The Panama Canal is a 51-mile-long waterway across the Isthmus of Panama in Central America. Each year, it allows as many as 14,000 vessels to travel between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
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For about two decades, Suez Canal-builder and Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps led the project, but financial troubles forced it into the hands of the US, who completed it in 1914. This timeline, made to accompany the definitive PBS American Experience documentary about the canal, highlights major moments in its construction.
This was the result of two treaties signed during President Jimmy Carter's presidency, one shifting control to Panama and the other declaring the canal zone neutral. In recent years, US officials have suggested the US may retake control. Experts agree that the only viable way would be through military force.
The system centered around Gatun Lake, the largest human-made reservoir at the time, and two massive concrete locks that helped raise the ships 85 feet from sea level to the lake surface. The excavation was also the largest earth-moving project at the time, moving 240 million cubic yards of soil.
Many of the world’s cargo ships are built to be as large as possible while still being able to fit through the Panama Canal’s narrowest locks. The size standard even has a name: Panamax (and, since the canal’s expansion in 2016, Neopanamax). To avoid running against the canal walls, locomotives hold the vessels in place as the chambers are filled and emptied.
The effort proved the US could achieve grand engineering projects while granting it influence over (and benefitting economically from) a major interoceanic channel and its host country, Panama.
While more container ships traverse the canal than any other type of ship, vessels carrying dry bulk goods, vehicle carriers, chemical tankers, passenger ships, and more also pass through the Central American passageway.
In 2023, canal authorities reduced traffic in the canal amid severely dry conditions. These seven infographics from the Woodwell Climate Research Center explain exactly what happened that historically dry October, and how it affected global supply chains.
This platform uses satellite data to track chokepoints and trade disruptions along the shipping lanes that crisscross the globe. Search for data from more than 1,600 ports, or run the climate scenario simulator.
More than 75,000 workers labored to build the Panama Canal, and up to a third of them, by some estimates, died on the job. This gallery of 16 archival black-and-white photographs from PBS shows what life was like for the workers.
This map shows some of the alternative trade route options that are available to shipping companies, from overland routes that rely on railways to transport goods coast-to-coast, to Arctic Ocean passages.
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