Thousand-foot-long ships chug through the Panama Canal’s waters each day, over the submerged stumps of a forgotten forest and by the banks of a new one, its canopies full of screeching parrots and howler monkeys. Some 14,000 ships pass through its locks every year, their decks stacked high with 6 percent of the world’s commercial goods, crisscrossing the paths of tugboats on the voyage between oceans.
In early 2023, the weather pattern known as El Niño ushered in a drought that choked traffic through the canal, dropping water levels in Lake Gatun, the canal’s main reservoir, to record lows and revealing the tops of trees drowned when the canal was created at the start of the last century. It takes 52 million gallons of water to get a cargo ship through the canal’s locks, and by December, only 22 of the usual 36 ships were allowed to make the passage each day. Some vessels opted for lengthy routes around Africa instead, while others bid as much as $4 million to skip the queue that had grown to more than a hundred ships.
Over a year later, the water is rising and t... Read more
