Disaster in Strait of Malacca would cause worldwide chaos – 05/03/2023 – Science

Every year, around 90,000 ships travel through the narrow maritime passage of the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indian Ocean to the Pacific.

The cargo transported – grains, crude oil and every type of commodity you can imagine – represents about 40% of the world’s trade. Above these ships lies one of the busiest airways in the world, and below them, over the ocean floor, is a massive network of undersea internet cables that keep the world connected.

Together, these factors make the Strait of Malacca one of the most important arteries for the global economy. It has been classified as a choke point in reports by the World Trade Organization, the US Energy Information Administration and the London-based Chatham House foreign affairs think tank.

They all claim: you have a beautiful strait there. It would be a shame if something happened to him.

Researchers warn that it is only a matter of time before a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption, strikes the region. And when that happens, the consequences will affect the entire world.

Disruption of major trade routes is a consistent problem, whether due to crime or human error. Piracy has long been a scourge in the region, but the strait is cooperatively supervised by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand and is generally under control.

It is not uncommon for ship collisions to occur on site. Ten US sailors died when the USS John McCain collided with a Liberian-flagged oil tanker in 2017.

But, with a minimum width of 2.7 km, the site is not narrow enough to be blocked by an errant container ship, as occurred in the Suez Canal in 2021, with the ship Ever Given, which is 400 meters wide.

The biggest threats to the Strait of Malacca, which separates the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, lie in the natural world.

Among the many troubling maps of activity in the region, the most notable is the one that pulls together the planet’s active volcanoes and recent earthquakes. The coast of Sumatra and the southernmost part of the island of Java, following the course of the Sunda Trench, form a belt of seismic activity with several volcanoes.

In Java, two volcanoes – Mount Semeru and Mount Merapi – have recently erupted. In the Sunda Strait, which separates Java from Sumatra, lies Krakatoa, and to the east is Mount Tambora. Its eruption in 1815 caused agricultural production to drop even in Europe and the eastern United States.

The Mount Tambora eruption had magnitude VEI7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), a logarithmic scale that goes up to VEI8.

An event like that of 1815 may occur once or twice a millennium. But it doesn’t take an eruption of such high magnitude to cause serious problems at a global chokepoint, especially if it happens at one of the volcanoes closest to the Straits of Malacca.

In 2018, researchers at the Center for Risk Studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK imagined the effects of scenarios that included a VEI6 eruption of Mount Merapi in Sumatra. They suggested that the eruption could produce clouds of ash and fine pyroclastic – fragments of rock ejected into the air – that will float across the Straits of Malacca, towards Singapore and Malaysia.

The resulting damage to local infrastructure and supply chains (aviation, in particular, would be badly hit) would combine with a global temperature drop of 1°C, generating an estimated $2.51 trillion drop. 13 trillion) of global GDP over a five-year period.

This number is much higher than the US$ 5 billion (R$ 26 billion) estimated damage to the global economy, due to the VEI4 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, in Iceland, in 2010.

Mount Merapi’s last VEI4 eruption also occurred in 2010. A VEI6 eruption at Merapi is less likely – its return period, which is the estimated average time between each eruption, is 750 years.

But the risks are very high and deserve serious consideration, according to volcanologist Lara Mani of the Center for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge. And Merapi is just one of several active volcanoes in the region.

Mani says VEI4, VEI5 and VEI6 eruptions “can still really damage the strait. And the thing is, when a volcano starts, it doesn’t say when it’s going to stop.”

Let’s imagine that one of these active volcanoes – like Mount Semeru on the island of Java, Indonesia – produces a VEI5 or VEI6 eruption.

Magma would erupt from the crater. Ashes would be thrown into the sky. Tremors shook cities in the region.

If the wind is in a southwesterly direction, all air traffic from the Straits of Malacca would be suspended. The ash would fall on the strait itself. Pieces of pumice would accumulate on the surface of the sea.

