What is Panama Canal?

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About Panama Canal:

It is a man made waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the Isthmus of Panama.
It is owned and administered by Panama, and it is 40 miles long from shoreline to shoreline.
- It was built by the United states and completed in August 1914,
- It is one of the two most strategic artificial waterways in the world, the other being the Suez Canal.
- From its opening in 1914 until 1979, the Panama Canal was controlled solely by the United States, which built it.
- In 1979, however, control of the canal passed to the Panama Canal Commission, a joint agency of the United States and the Republic of Panama, and complete control passed to Panama at noon on December 31, 1999.
It is a sophisticated, highly-engineered system which uses a system of locks and elevators to take ships from one end to the other.
This is needed because the two oceans that the Panama Canal connects do not lie at the same elevation, with the Pacific slightly higher than the Atlantic.
This difference means that for a ship entering the canal through the Atlantic, it needs to gain elevation during its journey to the Pacific. This is achieved using a lock system which lifts and drops vessels to the required sea level at either end of the canal.
Basically, locks are either flooded (to gain elevation) or drained (to lose elevation), and act as water elevators. In total, the system comprises three sets of locks — 12 locks in total — which are serviced using artificial lakes and channels.

Q1: What is an Isthmus?

An isthmus is a narrow strip of land connecting two larger land masses which is bounded by water on two sides. The word has its origins from the Greek word isthmós which means “neck.”

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