Vistula Spit canal

The Vistula Spit canal (Kanał przez Mierzeję Wiślaną), officially known as the Nowy Świat ship canal (Kanał żeglugowy Nowy Świat), is a canal across the Polish section of the Vistula Spit that creates a second connection between the Vistula Lagoon and Gulf of Gdańsk. It allows ships to enter the Vistula Lagoon and the port of Elbląg without having to rely on the Russian Strait of Baltiysk, saving a 100 km journey and avoiding Russian waters. Its construction started in February 2019. It is 1,536 m in length and allows ships of draft up to 4 m, length up to 100 m, and beam up to 20 m to pass through.

The canal was officially inaugurated on 17 September 2022. Further works will continue. It is part of the project to construct a waterway connecting Bay of Gdańsk with the port of Elbląg with a total length of 22.88 km.

The canal is located between the villages of Skowronki and Przebrno, at the site of an abandoned settlement called Nowy Świat, hence its official name.

Works


The major works included: the construction of the breakwater forebay on the Gdańsk Bay side, using 10,000 concrete blocks, the construction of the shipping channel together with all its infrastructure, including locks; the construction of new roads and two swing bridges and the construction of an artificial island in the Vistula Lagoon.

The works started in February 2019 with tree cutting, which was finished during 15–20 February 2019. Logging and branch removal was to be finished by the end of March.

The beginning of the construction of the artificial island was announced on 30 May 2020. Its area is planned to be about 180 hectares and it is expected to be a bird habitat. Its tentative name is the Aestian Island, selected by a poll and to be formally approved.

The first of two bridges over the canal, the southern one, was completed in June 2021. It is on the road connecting Krynica Morska and Stegna.

Costs
A contract was signed with a Polish-Belgian consortium in October 2019 to build the canal at a cost of 992 million PLN (230 million euro). The total cost of the project is expected to be 2 billion PLN.

Concerns
The Russian Federation strongly objected to the canal on both environmental and security grounds, claiming that since the canal could allow NATO warships to enter the Vistula Lagoon without passing near the Russian military facilities at Baltiysk, this presented a direct threat to the security of Kaliningrad and the Russian Federation as a whole.

Environmental concerns had been expressed by environmental activists in Europe and Poland, which did not stop the project.

Marine biologist Dr. Agata Błaszczyk expresses the concern associated with the phosphorus accumulated in the sediments at the bottom of the lagoon, primarily coming from technical wastewaters from industries in the area of Elbląg, from animal farming sewage, and from washed-out fertilizers, which contribute to eutrophication of the nearly closed lagoon resulting in strong blooms of cyanobacteria, which in turn contribute to algal blooms in the lagoon, giving it a distinct greenish color compared with the rest of the Baltic Sea. The new waterway is expected to contribute to the mobility of the sediments, possibly resulting in changes in the ecology of the adjacent areas of the Baltic Sea with unknown consequences. The concern is that the cyanobacteria in the lagoon are different from those in the open sea, with higher toxicity.