This is what the Mediterranean would look like if the Atlantropa Project had been made

25 comments
  1. This is the kind of exploitational thinking that got us into the current climate- and biodiversity crises. No thanks.

    Still creative though

  2. This idea always interested me, but like everyone says outside of the political drama the new land would create massive deserts

  3. A nuke in Gibraltar dam and you have a disaster of apocalyptic magnitude in all the Mediterranean.

  4. Wow. I never heard of this. What a fascinating project.

    It sounds like it would have been an absolute disaster on so many levels. But it’s fascinating to read about.

  5. How to start WW3 in a few easy steps. Build another dam at the gate of the Suez canal while you’re at it. I love the smell of uranium in the morning.

  6. Also known as the plan to ruin maritime trade, aquire a lot of worthless salty wasteland, waste absurd amounts of cement, mess with the local climate, and set yourself up with an vulnerable piece of infrastructure that may be destroyed at any time.

  7. Makes me think of a somewhat less ambitious French idea : they were studying the feasibility of flooding a low-lying region of the Sahara desert via a canal in Tunisia to create an inland sea and open up the interior of Northern Africa to trade.

    Jules Verne wrote his last novel based on that idea and it is great : Invasion of the Sea !

  8. Totally insane and we’re lucky this never happened.

    Reminds me of a radio documentary I heard about a project here in Sweden that never happened. In Sweden, the highest mountains are all along the borders to Norway and the landscape gradually gets lower and lower until you reach the sea in the east. In Norway, they have mountains basically everywhere, even in the coastal areas, and the mountains there are like 1000 m straight down to the sea with waterfalls everywhere. This gives them insane opportunities for hydroelectric dams. In the 60s, Sweden was planning to *reverse* one of the northern rivers to make the river go west instead of east, and end up in a massive waterfall to the sea in Norway, just to be able to build at least one super-powerful hyndroelectric power plant like Norway has. It would also result in irreversible effects for the environment since an *entire river* would be removed, killing I dunno how many species there.

    The project was never put to reality.

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