Experts issue warning on looming crisis that could bring Panama Canal traffic to halt: 'The canal is vulnerable'

One of the most important waterways to global trade is under threat from our increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. 

What's happening?

According to Northwestern University, a combination of severe drought and decreasing water levels is threatening to disrupt trade through the Panama Canal. 

The Canal relies on a reservoir of fresh water to keep its water levels high enough for ships to pass through, but the rate of passage slows significantly during droughts. 

Samuel Munoz, a professor at Northwestern University, published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters explaining that as the planet's climate shifts and droughts become more and more common in Panama and the rest of Central America, trade could be severely impacted. 

"The canal is vulnerable to drought," Munoz, associate professor of marine and environmental sciences and civil and environmental engineering, said. "That vulnerability increases with climate change. The models think that the more we warm things, the more severe and frequent these droughts become in Panama."

Munoz ran projections on a variety of scenarios involving the amount of pollution produced. He found that the more pollution produced and the more the planet warmed, the more likely it became that the Canal would be impacted by prolonged droughts. 

"Every time a ship goes through, it uses a lot of water," Munoz said, with the flooding of locks to raise and lower ships as they cross continents a notable necessity. 

"When they have droughts, the main thing that they can do is basically reduce the number of ships transiting through."

While extreme weather conditions, such as droughts, aren't unusual, scientists have observed that they are becoming longer and more intense as a result of rising global temperatures. 

Why is the Panama Canal important?

The Panama Canal, along with the Suez Canal in Egypt, is one of the most essential man-made trade arteries in the world. It connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and it allows ships to shave significant time off their transit from one side of the world to the other.

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Without the Canal as a viable option, most ships would add multiple months to their transit time between the oceans, as they would have little choice but to go around South America. 

Even if the canal is open but slowed, it would create a significant backlog of ships waiting to pass through and severely hinder global trade. 

The Canal is yet another portent of potential problems arising as the planet warms due to human-caused pollution. As the temperature rises, weather patterns become more severe and less predictable, and it can be tough for industries to keep up. 

What can be done to support the Panama Canal?

Munoz's research is clear: the higher the pollution, the more problems will arise with the canal. 

"We looked at the rain coming in, we looked at how much water was evaporating away under these different scenarios," Munoz said. 

"Under the scenarios where we don't mitigate emissions very much, the amount of rain that Panama gets goes down a lot, and the amount of evaporation that occurs goes up a lot, so low lake levels become really problematic, really more common and severe than they are now. 

"But in scenarios where we do more mitigation of greenhouse gases, there's less change (in water levels) and it stabilizes more." 

Without cutting down on planet-warming pollution sufficiently, Munoz says other methods may be required to ensure the Canal's continued viability as a shipping hub. 

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