Why does the Panama Canal have canal locks while the Suez Canal doesn’t have any?
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The Panama Canal has to traverse different elevations to make the crossing. The Suez Canal does not. Basically, the path for the Suez they were able to dig all at the same level. But Panama has to cross a mountain and digging the entire length down to sea level was much more difficult than building locks allowing them to raise and lower the water level in segments.
The Panama Canal travels through some very challenging terrain, and so the canal would either need to raise/descend in elevation along with the terrain, or otherwise would need to be dug extremely deeply in some locations. They chose the lock method to raise and lower the canal sections as it moved through the elevation changes. The Suez canal doesn’t have these elevation changes and so could be dug at a consistent elevation without difficulty.
Ohh I see I see, it makes sense now. Thanks
The locks are used to make a kind of tub and add or remove water to raise or lower the ship to traverse to the next part of the canal. The Panama Canal, basically goes over mountainous terrain, they didn’t just dig up the whole terrain and make it all sea level, it rises and then drops down again. The boats in the canal need to do the same thing, go up and then down the other side.
The Suez Canal has no such difficult terrain.
The french design would have been at sea level for panama. It would have required moving alot more dirt. Suez goes through pretty flat geography. Panama not so much.
Pretty simple, the Suez is just a big ditch in the desert, while the Panama Canal has to go up and over some hills.
People have pointed out the terrain issues, but I encourage you to actually look up the Panama Canal on like Google Maps.
You’ll see that the excavated canal is actually a pretty small part of its length. When you go through the Panama Canal, most of the trip you’re actually traveling through a large mountain lake, Gatun Lake.
The canals and the locks are mostly just to get you from sea level up to the level of this lake, and then back down.
Panama is a mountainous country, plus a lot less digging was done on the Panama canal by running it through a lake that’s above sea level. As a result, a boat entering needs to be raised up to the level of the lake on one side and then lowered back down to sea level on the other.
Egypt, however, is very flat, so when the Suez canal was built, they could just dig a trench all the way through to the Red Sea, which is also at sea level. This fact also makes expanding the canal much easier because you don’t have. A limit on the length of ships that can fit through it, as well as widening the canal means you don’t need to modify any locks.
Panama also has the disadvantage of the fact that every time they open the locks, they lose fresh water from the lake, which is a major source of drinking water for the country.
The Panamá Canal actually raises ships that are incoming. The ships then navigate through a lake that is elevated higher than both oceans on either side. They then lower the ship to the sea level of the opposite ocean and away they go.
So the ships go from salt water, to elevated fresh water, then back down to salt water again.
At first glance I thought this was a link from r/Jokes and was looking forward to the punchline.
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