A large earthquake relatively close by would be a threat of similar scale. It could cause a tsunami over the strait, like the December 26, 2004 tsunami. It would also generate turbidity currents – clouds of churned sediment moving at high speed – that would reach the ocean floor.

“It’s typically what causes the cables to break,” explains Mani. “In the eruption of Tonga [a erupção VEI5 do vulcão Hunga Tonga-Hunga, em janeiro de 2022], it was the turbidity currents that broke the cables, causing a regional internet blackout. Turbidity currents also bury these cables, making them even more difficult to recover.”

On the upside, these natural disasters would cause less disruption to global shipping than the Ever Given in Suez, according to Tristan Smith of University College London.

Smith is a navigation specialist at the university’s energy institute. He says the ships’ machinery must be able to handle the ash and that the tsunami is more dangerous for people on land, where the wave breaks and is larger than at sea.

It is also thought that, in the event of an eruption, an exclusion zone would be declared, forcing ships to follow another route. Rerouting ships would have effects on global trade, according to Smith, but the system should eventually be able to handle the situation.

“If you have a ship that is three days late because it has to take the long way around Indonesia, all that ship has to do is increase speed by a knot or two to make up for the delay,” he explains.

And there would still be the issue of planes on the ground. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull led to a ban on the use of airspace for six days, causing problems for millions of people. And even worse would be the cutting of undersea cables, which would cause economic pandemonium.

“Trillions of dollars move through these cables every day,” according to Mani, “which basically underpins our financial markets. Our undersea cables are vulnerable and there have been accidents over the years.”

Mani highlights the disruption of several submarine internet cables by an earthquake near Taiwan in 2006, which left a single cable connecting Hong Kong to the rest of the world.

“It took 45 days to repair the other cables and it was very lucky that one of them managed to survive,” recalls Mani. “Imagine 45 days of nothing for Hong Kong and the surrounding area.”

It would have been catastrophic, she explains, not just for Hong Kong but for the rest of the world. Like Singapore, Hong Kong is a financial hub and a local blackout would bring worldwide economic chaos.

“We just don’t have redundancy,” Mani says of cables: if something goes wrong, there are no substitutes to meet demand. “And our satellites, in their current state, can carry only about 3% of global communications.”

preventive measures

What can we do to make the strait less vulnerable?

We cannot stop earthquakes. The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and UNESCO have developed early warning systems for events such as tsunamis, and there is a service in operation (the World Navigation Warning System) that alerts shipping to geological or meteorological disasters. The Japanese Coast Guard is the official coordinator for the region that includes the Strait of Malacca.

With regard to volcanoes, it may one day be possible to prevent eruptions by manipulating the magma underneath volcanoes, but we are many years away from seeing this possibility as realistic.

At the moment, we need to improve not only the monitoring of volcanoes – an eruption warning up to a few hours in advance makes a big difference – but also in identifying them. Mani warns that Indonesia has “more volcanoes than you can imagine, and for many of them, we [vulcanólogos] we never looked straight.”

Also, the best preparation is diversification. More satellites with internet would help. Countries in the region would also increase their resilience by launching new submarine cables that follow a different path than the current ones.

China appears to be adopting this practice with regard to shipping. For years, it has been trying to build a canal through southern Thailand, eliminating the need to go through the Strait of Malacca.

The Thailand Canal, as it is called, would reduce fuel costs by providing a shortcut to shipping crude oil, but would also add significant resiliency to Chinese shipping.

While the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee is believed to consider this resilience in geopolitical terms, it could also be useful as an insurance policy for global shipping.

Finding ways to reduce dependence on bottlenecks such as the Strait of Malacca is “certainly on the minds of many governments in Asia”, according to Chatham House’s Asia and Oceania program director Ben Bland.

The responsible government bodies in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore did not respond to BBC requests for comment, but it can be assumed that some contingency planning is already underway. And anyone benefiting from the Straits of Malacca – and you’re in that group if you’re reading this story – should hope that those plans never need to be put into action.

Text originally published here.