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The Three Gorges Dam Ship Locks

What is a lock and what is it used for?

A lock is a device for raising and lowering boats between stretches of water of different levels on river and canal waterways.

  • Three Gorges Dam Ship Lock

    Three Gorges Dam Ship Lock

  • Yangtze Three Gorges Dam Ship Lock

    Yangtze Three Gorges Dam Ship Lock

 Locks are used to make a river more easily navigable, or to allow a canal to take a reasonably direct line across county that is not level. It is required when a stretch of river is made navigable by bypassing an obstruction such as rapid, dam, or mill weir because of the change in river level across the obstacle. Therefore, here are the Three Gorges Ship Locks.

Three Gorges Ship Locks

The construction of Three Gorges Ship Locks is intended to increase river shipping from ten million to 100 million tons annually, with transportation costs cut by 30% to 37%.

Since the installation of the ship locks, shipping through the Three Gorges become much safer, which changed the fact that the gorges were notoriously dangerous to navigate. Each of the two ship locks is made up of five stages, taking around four hours in total to transit, and has a vessel capacity of 10,000 tons.

  • Yangtze Three Gorges Ship Lock

    Yangtze Three Gorges Ship Lock

  • Yangtze Three Gorges Dam Ship Lock

    Yangtze Three Gorges Dam Ship Lock

The locks are 280 meters long, 35 meters wide, and 5 meters deep, which are 30 meters longer than those on the St Lawrence Seaway but half as deep.

Before the dam was constructed, the maximum freight capacity of the river at the Three Gorges was only 18 million tons every year, but a total of 198 million tons of freight per year pass through the Three Gorges Dam ship locks presently.

The freight capacity of the river increased six times and the cost of shipping was reduced by 25%, compared with the previous years.

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