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Panama Canal Research Paper

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The Panama Canal is approximately eighty kilometers long between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This waterway was cut through one of the narrowest parts of the isthmus that joins North and South America. The Canal uses a system of locks to raise and lower ships to the desired elevation. The locks function as water lifts: they raise ships from sea level(Atlantic or Pacific Ocean) to the level of Gatun Lake, which is twenty-six meters above sea level. Ships then sail the channel through the Continental Divide. Each set of locks bears the name of the town where it was built, Gatun ( on the Atlantic side), and Pedro Miguel and Miraflores ( on the Pacific side). The lock chambers, which are steps, are 33.5 meters wide by 304.8 meters long. The …show more content…
Currently though, the Panama Canal has been experiencing difficulty handling the larger vessels being developed by the maritime industry. To solve this proble, the Panama Canal Authority is has design and is building a third set of locks that will generally run parallel to the current canal. [2 pumping up PC] The third set of locks will be able to fit post-panamax vessels too large for the original canal. The locks chambers that already exist in the current canal are thirty-three meters wide, three hundred and five meters long, and twelve meters deep. The future set of locks will have six chambers. Each chamber will be four hundred and twenty-seven meters long, fifty-five meters wide, and eighteen meters deep. There will be three locks on the Pacific side, and there will be three locks on the Atlantic side. Post-Panamax vessels, which are vessels too large for the original Panama Canal, account for thirty-seven percent of the world’s capacity of containerized maritime shipping. Since these ships are too big too large to fit through the canal, many of them have to off-load their cargo at ports along the West Coast and have the containers shipped inland by railroads or trucks. A smaller number of ships use the Suez Canal to reach the eastern side of the United States. Adding a third set of locks large enough to accommodate these post-Panamax vessels, will hopefully offer shippers a …show more content…
Gatun Lake is in the middle of the Panama Canal and is replenished with water from the surrounding watershed. A watershed is an area of land that fees all the water running under it and draining off of it into a body of water. It combines with other watersheds to form a network of rivers and streams that progressively drain into larger water areas. Recently though, the Panama Canal has been questioning whether the Panama Canal watershed is diminishing. The Panama Canal sits in the center of one of the world’s most biologically diverse areas. Southern Central America has the third most species of forest birds in the world. Also, Panama has as many plant species per ten thousand square kilometers as any region in the world. The forests are crucial for protecting the water supply of the Panama Canal and for maintaining the plant and animal communities. The Panama Canal watershed encompasses 2892 square kilometers of land, this is about half the size of the state of Delaware. Rainfall is sufficient to sustain tall forest throughout the area, but there is a marked dry season from December through April. Most of the watershed is less than three hundred meters above sea level, but the outer edges to the southwest and east rise to one thousand meters in elevation at the peaks.

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