[professor_v]

It never costed $56 billion. It's just $56 billion worth of goods held up for a few days. A bit like a bitcoin payment.

[curiousgal]

Some of those goods are cattle. Imagine being blocked in the middle of the desert on a steel ship for days.

[gruez]

It takes almost a day to transit the canal, so presumably they have some way of dealing with the heat.

[suprfsat]

How many cattle can fit in a TEU?

[MertsA]

Are we dealing with spherical cows here?

[mschuster91]

Cattle (and sheep, of which there are at least 130.000 stuck at the moment, see https://www.voanews.com/middle-east/stranded-suez-canal-ship...) aren't squeezed in containers but rather shipped on specialized ships (which in turn often are sometimes barely retrofitted other ships, such as car ferries, see https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/spanien-rinder-irrfahrt...).