Suction dredgers can fill two Olympic pools per hour

In the disputed waters of the South China Sea, nations are using industrial machinery to physically rewrite geography. China currently maintains the world's largest fleet of cutter suction dredgers, specialized vessels designed to vacuum millions of tons of sand from the seafloor. The most powerful of these machines can extract up to 6,000 cubic meters of material every hour, a volume equivalent to filling two Olympic sized swimming pools.