This is an incredibly stupid question, but I’d really like to know what the consequences of a project like this would be given the current drought in the lake that feeds the canal.
In: Engineering
The maximum land elevation of the canal is almost 100 feet above sea level.
Excavating an area 50-100 feet down and very wide would be a massively expensive project.
because it would be massively expensive, the whole reason for the lock system is so they could use existing water instead of digging through mountains
It would be a huge and costly undertaking. Possible, sure – no reason it cannot be done. But we can also build a huge railway system that lifts boats out of the Atlantic (or Pacific), hauls them up and over mountains, and deposits them into the Pacific (or Atlantic). And we can do this anywhere there is land between two bodies of water. The reason we don’t do it is the same reason we don’t widen the Panama canal – the costs involved greatly exceed the benefits.
And I’m not sure what you mean by “normalize sea levels” but if you mean why can’t we remove the locks and connect Atlantic to Pacific without using the lock system, you should know that “sea level” on either side of the canal is different. It’s a difference of only about 20 cm on average, but removing the locks would cause the top 20 cm of the Pacific Ocean to try to dump into the Atlantic Ocean (well, not exactly, but you get the idea). The volume and force of water flowing from one ocean to the other would be enormous. The locks (in part) address this issue (and in part literally raise the boats up and over about 26 meters of land).
There was a [proposal in the 1950s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) to blast a sea-level canal through Nicaragua using atomic bombs. This was part of an “atoms for peace” program. I think it probably wasn’t practical, and probably wasn’t popular with people living in the area. In any case, the project didn’t proceed.
I imagine a lockless & sea level canal would suffer from a one-way current full of coastal waste to the other ocean or sea. Tides might be a problem too.
I suspect something like that happened at the Straights of Gibraltar but happened naturally. Which at the time was construed by some as an act of their deity to get rid of the “bad” people.
Just looking at the ecological disaster that would take place is enough to say “no don’t do it. I’m sure there are fish and plant species that would become extinct. People would die because the fresh water would be gone.
I can’t see how making the canal wider would solve anything. If anything, a wider canal will require more water and drain the lake faster. But aside from that, the Panama Canal was one of the greatest undertakings in human history. I would be easy to simply upgrade it.
Because of this question coming up on Reddit and the resulting comments, I went and got the book “The Path Between the Seas” on audible. The French tried to do a sea level canal first just a few hundred feet wide and it’s difficult to overstate how much effort that would have taken. Doing it in a canal a mile wide would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and probably take decades.
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