Panama Canal

The Panama Canal is a man-made waterway that cuts across the country of Panama in Central America. It connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The canal is about 51 miles long. Before it was built, ships going from New York to California had to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America. That trip was about 8,000 miles longer and could take months.

People dreamed about a canal across Panama for hundreds of years. Panama is one of the narrowest places between the two oceans. But the land in between is full of mountains, jungle, swamps, and rivers. France tried to dig a canal there starting in 1881. The project failed. Workers got sick with yellow fever and malaria from mosquito bites, and more than 20,000 of them died. France gave up after nine years.

The United States took over the project in 1904, during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. American doctors figured out that mosquitoes spread yellow fever and malaria. Workers drained swamps, sprayed oil on still water, and put screens on windows. These changes saved many lives, though thousands of workers still died during construction.

American engineers also changed the plan. Instead of digging a sea-level canal, they built a system of locks. Locks are giant water elevators. A ship sails into a lock chamber, huge gates close behind it, and water either flows in or drains out to raise or lower the ship. The Panama Canal has three sets of locks. They lift ships 85 feet up to a big man-made lake called Gatun Lake, carry them across, and then lower them back down on the other side. A full trip through the canal takes about 8 to 10 hours.

The canal opened in 1914. For most of the twentieth century, the United States ran it and controlled a strip of land around it called the Canal Zone. Many people in Panama felt this was unfair, because the canal cut right through their country. In 1977, the two countries signed a treaty to hand the canal over to Panama. The handover was finished in 1999.

Panama finished a huge expansion of the canal in 2016. Workers built a new set of bigger locks so that modern container ships, which had grown too large for the old locks, could fit through. Today the canal is one of the busiest shipping routes on Earth. About 5 percent of all goods traded around the world pass through it.