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
the panama canal is a bit different from other canals because of the varying elevations of the terrain. They either would have had to dig extremely (and unfeasibly) deep, or they could build it in a way to allow ships to traverse the elevation changes of the terrain. As it is, they already had a hard time removing enough earth for the current canal; the United States even proposed using buried/detonated [nuclear bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) for widening the canal in the 50’s.
The Pacific is also ~20cm* higher than the Atlantic, so if it were just open there would be a constant current of water, not to mention the tides are different as well. The Pacific side level changes about 6x* more than the Atlantic side with the tides.
**source: [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268174985.pdf](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268174985.pdf)
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