Whether an animal would actually try is another matter. All three Chunnel tubes—one each for westbound and eastbound trains, and a parallel central corridor to service them—are swaddled in concrete. For 35 miles there would be no food or water—just pitch darkness. Still, it’s not impossible that some continental species might recolonize Britain that way: The capacity of organisms to ensconce themselves in the world’s most inhospitable places—from lichens on Antarctic glaciers to sea worms in 176°F sea vents—may symbolize the meaning of life itself. Surely, as small, curious creatures like voles or the inevitable Norway rats slither down the Chunnel, some brash young wolf will follow their scent.
The Chunnel is a true wonder of our times, and, at a cost of $21 billion, also the most expensive construction project ever conceived until China began damming several rivers at once. Protected by its buried bed of marl, it has one of the best chances of any human artifact to last millions of years, until continental drift finally pulls it apart or scrunches it like an accordion.
While still intact, however, it may not remain functional. Its two terminals are just a few miles from their respective coasts. There’s little chance that the Folkestone, England, entrance, nearly 200 feet above current sea level, could be breached: the chalk cliffs that separate it from the English Channel would have to erode significantly. Far more likely is that ascending waters could enter the Coquelles, France, terminal, only about 16 feet above sea level on the Calais plain. If so, the Chunnel would not completely flood: the marl stratum it follows makes a mid- channel dip and then rises, so water would seek the lowest levels, leaving part of the chambers clear.
Clear, but useless, even to daring migrating creatures. But when $21 billion was spent to create one of engineering’s greatest wonders, no one imagined that the oceans might rise up against us.
Nor did the proud builders of the ancient world, which had seven wonders, dream that in a span far shorter than eternity only one of them— Egypt’s Khufu pyramid—would remain. Like old-growth forest whose lofty treetops eventually collapse, Khufu has shrunk some 30 feet over the past 4,500 years. At first, that was no gradual loss—its marble shell was cannibalized during the Middle Ages by conquering Arabs to build Cairo. The exposed limestone is now dissolving like any other hill, and in a million more years should not look very pyramidal at all.
The other six were of even more mortal stuff: a huge wooden idol of Zeus plated in ivory and gold, which fell apart during an attempt to move it; a hanging garden, of which no trace remains among the ruins of its Babylonian palace 30 miles south of Baghdad; a colossal bronze statue on Rhodes that collapsed under its own weight in an earthquake and was later sold for scrap; and three marble structures—a Greek temple that crumbled in a fire, a Persian mausoleum razed by Crusaders, and a lighthouse marking Alexandria’s harbor, which was felled by earthquake as well.
What made them qualify as wonders was sometimes stirring beauty, as in the case of the Temple of Artemis in Greece, but more often it was simply massive scale. Human creation writ very large often overwhelms us into submission. Less ancient, but most imposing of all, is a construction project that spanned 2,000 years, three ruling dynasties, and 4,000 miles, resulting in a rampart so monumental that it achieved the status not just of landmark, but land
Yet, like any other ripple in the Earth’s crust, the Great Wall is not immortal, and far less so than most geologic versions. A pastiche of rammed earth, stones, fired brick, timbers, and even glutinous rice used as mortar paste, without human maintenance it is defenseless against tree roots and water—and the highly acidic rain produced by an industrializing Chinese society isn’t helping. Yet without that society, it will steadily melt away until just the stones remain.
Walling the Earth from the Yellow Sea all the way across Inner Mongolia is impressive, but for grand public works, few have matched a modern wonder whose construction began in 1903, the same year that New York inaugurated its subway. It was no less than the human race defying plate tectonics by tearing apart two continents that floated together 3 million years earlier. Nothing like the Panama Canal had ever been attempted before, and little has come close to it since.
Although the Suez Canal had already severed Africa from Asia three decades earlier, that was a comparatively simple, sea-level surgical stroke across an empty, disease-free sand desert with no hills. The French company that dug it went next to the 56-mile-wide isthmus between the Americas, smugly intending to do the same. Disastrously, they underestimated dense jungle steeped in malaria and yellow fever, rivers fed by prodigious rainfall, and a continental divide whose lowest pass was still 270 feet above the sea. Before they were one-third of the way through, they suffered not only a bankruptcy that rocked France, but also the deaths of 22,000 workers.
Nine years later, in 1898, a highly ambitious Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Theodore Roosevelt found a pretext, based on an explosion (probably due to a faulty boiler) that sank a U.S. ship in Havana Harbor, to oust Spain from the Caribbean. The Spanish-American War was intended to liberate both Cuba and Puerto Rico, but, to the great surprise of Puerto Ricans, the United States annexed their island. To Roosevelt, it was perfectly positioned as a coaling station for the still-nonexistent canal that would eliminate the need for ships sailing between the Atlantic and the Pacific to travel down the length of South America and up again.
Roosevelt chose Panama over Nicaragua, whose eponymous navigable lake, which would have saved considerable digging, lay among active volcanoes. At the time, the isthmus was part of Colombia, although Panamanians had tried three times to bolt from distant Bogota’s fitful rule. When Colombia objected to the U.S. offer of just $10 million for sovereignty over a 6-mile-wide zone bordering the proposed canal, President Roosevelt sent a gunboat to help Panamanian rebels finally succeed. A day later, he betrayed them by recognizing as Panama’s first ambassador to the United States a French engineer from France’s defunct canal-digging company, who, at considerable personal profit, immediately affirmed a treaty agreeing to U.S. terms.
That sealed the United States’ reputation in Latin America as piratical gringo imperialists, and produced—11 years and 5,000 more deaths later—the most stunning engineering feat yet in human history. More than a century has passed and it is still among the greatest of all time. Besides reconfiguring continental landmasses and communication between two oceans, the Panama Canal also significantly shifted the economic center of the world to the United States.
Something that substantial and literally earth-moving seems destined to last for the ages. But in a world without us, how long would it take nature to rejoin what man split asunder in Panama?
“THE PANAMA CANAL,” says Abdiel perez, “is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth—one that nature is trying to heal.”
As superintendent of the locks on the Canal’s Atlantic side, Perez— along with 5 percent of all planetary commerce—depends on a handful of hydrologists and engineers charged with keeping that wound open. A square- jawed, soft-voiced electrical and mechanical engineer, Perez began here in the 1980s as an apprentice machinist while studying at the University of Panama. Daily, he feels humbled to be entrusted with one of the most revolutionary pieces of machinery on Earth.
“Portland cement was a novelty. This is where it was tried out. Reinforced concrete wasn’t invented yet. All the walls of the locks are oversized like a pyramid. Their only reinforcement is gravity.”
He stands alongside what is essentially a huge concrete box, into which an orange Chinese freighter bound for the East Coast of the United States, stacked seven stories high with containers, has just been guided. The lock is 110 feet wide. The ship, as long as three football fields, has exactly two feet of clearance on each side as two electric railway engines, called
“Electricity was also new. New York had barely installed the first generating plant. But the Canal builders decided to use electricity, not steam engines.”
Once the ship is inside, water is piped into the lock to raise it 28 feet, which takes ten minutes. On the lock’s opposite end awaits Lake Gatun, for a half-century the biggest artificial lake in the world. Creating it drowned an entire mahogany forest, but prevented a repeat of the French debacle, which resulted from the fatal decision to try digging another sea-level canal like Suez. Besides entailing removal of a large chunk of the continental divide, there was also the matter of the Rio Chagres, a rain-gorged river that, as it plunged from jungle highlands to the sea, smacked into the middle of the canal’s route. During Panama’s eight-month rainy season, the Chagres carried
