More than 80% of world trade by volume travels by ship — and almost all of it squeezes through a handful of gaps where land nearly closes. Two of those gaps carry more than half the oil that moves on water. One of them is narrower than the runway at most airports is long.
Malacca and Hormuz together move about 44 million barrels a day. The EIA puts them at 29% and 25% of all seaborne oil — the rest of the world's chokepoints share what is left.
A logarithmic strip from a lock chamber to an open strait. The mark in teal is a 400-metre container ship — the thing that has to fit through all of it.
Hormuz looks generous at 39 km across — until you notice that ships do not use 39 km of it. Traffic runs in two lanes about 3.7 km wide, inbound and outbound, separated by a buffer of the same width. Bab el-Mandeb, 29 km wide, is split by the island of Perim into two channels of the same 2-nautical-mile order. The usable sea is always a sliver of the visible sea.
Count the hulls instead of the barrels and the ranking changes shape entirely: one strait dwarfs both canals combined.
Attacks on shipping in Bab el-Mandeb emptied the Suez Canal within weeks. The traffic did not vanish — it went the long way round Africa, on the dashed line on the map.
The map shows the arithmetic. In the first half of 2025, Suez and the SUMED pipeline together moved 4.9 million barrels a day while the Cape of Good Hope carried 9.1 million — an open-water route around an entire continent outperforming the canal built to make it unnecessary.
The other canal did not close for a war. It closed for want of rain: every ship that crosses Panama is lifted by fresh water out of a lake, and the lake ran low.
Of the 9,936 FY2024 transits, 7,084 were Panamax vessels and 2,852 Neopanamax. The old locks are 33.53 m wide; the 2016 locks, 55 m. Between them lies the Culebra Cut, where the canal is only 192 m across on the straight stretches — a corridor blasted through the continental divide, and the single narrowest working door on this map.
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