How do you cross the Panama Canal?

Answer 1

It's really cool! Basically, most of it is too narrow and shallow for a ship to go through, so it's got chambers all along it that end up making a sort of staircase. As the ship goes along, water will fill up the chamber it's in until it is high enough to enter the next chamber. This process takes a while (8-10 hours to get across 50 miles), but it's still pretty awesome.

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It's too narrow for the largest ships now, but the first statement is otherwise wrong. The chambers you describe have a proper name: "locks", and although as you say a 'sort of staircase', they do not work quite as you've described them. They are filled from rivers, and enable the canal to climb over the ridge forming the bulk of the isthmus. (The original attempt to keep the canal at sea-level failed as the ridge is too high.)

Answer 2

You go in a boat and you go into a chamber in the damn and a wall raises up behind you and in front of you. The water then lowers and the wall in front of you lowers and it repeats. And opposite for going the opposite way

Answer 3

you would cross the Panama Canal by boat because it's water. Not land. There are tours you can book crossing the Panama Canal.

Answer 4

They go through using a series of locks. The canal is 40 miles long and opened to shipping in 1914.