prize level research.
Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but physics is close enough.
No it's not. But in practice that sort of relation seems to have about a 10% chance of being an actual casual relationship.
> Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet.
When there is fuzzy evidence that X causes Y it is not safe to say "X causes Y" and I'm not willing to concede an exception to this when X = climate change.
Most climate change models are designed to try and predict certain events over others - i.e. sea level rise, overall temperature change, etc. It doesn't really make sense to expect the IPCC to produce a model that accurately predicts drought in Panama (and no one is claiming they have?).
There are a bunch of broad-stroke descriptions about climate change. Generalizations about what it may change. Those are what I invoked. We expect droughts to get worse. Specifically, though it's hard to say how or where or what, we should expect to see more 'rare' events (that are probably not 'rare' anymore but we kind of lack the data to check).
I guess I would ask you if you apply this level of skepticism to any other predictive practice. Pairing general predictions ("more drought") with targeted models (estimates for sea level rise) is a pretty common practice.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/03/science/earth...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/03/04/climate-ch...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220620152119.h...
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/new-unexpected-shipping-r...
https://www.axios.com/2018/08/23/maersk-to-send-first-contai...
(I assume you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal )
It has the original engineering drawings of many of the places the canal was proposed and surveyed and was going to be built before Panama was finalized for practicality and political reasons.
To quote my own blog from when I was there:
> The number one attraction in town is obviously The Canal and before visiting I make a stop at the museum in Casco Viejo which is amazing considering the tiny $2 admission price. My engineering background means I’m fascinated by the surveying work that was undertaken before construction began. One map in particular shows proposed routes through Tehuantepec in Mexico, through lake Nicaragua, through a couple of different places in Panama and finally one using a river mostly in modern-day Colombia. The decision didn’t actually come down to the “shortest” distance to dig as you might think, but primarily on how the mountain range through Central America would be dealt with. The final location chosen meant it was possible to create a huge in-land lake and use locks to elevate the ships 28 meters to that level.
Really, really fascinating. I went back for a second day.