Im sure people have come across the videos where ships passing through said canal or similar ones go through one or more “water lock”. Water levels between connected water bodies should be the same right? Why do they need to raise or lower the passing ships?
In: Planetary Science
> Water levels between connected water bodies should be the same right?
They don’t have to be, and often aren’t.
The Suez Canal in Egypt is a rare example of a canal where the water on both sides *do* happen to be more or less the same. That canal has no locks because, indeed, it does not need them.
The Panama canal is an entirely different beast. Even *if* the bodies of water on the two sides were at the same height (and, surprise surprise, they aren’t), the main thing that particular canal is actually doing is *lifting the ships across the land*, moreso than just making up the height difference.
The Americas have one long mountainous backbone running all the way from tip to tip. Draw a horizontal line across either continent and you will cross mountains somewhere. Panama is no exception. If you want to get from one ocean to the other, you need to go up and over these. No way around that. (Or, well, there is away around that, but avoiding that way was *the whole point*.)
I suppose in theory you could carve straight through them, or even tunnel beneath them. But that’s a ridiculously monumental proposition. The canal in its current form was already an engineering marvel that took a lot of time, a lot of money, and frankly, a lot of lost lives to complete. They were not going to be moving any more earth than they already had to to get that done.
Perhaps the only thing that made the Panama canal project viable at all is the fact that, by pure happenstance, there’s a large natural lake midway through the crossing, nestled in the mountains. The water level of that lake is high above the oceans on either side, but if you can somehow lift ships up to that level, the lake can be a shortcut, reducing the amount of work cutting channels. So that’s what the canal does: you come in from one side, locks raise you up to the lake, you cross the lake, and more locks lower you back down.
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