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Suez Canal blockage is visible from outer space, here are the satellite photos
Aerospace corporation Airbus shared a series of high-resolution photos captured by its Pleiades satellite on early Thursday morning from outer space.
Even though Shoei Kisen, the Japanese owner of the skyscraper-sized cargo ship wedged across Egypt's Suez Canal, has apologised for the incident that's imperilling global shipping — the predicament is clearly visible even from outer space, thanks to Earth-observing satellites.
'The Ever Given', the Panama-flagged ship carrying cargo between Asia and Europe, has been stuck in the key waterway since Tuesday and could remain there till at least Saturday night (Tokyo time), as per to its owner, Japan's Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd. The incident has been making the headlines over the past several days due to its impact on global maritime trade, raising the prospects of higher inflation with more ships ferrying cargoes and commodities forced to divert.
Hours after the ship was stranded in the Suez Canal, aerospace corporation Airbus shared a series of high-resolution photos captured by its Pleiades satellite on early Thursday morning from outer space.
The images show, in stunning detail, the mired ship and a queue of cargo vessels waiting to enter the canal from the Red Sea. The bird's-eye view provides a wider context to the predicament of the 400-meter-long ship, stuck sideways in the narrow, man-made canal dividing continental Africa from the Sinai Peninsula.
The blockage highlights a major risk faced by the shipping industry as more and more vessels, which are getting bigger and bigger, transit maritime chokepoints including the Suez, Panama Canal and the Strait of Hormuz. According to news agency Bloomberg, it’s going to be tough to come up with a single figure for how much the epic traffic jam in the canal is costing, but shipping rates are already skyrocketing.
The number of ships waiting to enter the Suez Canal is also growing as the waterway remains blocked. Data compiled by Bloomberg shows there were 238 vessels queued up Thursday, compared with 186 counted on Wednesday and around 100 at the start of the blockage.
A specialized dredger has been deployed in efforts to dislodge the stuck ship. The Mashhour has completed 87% of its targeted work of that’s removing sand surrounding the vessel, displacing 17,000 cubic meters of material per hour. It started operations 100 meters from the stuck ship on Thursday and can get as close as 10 meters. 'The Ever Given' will start to be pulled once the dredging operations are completed.
