The Panama Canal is a 77 km ship canal that joins the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific ocean and a key conduit for international maritime trade. Annual traffic has risen from about 1,000 ships in the canal's early days to 14,702 vessels in 2008.
One of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken, the canal had an enormous impact on shipping between the two oceans, replacing the long and treacherous route via the Drake Passage and Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America.
This article is licensed from Wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License.