巴拿马运河缺水，全球供应链再遭冲击
Through a narrow strip of Panama, a century-old waterway lifts entire ships over a mountain range, saving a two-week detour around South America. The Panama Canal moves about five percent of global maritime trade, from American grains to Asian electronics. Yet this engineering marvel depends on an increasingly unreliable ingredient: rainfall. Since late last year, one of the worst droughts on record has squeezed the canal's capacity, forcing shipping companies to rethink routes that the world economy has taken for granted.
Each ship passage flushes around 200 million liters of fresh water from Gatun Lake into the sea, water that must be replenished by tropical rains. The canal's locks act like giant bathtubs, raising and lowering vessels over the continental divide. When lake levels drop, the authority can only fill the chambers so many times per day. Recent dry weather, driven by an El Niño pattern and worsened by long-term climate shifts, has left the lake so shallow that draft restrictions and daily transit limits have become the new normal.
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