Why do they need to use fresh water to fill the locks? I get that pumping salt water may come with a bit more maintenance but it just seems like a waste to use all that fresh water.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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The middle part of the canal is 26 meters above sea level, and the canal is way too big for them to pump sea water into it.
Easy fix, just dig down that 26 meters!
All the way across the length of the canal.
I'm sure a couple dudes with shovels could knock it out in a week.
Two weeks tops.
So interesting thing
Digging out the height difference and making it a straight shot canal would have VERY BAD ecological consequences.
Sea level on the Pacific side is higher than on the Atlantic side, meaning that opening a straight shot canal would cause the Pacific to begin draining into the Atlantic through the canal
This could have DRASTIC implications for the Caribbean and North Atlantic because, how much Pacific needs to get into the Atlantic before the water tables are balanced‽
plus it allow sea snakes in to the Caribbean
I thought sea levels were the same at the same latitude all around the globe. I feel like I've been lying to myself all these years now.
Also tides are not the same on both sides, even if they were the same average level, the tides definitely wouldn't be synchronized. This would result in very strong currents in the canal, making it impossible to safely navigate. The most common fix for that type of situation is to put... locks in the canal.
It's pretty unintuitive because we're not used to dealing with ocean sized bodies of water in day to day life. Part of the explanation is just that the prevailing winds pile all the water in the Pacific up against the coast, causing higher sea levels on the West Coast. The lower salinity of the Pacific also causes lower water density, which translates to higher sea levels.
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I saw two guys on YouTube dig a whole city in the mud by hand I bet they could totally do it lol
Easy fix, just dig down that 26 meters!
All the way across the length of the canal.
I’m sure a couple dudes with shovels could knock it out in a week.
Why shovels when you can use plowshares?
Proposed uses for nuclear explosives under Project Plowshare included widening the Panama Canal, constructing a new sea-level waterway through Nicaragua nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal ...
Or maybe we should stop messing with our climate.
The canal is actually larger than I thought.
C'mon physics, be a bro
The canal traverses a fresh water lake at the middle
As I understand it, canal locks don't pump water at all.
When you're going downhill, you allow the higher water to slowly drain out of the lock, thus lowering you to the lower level
When you're going uphill, you allow the higher water to slowly drain into the lock, thus raising you to the higher level.
In both directions the water is always flowing from high to low.
Because the canal is connected to Gatun Lake, a freshwater lake.
They should use crude oil, it’ll make the boats slippery so they can go through the canal faster.
I wonder how many of the ships that pass through the canal wouldn't float in oil because of its lower density.
No need to pay for lubrication of the mechanisms either
It's to keep it out of the hands of Nestlé
I don't think maintenance is the prohibitive factor; I think it's energy.
I don't know if there's a c/theydidthemath on this instance, but...the locks ultimately lift ships about 25 meters or so up to the level of the canal, right? So if you were to pump the locks full of water from sea level, you would have to pump a volume of water equal to the lock's area, 25 meters deep, up to 25 meters up hill. I'm too lazy to look up the numbers and solve for watt-hours, but I'm imagining to operate all the locks in the canal that way you'd need a power station worthy of a captain planet villain.
Using fresh water from the inland waterway (including a freshwater lake) allows the locks to be filled by allowing water to run downhill with no additional power needed.
It is my understanding (and late night refusal to look it up) that the newer locks have water storage tanks off to the side so that water drained from a lock on a "downward" trip can be used to at least partially fill the lock below it on its next "upward" trip such that less total water is released with each cycle of the locks, but still none of it is pumped uphill.
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The world economy about to learn what a 15% reduction in Panama Canal crossings does to supply chains
EDIT: Nvm that was the Suez canal not Panama.
Wel it will be better than the 100% we had when a ship got stuck, of course that wasn't a long term thing, this I do not know how long will last.
That got stuck in another canal, not the panama one. Maybe Suez?
Oh yeah right right it was Suez. My shitty memory again. Will edit the post.
