Ship locks

Ship locks:
The tree Gorges dam in china has the biggest ship lock in the world in terms of size. There are 2 giant ship locks in this dam each composed of 5 ladders. These locks fill water about 30 meters deep in a couple of minutes, and in total it takes ships 4 hours to get trough. The pipes used to inject and release water can let a truck pass trough.

Ship's approaching the locks to get 160 meters higher:


The locks during the construction:




When talking about the size of 1 lock on it's own the Berendrecht lock in the harbour of Antwerp is the biggest in the world. It drop's only 13.5 meters but has a size of 500 meter long and 68 meters wide. Even really big container and oil ships can pass this way:




The Oskemen lock bypassing a hydro-electric dam on the River Ertis in Kazakhstan has the deepest single lock in the world. This one handles a height difference of 42 meters with one single lock. A famous canal passage, the Panama Cannel in Panama, has 3 huge locks. None of the them is the biggest in the world but all three together they make one of the biggets ship lock projects ever constructed. When you enter this channel from north to south you will first enter the Gatun lock, which is the biggest of the three locks in the Panama channel. A lot of cruise ships form the US enter the channel here:


When you go further south the ships enter the Pidro miguel locks, and 1.6 miles south of this lock they enter the Miraflores locks which is the gate to the pacific ocean:


A very special lock passage can be found in Caen hill in England. In the ´Kennet and Avond Canal´ 29 locks can be found in a distance of only 3.2 km for small recreation boats. The total rise is 72m. The locks come in three groups. The lower seven locks, Foxhangers Wharf Lock to Foxhangers Bridge Lock, are spread over 1.2km. The next sixteen locks form a steep flight in a straight line up the hillside. Because of the steepness of the terrain, the pounds between these locks are very short: