The Panama Canal opened just as the First World War erupted in August 1914. The newly completed canal was underutilized and plagued with closures by massive landslides throughout its first quarter century of operation. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson empowered the National Academy of Sciences to undertake a scientific study of the landslides and report on how they might be mitigated. During the interwar years the canal became a naval bastion almost without peer in the western world, but plans for capital ships began exceeding the width of the canal's locks by the late 1930s.