Seven Straits That Explain the Map

Oceans are where geography gets vague; straits are where it snaps back into focus. A strait is a point-sized answer to a continent-sized question, which makes the great ones both the best value on the globe and the spine of world trade. Learn these seven and you have not just seven answers; you have the joints that the continents hinge on.

Gibraltar: the Atlantic's doorway

Fourteen kilometres of water between Spain and Morocco, the ancients' Pillars of Hercules, and the only natural way into the Mediterranean. Pin it at the meeting of two continents at about 36°N. Bonus intuition: the whole Mediterranean would slowly evaporate away without the Atlantic topping it up through this gap.

Dover: the moat that made an island matter

The English Channel narrows to 33 kilometres between Dover and Calais; on clear days each coast watches the other. It is the busiest shipping lane in the world and the reason British history reads the way it does.

The Bosporus: a city astride two continents

The Black Sea drains to the Mediterranean through a channel that narrows to about 700 metres, with Istanbul built on both banks: Europe on one side, Asia on the other. Paired with the Dardanelles to its southwest, it is why that one city has been besieged, renamed and fought over for two and a half millennia.

Bab el-Mandeb: the Gate of Grief

Where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, about 30 kilometres between Djibouti and Yemen. Everything that transits the Suez Canal also threads this needle, which is why a crisis here reprices shipping worldwide. On the globe, find the Horn of Africa and slide just north of it.

Hormuz: the world's oil valve

The Persian Gulf's only exit, a dogleg about 39 kilometres wide between Iran and the Omani exclave on the Musandam Peninsula. Roughly a fifth of the world's traded oil passes through it. It is the most consequential right-angle turn in the ocean.

Malacca: a quarter of everything

Between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra runs the main street between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, carrying on the order of a quarter of the world's traded goods. It funnels down toward Singapore at its southeastern end, which is the entire explanation for Singapore. In the game, the strait and the city are nearly interchangeable pins.

Bering: where the hemispheres almost touch

About 85 kilometres of cold water between Russia and Alaska, on the seam where the map wraps around. In the middle sit the two Diomede Islands, one Russian, one American, less than four kilometres apart with the International Date Line between them: neighbours living on different days.

The man-made pair

Two canals complete the set, and both are point-precise answers. Suez (opened 1869) splices the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and saved ships the entire loop around Africa. Panama (opened 1914) cuts the American isthmus at its narrowest useful point. Both sit at the skinny waists of their landmasses, which is exactly how to find them on a label-free globe.

Why chokepoints are scoring gold

Every entry above is a junction of two coastlines, and coastlines are the loudest feature on the game's globe (the technique guide leans on this hard). A strait question is therefore the rare case where a perfect pin is realistic within the ten seconds: no interior to misjudge, no climate inference needed. Learn the seven as reflexes and they become the fixed stars the rest of your map rotates around.