Three years of transit through the Panama Canal in a space image

2023-10-20 11:22:40

MADRID, 20 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –

ESA has produced this compressed view of maritime traffic through the Panama Canal, made with hundreds of radar images acquired between 2020 and 2022 by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite.

One of the largest engineering projects of the last century, the locks at both ends are used to raise and lower the water level by up to 26 metres: ships entering the canal are raised and then lowered to sea level when they leave. Under normal conditions, Up to 14,000 ships pass through the canal each yearmaking it one of the busiest maritime passages in the world.

Separate colors have been assigned to each year to highlight the differences: blue for the 2020 images, green for 2021 and red for 2022. At each end of the canal, ships entering, leaving and waiting to pass through the waterway appear as dots red, green and blue depending on the year, reports the ESA.

In this link you can zoom in on the image.

While the trail of maritime traffic is clearly visible in the canal, so is the traffic in Gatun Lake, the large black and jagged inland body of water in the center of the image.

Gatun Lake was created by damming the Chagres River to the north, where the river, which flows into the Caribbean Sea, can be seen as a black, sinuous line. The lake water helps keep the locks in operation. However, This year Panama has been experiencing one of the driest seasons on recordsignificantly affecting the supply of fresh water needed to fill the locks.

In recent months, this severe drought has forced the Panama Canal authority to gradually reduce the number of ships entering the canal from an average of 37 per day to a maximum of 31 per daywhich has impacted maritime traffic and the local and global economy.