Modern

The French attempt of 1881 to 1889 collapsed under disease and design errors. The American project succeeded after 1904 because sa...

More than 90,000 vessels transit each year, several hundred a day, making this the busiest shipping chokepoint and the shortest ro...

Between Iran and Oman, the usable deep-water lanes are only a few kilometers wide in each direction. Around 17 to 21 million barre...

Perim Island splits the strait into usable channels a few kilometers wide between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea. Millions of barrels...

The Bosphorus, at points under 700 meters wide, and the Dardanelles form the only sea exit from the Black Sea, governed since 1936...

The Oresund between Denmark and Sweden, the Great Belt, the main deep-water route, and the Little Belt connect the Baltic to the w...

The only sea exit from the Mediterranean is a two-layer exchange, Atlantic water in at the surface and saltier Mediterranean water...

Opened in 1895 to link Germany's naval bases without the Skagerrak detour, the canal saves roughly 450 kilometers between the Nort...

Franklin's 1845 expedition of 129 men vanished seeking it, with the wrecks finally found in 2014 and 2016, and Amundsen completed ...

Soviet icebreakers pioneered scheduled convoys along the Siberian coast in the 1930s. The route cuts Asia-Europe distance by rough...

Very large crude carriers hauling around 2 million barrels mostly sail the Cape because the Suez Canal handles loaded tankers roug...

The Dover Strait sees several hundred vessel movements a day, among the densest shipping anywhere. Frequent ferry sailings between...

Tens of millions of containers a year move from Shanghai, Ningbo, Yantian and Busan through Suez to Rotterdam, Hamburg, Antwerp, F...

Roughly two weeks to 20 days from China's coast to Los Angeles and Long Beach, with Pacific Northwest and all-water services via P...

Containerization went transatlantic for keeps in the mid 1960s, a decade after Malcom McLean's first domestic box ships. Today the...

Qatar ships on the order of 80 million tonnes of LNG yearly, with a major expansion aiming far higher, and Asia's utilities are it...

China buys roughly 70 percent of seaborne iron ore, and the Pilbara trio of Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue supplies the largest shar...

Before 2022, Ukraine and Russia together supplied a large share of world wheat and most sunflower oil exports, moving through Odes...

The first Chongqing-Duisburg train ran in 2011 across about 11,000 kilometers, with bogie changes at gauge breaks like Alashankou ...

Roughly 30,000 kilometers of connected highway run from Prudhoe Bay toward Ushuaia, interrupted only by the Darien Gap between Pan...

Authorized in 1956 with 90 percent federal funding through the highway trust fund, the system standardized American road freight. ...

Built over two decades from 1959 with heavy engineering losses among Chinese and Pakistani workers, the highway follows Silk Road ...

The corridor bundles Rhine barges, alpine rail tunnels and parallel motorways into one supply chain spine. Its centerpiece is the ...

Also called the middle corridor, the route runs from Kazakhstan's Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk by ferry to Baku, then by the B...

Opened in 1994, the 50.5 kilometer tunnel holds the longest undersea section of any tunnel. Purpose-built Le Shuttle trains carry ...

Seven locks between Montreal and Lake Erie, with the Welland Canal alone climbing about 100 meters past Niagara, let oceangoing ve...

Ocean ships reach Nanjing and river fleets push far beyond, with roughly 2,800 kilometers of navigable waterway. System cargo volu...

The 1992 Rhine-Main-Danube canal closed the gap to the North Sea, creating a 3,500 kilometer trans-European waterway through ten c...

From the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, the Mekong moves bulk cargo, sand, rice, fe...

Lakers, ships up to 300 meters long that never leave the system, haul taconite iron ore from Duluth and Marquette to the steel mil...

Ocean ships reach Iquitos in Peru, about 3,700 kilometers from the sea, often cited as the world's most distant ocean port, and ba...

Pushed convoys of twenty to thirty barges run soy, maize and fuels downriver from Paraguayan and Bolivian terminals past Rosario, ...

Opened in 1952 after construction with convict labor under brutal conditions, the canal's thirteen locks lift traffic about 88 met...

Split between dedicated freighters and the belly holds of passenger jets, transpacific air cargo anchors at hubs like Anchorage, N...

Fred Smith founded FedEx on the hub-and-spoke overnight idea, a thesis famously sketched at Yale, and moved operations to Memphis ...

Great circle routes between Asia and North America pass near Alaska, and cabotage rules allow foreign carriers efficient technical...

The Soviet system, whose name means friendship, runs roughly 4,000 kilometers from the Volga-Ural region west, splitting in Belaru...

Running about 8,800 kilometers from Houston to the New York harbor area with a capacity around 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day, Col...

Opened in 2006 by a BP-led consortium, BTC carries Azeri Light crude from the Caspian across Georgia to the Turkish terminal at Ce...

Built 1974 to 1977 after the oil embargo made Alaskan crude a national priority, the pipeline runs mostly above ground on elevated...

Signed in 2014 as a multidecade supply deal reported around 400 billion dollars and started up in 2019, the pipeline carries gas f...

Built by an Aramco affiliate after the Second World War, Tapline ran more than 1,200 kilometers from Abqaiq area fields across Sau...

Nord Stream 1 began delivering Russian gas from near Vyborg to Lubmin in Germany in 2011, with the second line following in 2012, ...

Charlemagne began a trench between the river basins in 793, the Fossa Carolina, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria opened a small canal ...

Russia, Iran and India signed the founding agreement in 2000, and more states joined later. The concept routes cargo from Mumbai b...