Least cost Path for the concept of a plan for a Canal crossing the Musandam Peninsula (UAE and Oman) Given current global affairs, I decided it would be fun to calculate a Least Cost Path that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz while I teach myself QGIS. In GIS, a least-cost path assigns a 'cost' to each pixel in a raster and computes the path with the lowest cost using a pathfinding algorithm such as Dijkstra's. From a 30m resolution Digital Terrain Model (image 2), slope (image 3) was calculated. From the slope, an Elevation Cost Multiplier raster was calculated by splitting the slope into 3 intervals: less than 3 percent, less than 10 %, and greater than 10 %. These intervals were selected based on a New Pananamax lock length of 450m and a 10m elevation gain per lock (New Pananamax is 8.66m elevation gain per lock. Slopes of up to 10 percent could be tolerated over short distances but should be avoided. Slopes of greater than 10% are essentially impassable for a large ship canal and are heavily penalized.…