Hola Anne. Good post with links about an important subject, but please change the title to reflect that your topic is the new Nicaragua Canal, and not about the new Panama Canal, which is a different project.
The new Nicaragua Canal is a provocative geo-political gambit by the Chinese working in secret with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his ruling party, the Sandinistas.
Edit: The Nicaragua Canal is also referred to as the "Nicaragua Grand Canal", or the "Nicaragua Interoceanic Grand Canal"
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My handle is Xulonn, a name that I associate with my woodturning hoppy and my website - but my identity is not a secret. My name is David van Harn, and I am a retired American - a pensionado in the local lingo - who lives a modest life here in the cool, green Western Panamanian town of Boquete not far from the Costa Rica border. My academic background is a BS from U.C. Berkeley in Conservation of Natural Resources that I earned in 1976 at the age of 36. Conservation and ecology are subjects that I have been interested in all of my adult life, so I view the Nicaragua Canal project from that perspective.
The widening, new locks, and new water conservation measures for our canal near Panama City are an "upgrade" - but they still call it "the new Panama Canal."
The Nicaragua Canal project is unrelated to Panama, except as a source of concern - Panama could lose revenue to traffic using the Nicaragua Canal.
The new Panama Canal will be competed in a year or so, and is simply a widening of the current canal to handle larger ships - the "post-Panamax" class. There's a good page on container ships on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_shipThe monster gates for the locks are arriving and currently being installed. Also new is a system of new water-conserving ponds that will make the "upgraded" canal more water efficient, because everything depends on Lake Gatun having enough water to operate the locks.
The New Panama Canal will accommodate the much larger post-Panamax ships, but not the "Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCV's).
The Spiegel article on the Nicaragua canal is excellent, and it covers most of the issues - political environmental, and technical - associated with this important project. The Nicaragua Canal will have a global impact.
I plan to monitor this thread and participate in it because it concerns the country in which I live - and the environmental, social and political issues are of concern to many people around the world.
It could get ugly.
PS: Don't forget that Mother Nature, responding to the massive release of CO2 by humans, is preparing to open her own Atlantic <-> Pacific water transit route - the Arctic Ocean's northwest and northeast passages - for at least a couple of months per year in near future.
