Isthmus Of Panama

Panama Canal expansion

Imagine you�re driving a tractor trailer with a time-sensitive payload through a typical Denver rush hour. Because time is money, you need an alternate route and quick. It can be nerve wracking.

Now, instead of a tractor trailer, imagine you�re steering a giant cargo ship headed from New York to Los Angeles with a 150,000-ton payload. While there aren�t a lot of choices, at least there is one more today than there was a century ago. The Panama Canal.

Prior to 1914, an east to west maritime route didn�t exist. The only option was navigating seven-thousand miles around the daunting Cape Horn. It was then, and remains today, one of the most unpleasant choices any ship�s captain could have. Cape Horn�s omnipresent high winds, heavy seas and ice bergs have claimed their share of ships and lives over the centuries.

But so important and so successful has been the Canal, that today it is being expanded to accommodate more traffic including a new generation of behemoth-sized vessels that now regularly criss-cross the seas. And Denver-based CH2M Hill is the project manager for this expansion.

�The expansion of the Panama Canal is considered one the most visible and important infrastructure projects in the world, and will affect global commerce significantly over the next century,� said Garry Higdem, CH2M HILL�s lead executive for the Panama Canal Program. And while no doubt the job will be impressive, a century earlier the plan to bisect a 50-mile stretch of tropical canopy, jungle swampland and snow-capped mountains defied imagination.

While it was President Theodore Roosevelt who pushed for the construction of the Panama Canal at the turn of the century, it was the French, nearly twenty years earlier, who actually began construction on what would become one of the seven modern wonders of the world.

With the unimaginable challenges the Canal�s construction posed, many would say that it is a wonder this 50-mile swath through the Isthmus of Panama connecting the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean ever got built at all.

For its time, at an estimated $400 million, it was the costliest project ever undertaken anywhere in the world. Spending the money to build it, however, may have been the easy part.

Once the U.S. purchased the project from the French, at a cost of $40 million, workers swarmed to the area. The Canal meant certain employment.

New Theory: Isthmus of Panama Could be Much Older | The Panama Digest

A new theory from the Smithsonian Tropical Institute suggests that the Panamanian Isthmus may have risen from the ocean floor millions of years earlier than previously thought.

Smithsonian stratigrapher Carlos Jaramillo and his team have unearthed evidence that “the Americas crashed into each other not 3 million years ago, but up to 22 million years ago – some 19 million years before the birth of the Arctic ice cap,” according to an article published in the New Scientist on June 11.

Jaramillo will present a talk entitled “Paleontology in Panama” today, Wednesday, June 22, at 5:30 p.m. (Panama time) at the Tupper Center Auditorium. This talk will also be  webcast on the Smithsonian website.

Isthmus of Panama, History of the Panama railroad; and of the Pacific mail steamship company. Together with a traveller's guide and business man's hand-book for the Panama railroad and the lines of steamships connecting it with Europe, the United States, the north and south Atlantic and Pacific coasts, China, Australia, and Japan

Isthmus of Panama, history of the Panama railroad and of the Pacific mail steamship company

Isthmus of Panama, history of the Panama railroad; and of the Pacific mail steamship company, together with a travellers' guide and business man's hand-book for the Panama railroad and the lines of steamships connecting it with Europe, the United States, and north and south Atlantic and Pacific coasts, China, Australia, and Japan

Isthmus of Panama...

The isthmus of Panama