LOL. Expend HUGE amounts of energy pumping the Med dry, then generate power by letting the water flow back into the Med from the Atlantic. FREE ENERGY!!
I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
Posted on 03/15/2021 1:30:48 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Alantropa plan does sound absurd today to many, but in the 1920s, it was taken seriously by engineers, politicians, architects, and even the United Nations, at one point. There were hundreds of articles in the German and international press supporting the project, and currently, thousands of publications and lectures about Alantropa can be found in a special section in the archive of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The grandiose plan involved partially draining the Mediterranean Sea and uniting Europe and Africa into one supercontinent.
German architect Herman Sörgel, who was the brain behind the project, believed his plan was the only way to prevent another conflict. World War I had at the time plunged Europe into crisis. Europe’s future was uncertain. After having lost a lot of lives in the war, it was now faced with mass unemployment, poverty, overpopulation while an energy crisis was imminent.
Having experienced all these, Sörgel was convinced that his Alantropa project, which would among others create more land to develop more infrastructure, would help curtail these European problems while ensuring peace. Here’s how.
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In 1927, having been inspired by other gigantic engineering projects like the Suez Canal, a 42-year-old Sörgel developed his plan for Atlantropa, which he originally called Panropa. The plan involved building a network of dams. The biggest would be built across the Straits of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco, separating the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. A second dam would be built across the Dardanelles which would shut off the Black Sea. A third dam would also be placed across the Strait of Sicily, linking Italy to Tunisia and cutting the Mediterranean in two, with different water levels on either side.
These dams would together link Europe to Africa via roads and railways, facilitating the transportation of African minerals and oil to European processing and production centers, a report noted. What’s more, each of the dams would provide hydroelectric energy, supplying Europe with all the power it needed. With a total of 660,200 km2 of new land expected to be reclaimed from the sea, Europe would also have an abundant supply of food from new farmland while Europe’s nations would also have space to expand.
Sörgel maintained that the scale of the Alantropa project, which requires cooperation between countries in terms of money and people power, would put aside the thoughts of getting involved in future conflicts. Again, labor would be needed for the project, giving jobs to the many unemployed at the time.
The German architect believed in Alantropa so much so that he did not only promote it vigorously through the press, films, talks, exhibitions, and poetry, but he also founded the Atlantropa Institute to make his plans known to all. Yet, he failed to talk about the “racist underpinnings” of his project. As part of Alantropa, the Congo River would be blocked, flooding Central Africa and its inhabitants. Ultimately, Alantropa would see Europeans ruling as the dominant race with Africans being a source of labor. Africa’s resources and land would also be at their disposal.
Fortunately, no one gave Sörgel any signs of wanting to invest in his project, despite its popularity. The Nazis, who believed in the concept of Lebensraum (territory to provide space to its members), thought the initiative was impossible and preferred to invade occupying countries to achieve their aim. World powers were also during the time more interested in nuclear power than in hydroelectricity. Thus, Alantropa was never realized. However, following Sörgel’s death in 1952, his idea lived on in science fiction as seen in Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Grigory Grebnev’s novel, The Flying Station.
There’s no plan to drain it empty which has happened at least once in earths geological past. Lowering the Med 200 meters would creat massive hydraulic head for hydro power consumption. And would put massive amounts of the shallows above water thousands of sq kms. The influx of fresh water vs evaporation is such that without the waters flowing in via Gibraltar and rhe Suez the Med would drop by meters per year. In a few decades it would hundreds of meters down and ripen for hydro electric. Use the hydro power for desalination plants and green up those thousands of sqkm of new land which would be very fertile ask the Dutch how fertile former seafloor is their best farmland is all former northsea bottom.
Look at the map at the top of this page.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Humans more than have the technology to dam the black off and Gibraltar as well. The suez is a baby ditch compared to either locks would be needed for cargo ships but 200 meters of locks is not a impossible challenge eight 25 meter steps would work. Each one with hydro turbines on the outflows.
