Cutting Through: Canals and Tunnels That Reshaped the Map

Finished in 1825 after eight years of digging, this canal linked the Hudson River to Lake Erie and gave New York City a water route into the American interior. It cut shipping costs so sharply that it helped turn New York into the nations busiest port, and it set off a wave of canal building that followed its example.

Opened on 17 November 1869, this sea level cut through Egypt let ships sail straight between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea instead of rounding the southern tip of Africa. It shaved thousands of miles off the voyage between Europe and Asia, and it still ranks among the worlds most important shipping chokepoints.

The French diplomat who organized the company that built the Suez Canal and led its construction to completion in 1869. He later tried to repeat that success at Panama with a sea level design copied from Suez, and lost the gamble to tropical disease and engineering miscalculation.

De Lesseps failed French effort at a sea level canal across Panama nearly ended the project for good. The United States took it over, switched to a lock based design instead, and finished a working waterway across the isthmus in 1914, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific without the long sail around South America.

This German ship canal, opened in 1895, lets vessels cross between the North Sea and the Baltic without sailing around the Jutland peninsula and through the Danish straits, saving 460 kilometres. Roughly 32,000 ships use it every year, more traffic by vessel count than either Suez or Panama, even though those two canals carry far more cargo per crossing.

Cut through the Isthmus of Corinth and completed in 1893, this Greek canal revived a route first worked in antiquity, when ships were hauled overland on a stone trackway called the Diolkos. Its narrow width and shallow draft now limit it mostly to smaller vessels and tourist traffic rather than the freight ships Suez and Panama carry.

Where the earlier stops on this trail cut passages for ships, this one cuts a passage for trains. Opened in 1994 after six years of construction, it runs beneath the English Channel between England and France, and its 37.9 kilometre undersea section is the longest undersea tunnel section anywhere in the world.

This Swiss railway tunnel runs 57.09 kilometres under the Alps and reached full commercial service in December 2016, after seventeen years of construction. It is the worlds longest railway tunnel and its deepest traffic tunnel, running about 600 metres beneath the older, steeper Gotthard tunnel it was built to replace.

Opened in 1988 after construction that survived flooding and a work stoppage during the 1973 oil crisis, this undersea tunnel connects the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido beneath the Tsugaru Strait. It is the worlds longest undersea tunnel by total length, second only to the Gotthard Base Tunnel among the worlds long railway tunnels.