The ship, stretching more than 1,300 feet, ran aground and blocked one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes, leaving more than 100 ships stuck at each end of the canal. CAIRO — Trying to convey the sheer scale of the nearly quarter-mile-long container ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Tuesday evening, some news outlets compared it to the length of four soccer fields. Others simply called it gigantic. But the main thing to know was this: After powerful winds forced the ship aground on one of the canal’s banks, it was big enough to block nearly the entire width of the canal, producing a large traffic jam in one of the world’s most important maritime arteries. By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 per cent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods. “The Suez Canal is the choke point,” said Capt. John Konrad, the founder of the shipping news website gCaptain.com, noting that 90 per cent of the world’s goods are transported on ships. It “could not happen in a worse place,” he said, “and the timing’s pretty bad, too.” The potential fallout is vast. The vessels caught in the bottleneck or expected to arrive there in the coming days include oil tankers carrying about one-tenth of a day’s total global oil consumption, according to Kpler, a market research firm, to say nothing of the rest of the cargo now waiting to traverse the canal. And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers. The ship, the Ever Given, was heading from China to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It ran aground amid poor visibility and high winds from a sandstorm that struck much of northern Egypt this week, according to George Safwat, a spokesman for the Suez Canal Authority. The storm caused an “inability to direct the ship,” he said in a statement. Tiny against their quarry’s bulk, swarms of tugboats raced to try to wrench the Ever Given free, and a front-end loader strained to dig it out from the canal’s eastern embankment, where its bow sat wedged. Continued high winds, along with the sheer size of the ship, complicated the task, according to GAC. The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against. As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved. The Suez Canal is a key artery for oil flows from the Persian Gulf region to Europe and North America. Roughly 5 per cent of globally traded crude oil and 10 per cent of refined petroleum products passed through the canal before the pandemic, estimated David Fyfe, the chief economist at Argus Media. Source: Adapted from Yee, V & Goodman, S. Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck. New York Times, 25 March 2021. [Online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/world/middleeast/suez-canal-blocked-ship.html [Accessed 08 April 2022] In reference to the above article, discuss the role of transport infrastructure in facilitating global trade