The illegal mining operation in Donoso also had an impact on water sources that were supposed to be replenishing the canal in case of a drought like this.
See: https://www.tvn-2.com/de-frente/canal-panama-administrador-a...
A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
111–120 of 128 posts
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#112Can't the canal authorities reduce the water used somehow? If you paired up ships so that one going up the lock system is matched with one going down you could just pump the water back and forth from one lock to the other and back. Then way less water would be lost from the system. The Falkirk wheel in Scotland can move boats with minimal electricity usage. Could a bigger one be built?
The Falkirk wheel is quite an immense structure, but each one of it's basins is only 80m long and 6.5m wide. It's moving 500 tonnes of weight each rotation (split between the two basins to keep it balanced). To service the Panama Canal, you'd need basins 370m long and 50m wide. The new Panamax ships are apparently capable of carrying 120,000 tonnes of weight (no idea what they weigh themselves), but we're talking abo…
Is getting the ship across the canal even necessary when we're talking about shipping containers? a Flotilla of smaller ships for just a few containers could be used in a continuous convoy.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#113I guess it never occurred to me it was fresh water. Can they not just use salt water?
No, because the salt water is at sea level and the drinking water is at the level the ships need to rise to via the locks. Water flows out from a lake at 26 meters above sea level that is fed by a river that comes from the mountains by gravity. Making the amounts of water that drains out from there move up requires massive amounts of energy. We're not talking a few little pipes here and there. The pumps and energy ge…
I'd think you could recapture a lot of the energy as it drained right? Proposed solutions involve a lot of pumping and seem to rely on it. Hydroelectric efficiency is over 90%.
The salt water would be largely contained so I'm not sure why it would be so bad for the ecosystem.
I don't doubt it would be very expensive, everything about that canal has been. But if this turns out to be the new normal, rather than just a weather abberation, it will be cheaper than re-reouting all of those ships, whether the pumping is done with fresh or salt water.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much of the watershed has been protected from development in order to ensure the water supply for the canal. Also, no matter the current level of pristineness/pollution, there's no way pumping millions of gallons of seawater per day would help.
Unless of course it prevented the draining of millions of gallons of freshwater. No matter what there is some amount of mixing with the sea. The question is at which lock should that happen. Currently it's at lock 1, everyone here is arguing it'd be absolutely impossible for it to happen at any other lock, without providing any justification.
Here’s a document “salinity intrusion in the Panama Canal”: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA378475.pdf
Graphs at page 32 and onward shows that you could (in theory) pump salt water in one more lock upward in both sides. It will make the last lock before lake at 0.5ppt (Atlantic) and 1.32ppt (Pacific). Fresh water is 0-0.5ppt.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average! What's the mistake? It's a normal distribution; the average is equal to the median.
The median itself is a type of an average, too, regardless of the distribution. We have many averages to choose from
TIL that people talk about the median as a kind of average. Guess I’ll stop making the remark then!
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The median itself is a type of an average, too, regardless of the distribution. We have many averages to choose from
TIL that people talk about the median as a kind of average. Guess I’ll stop making the remark then!
Mean, median and mode are the three most commonly used averages.
Mean itself can be of various types, such as arithmetic, geometric, harmonic and others.
Median is a pretty good average because it excludes the extremes. Its 'superiority' compared to the arithmetic mean is can be easily explained by a hypothetical situation where you have 100 people and 99 of them are making $1000 a month while only one making $100000. The arithmetic average salary of this whole group is $1990 a month which is clearly not what most people would intuitively consider as the 'proper' average.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pump is the rain. The water flows down into both oceans, evaporates there and falls down on the lake's tributary areas, then flows down into it. That's the beauty of the whole design.
When it rains enough it is. What's the trend looking like for that?
In Panama? If anything there will be more rain, not less.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand. Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together. If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.
The sea level is the low side. The lake is the high side - which works great until the supply of lake water dries up. The obvious solution is a sea-level tunnel a hundred miles long. Probably cheap. ;)
i dunno about tunnel... i am not a digger but I don't think digging 26 meters (highest point of canal) would require tunneling... just dredging.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sea level is the low side. The lake is the high side - which works great until the supply of lake water dries up. The obvious solution is a sea-level tunnel a hundred miles long. Probably cheap. ;)
i dunno about tunnel... i am not a digger but I don't think digging 26 meters (highest point of canal) would require tunneling... just dredging.
You'd have to deal with the Chagres (assuming the current drought ends) as well.
The original excavation was done mostly dry and massive by any standards: 27kt of dynamite were used.
I'm also not a digger, but 26 meters of dredging over a 13km distance sounds crazy expensive. You would have to also widen the valley to prevent landslides into the canal.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, I’m no civil engineer, but couldn’t you design a siphon system that would only require opening and closing valves to capture the water without any pumping?
Siphons only really "work" if the final position of the water is lower than the starting position. Siphon effect allows the water to pass through an intermediate higher elevation without continuous external pumping energy, but on average the water must still be going downhill to utilize the siphon effect.
Omg, I wasn’t thinking. The surface of the target liquid needs to be lower than the source. I was thinking of a pipe coming in lower than the lake, but that wouldn’t work.