The Israelis have a idea to tunnel from the Med to the dead sea and use the drop to run turbines for desal and electricity while stabilizing the falling dead sea levels once and for all.
Maybe we’ll find Atlantis if they do.
I guess you missed the part of the plan to dam the Congo River and reverse it dumping water from the equatorial African tropical jungle runoff into three giant lakes in what is now the Sahara desert. This alone would reverse the desertification of the Sahara which only began less than 6000 years ago with the climate zone shifts of the melting of the last period of glaciation. Look at the link I posted its fascinating. Humans have this mega engineering tech we lack the cohesiveness as a species to use it due to political idiocy. Not all communalism is of the devil sometimes we as a species need to do things.
LOL. Expend HUGE amounts of energy pumping the Med dry, then generate power by letting the water flow back into the Med from the Atlantic. FREE ENERGY!!
I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
There’s effectively no border now, so they saved a ton of money and didn’t have to build any dams.
I would expect it would have a huge effect on the land ecosystems all around the Mediterranean.
No need to pump anything the Med evaporates billions of cubic meters of water per year more than flows in via rivers around its shores or the black sea for that matter. The Med is 2 to 10% saltier than the Atlantic for this reason. There are two high volume currents that flow through the straits of Gibraltar one is at tje ssurface carrying huge amounts of less salty water from the Atlantic into the Med tje other is up and over the deep shelf along the bottom of the straits of Gibraltar this dense salty water flows out as a distinct layer into the mid water depths of the Atlantic and can be detected as still sourced from the Med as far away as the Caribbean island arch. Closing the straits of Gibraltar would cause the Med to drop by tens of meters a decade and the suez would become a raging white water if not also dammed as would the straits through Turkey from the black sea.
The plan was to also reverse the Congo river and flood a good chunk of the Sahara over all northern Africa would have greened and cooled. With modern desalination tech the huge amounts of hydropower would be used to green much of the exposed sea bed just like the Dutch do this alsp would have a micro climate cooling effect. The end.result would be a much smaller Med sea that’s saltier but not hypersaline oceanic fish would still be able to live in it unlike the dead sea.
Oh man, that's going to create a hot spot that will rival Death Valley, but exceed the humidity of Houston in August.
and just how high would THAT raise the ocean level??? the greenies would never stand for it...
Taking 200 meters off the Med via evaporation would put that into the atmosphere over time as clouds and eventually rain out over both land and oceans. The water that falls over land that is previously dry would soak into the vadose zone and ve stored as ground water until saturation is reached then Hortonian overland flows would begin starting a runoff cycle. Some of that run off would be trapped in recharge zones of aquifers and others would run off into either back into the Med basin or redsea or north sea or Atlantic ocean. Over all it would eventually raise the worlds oceans a small amount all the mass of water not stored in biomass or ground water or ice in glaciters in the Alps. Given the relative size of the Med vs the world ocean for which there truly is only one. The effect would be a few centimeters at most. Yes as a matter of fact I am a hydrogeologist :)
The greens are the least of the worry. The level of international cooperation needed for a project of this scale dooms it because of the political infighting between the various special interest groups of which the greens are but one. Only a top down leader such as Das Führer who could silence the loud mouth groups and just put resources over a continental scale to work on a single front would be able to accomplish something like this. Look at China they can do Great Wall , Three gorges sized projects due to one party rule. Hell ask the Chinese to do the labor and raw materials with Dutch engineering thats the way to get something like this done while ignoring little counties like Gibraltar and Egypt use mass military might to just do it. But that’s the pure blood Italian fascist in me.
Well at least the islands won’t tip over.
They got a lot of sand over there, fill that bitch!!
I wonder how much that would raise the mean sea level?
How much is flood insurance?
thank you...
and for the exact same reason, an Antarctic ice melt would result in same-same?
a lil atomic teraforming?
The Soviets had a plan to reverse the flow of some rivers flowing north to go south a irrigate the steppe. The plan included "peaceful use" of nuclear weapons.
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