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.
They would have tectonics on their side, since the African plate is pushing northward toward Europe. But they would isolate the Black Sea and create a huge great salt lake there. Doubt the people would be happy about that.
Good catch. more sh*t “journalism.”
i remember that
iirc something about the decrease in fresh water into the arctic was thought to improve transit due to decrease in ice too
“I remember that.”
LOL. And the river beds in the Sahara. Rocks formed at the North Pole now sittings on the equator. Land bridges from Europe to Britain, Asia to Japan, Asia to North America.
This planet’s climate has been all over the place before human’s were even here!
I want them to explain this first before I’ll believe the need for the New Green Deal.
Think of all the submarines they would find from ww1 and ww2.
How many submarines were going into the Mediterranean? It seems like submarine warfare was mostly in the Atlantic?
Did a quick search. For WW2: 62 U-boats lost
Cost? Will DiFi’s hubby’s firm get a cut of the action?
Teddy Roosevelt would give the project a big bad two BUllys!!!
The volume of water frozen in Antarctica is much larger than the top 200 meters of the Med. Antarctica has kilometers thick ice sheets that when melted would flow.directly into the ocean at Antarctic.temps.evaporation is.drastically.reduced that’s why it’s a.giant desert one of the dfirst places on earth. Maybe for giggles today I’ll do a hypothetical mass balance with the Med and the local area River basins. The math for Antarctic ice sheet melting has been done it’s over 100 meters of sea level rise it.depends on how fast the melting happens due to crust isostatic rebound rates taking up accommodation space for the waters on the continental shelf. The mental math version is easier to picture. The total world ocean area is just under 140 million square miles. The Meds area is 965,000 ish sqmi so the Med is 0.00689 the surface area of the rest of the world’s oceans. Taking the top 200 meters off that small of an area and spreading it over the rest would be just about 1.2 meters but like I said a good.portion would end up in the adjacent ground water stores given the dry conditions and the depths of unsaturated vadose zones. Half or more would end up trapped that way, another ten percent or so in biomass so like my original estimates a few tens of cm of rise world wide.
Heck yes the old-school 1960s peaceful atomic...huge fan! Cutting a canal at sea level through Nicaragua with nukes, a larger suez yup nukes. Flooding the Afar triangle depression making a huge salt sea bringing evaporation next door to the head waters of the Nile oh yea baby nuke that badboy. Dig deep water harbors all along any types of coastlines in seconds blammo nuke it good. Need to frac oil fields in tight rocks kaplow nuke it. Gas shales boom that stuff too. Need underground caverns to store liquids or gasses pow goes the miracle Abomb the last three things were actually done. We as in the USA nuked tight oil rocks and drilled into it , same for gas shales and there was a few cavern test shots.
this is why i love FR... i learn something everyday
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