It might dissuade people from buying an iPhone or computer every year. So much stuff is thrown away prematurely.
With the amount of money, the Panama canal must make; why the flip do they not have backup pumps to hoist water back up into the reservoirs? Old timey dutch windmills would even work...
The most powerful pump in the world would take a half hour to fill a Panama Canal lock from the low level to the high level (by contrast, the gravity-fed system takes only ten minutes to fill it from the lake). That pump is called the Pentair Fairbanks Nijhuis HP1-4000.340; coincidentally it actually is in the Netherlands, and it's used to control flooding. It cost about $1B (USD) and took over three years to install.
The Panama Canal would need twelve of them; one for each lock. At a total cost of over one billion dollars, the installation would suck up almost a sixth of the nation's GDP; and each time you filled a lock with one, the electricity alone would cost another $22,400. That means over a quarter of a million dollars for every ship that goes through the twelve locks, which means another $2.5m per day to send ten ships through (and note that number— it would also bring along with it a 66% cut in the possible revenue that the canal can earn from current levels, which are already half of their designed rate) because the slower moving pumps would take three times as long to cycle a lock.
Are there ways to mitigate some of this? Certainly. But I'm trying to communicate the scope of this massive problem that you're dismissing here. I'm sure they've thought about every angle, since it's something like 40% of their GDP.
Why not pump straight to a top-level reservoir?
Well for one thing, Gatun Lake is now an entire freshwater ecosystem, and breathing to see because of it's inaccessibility to humans.Turning it brackish would probably have some consequences.
There already is a reservoir, it's called Gatun Lake. It's not filled using pumps, though, it's filled from the rain.
That rain is what's the problem right now, there's not enough.
That top-level reservoir is called Gatun Lake. It's one of the largest artificial freshwater lakes on Earth; pumping seawater into it would be disastrous for fish populations which have already not recovered from the introduction of an invasive species almost 60 years ago; but even more disastrous for the cities of Colón and Panama City, which get their drinking water from Gatun Lake.
Plus, (and take this part with a grain of salt, I haven't researched it as closely, but the provenance is pretty good) pumping water that far (Gatun Lake is 85ft/26m above sea level and 6mi/9.5km from the ocean on the Atlantic side) would increase costs significantly over just pumping it up a level from one lock to another. The maximum vertical pumping height of a single ideal pump was at one time proven to be 33ft, meaning that pumping from the ocean to the lake would require a system of pumps that wouldn't reduce installation costs that much and would probably have to run more or less continuously, increasing operating costs.
Hydrology is cool. The forces are gigantic.
Cool! I didn't know that. Thanks for the info!
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My guess is that the water gets contaminated by bilge and other stuff from the cargo ships, which you dont want getting into Gatun Lake.
A. One of the rainiest regions in the world
B. Also a source of drinking water for nearby cities
Maybe they haven't needed them before now?
Matter of scale. Requires too much water to pump efficiently.
Did prices ever go down after taxpayers funded the panama canal?
Or did rich people just start making more profit?
I always thought the locks operated in pairs - raise one side, lower other direction.
This also could be a navigation thing where there is a lack of depth at the top
No, they don't have pumps or the energy needed to do that all the way to 100%. They do send water from a higher lock to a lower lock until they are both at 50%, but they have to fill the remaining portion from the lake system on top.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
PANAMA CITY (AP) — The Panama Canal announced Saturday it will reduce the maximum number of ships travelling the waterway to 31 per day, from 32 in August, due to a drought that has reduced the supply of fresh water needed to operate the locks.
That compares to daily averages of 36 to 38 ships per day under normal operation.
Nine ships per day will be allowed to use the new, bigger NeoPanamax locks and 22 per day will be handled through the older Panamax locks.
In August, the canal implemented a measure capping the number of ships passing through its locks daily to a maximum of 32.
Not enough rain has fallen to feed the watershed system of rivers and brooks that fill lakes, whose waters in turn fill the locks.
The watershed also supplies freshwater to Panama City, home to about half the country’s 4 million people.
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