While not directly related, it reminded me of another plan (from 1963), sponsored by the US to create an alternate to the Suez Canal, through the Israeli Negev Desert using... 520 nuclear bombs:<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-alternative-israel-blast-with-nuclear-bombs-1960s-2021-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-altern...</a>
The Mediterranean sea is, to me, the most beautiful place on earth. Be it mainland Spain (with, sadly, way too many concrete all along the coast), France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, ... It's just beautiful. Then the islands: Corsica, Sicily, Ibiza, Formentera, ... It's heaven on earth.<p>I drive my kid to school on the french riviera, along the coast and among the vineyards every day.<p>Famous poets and painters would go and settle there.<p>It requires a very special kind of a sad fuck to want to destroy that.
I get a feeling that the author may have a teeny-weeny ideological axe to grind. A large underwater turbine with totally predictable generation cycle might indeed be a useful thing for Europe and north Africa.
Smaller scale project - Czech dam (the red lines are
dams):<p><a href="https://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/screenshots/7/3/242837-ceska-prehrada-predstaveni-projektu-8343853096564140216.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/screenshots/7/3/242837-ceska...</a>
The final part of a trilogy of stories I ran in my newsletter - and since the first two were well-received on here a few months back, and got me some generous & good advice on tightening them up, I thought I'd push my luck a final time. Plus, this topic's both wtf-barmy and perhaps timely, considering Europe's energy supply issues right now.
With rising sea levels perhaps it might be an option to keep the levels in the mediterranen? Seems at least more feasible than the Norther European Enclosure Dam*<p>*) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_European_Enclosure_Dam" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_European_Enclosure_Da...</a>
Something like this kind of drew me into geology. The inside jacket of my intro textbook explained the Mediterranean used to be damned naturally at Gibraltar or whatever the inlet is called and that so much salt water evaporated there where miles deep salt land features. Was instantly hooked
> What was needed was a project so ludicrously ambitious, yet so immeasurably beneficial to all the European powers, that it would at last force them to put aside their differences and cooperate<p>Interesting, so he was a sort of inverse Ozymandias.
The Qattara depression portion of the project still seems worth doing. While I’d prefer the freshwater flavored version, it’s not hard to imagine it turning into another Salton Sea as droughts occur.
If global warming continues to raise sea level, it could well become the case that such a project is undertaken but with the goal of keeping the Mediterranean roughly where it is, which would simplify changes necessary elsewhere to keep the Black Sea a sea and keep harbors navigable.<p>Lowering the Mediterranean a few feet and running turbines at a flow rate to counteract evaporation might work, especially since evaporation and power usage track somewhat. Hot days evaporate more water, and require more air conditioning. The volume of the reservoir would allow quite a bit of buffer if you wanted to time shift some of that usage, aiming for monthly or quarterly averages instead of daily.
Someone with more engineering sense than I can debunk this:<p>The Baltic is dramatically less saline than the Atlantic. That's why the Vasa [1] was so well-preserved after 300 years at the bottom.<p>So could we not take advantage of that salinity difference, somehow?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.vasamuseet.se/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.vasamuseet.se/en</a><p>Edit: Every engineering student sees the movie of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing. To me, the Vasa is a much better career lesson: Marketing dictating a stupid Engineering decision.<p>"Hey, let's put another gun deck on that thing! It'll be so much more imposing."
Not mentioned in this article: In Philip K. Dick's alternative history The Man in the High Castle, in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won World War II, the Nazis execute this plan and drain the Mediterranean. As the author mentions, there wasn't much care for what happened to the people living in Africa. In Dick's book, the Nazis visited some unspeakable holocaust on them.
If it is done can it easily for 1 country to threaten the whole euro … instead of nuclear bomb, we will bomb this dam. Giving the whole ww1 he has experienced can he just believe all countries are in it for peace. Also who will share the costs of losing the sea and maintain it.
Any thoughts on the idea to expand the Mediterranean with the Sahara Sea idea?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea</a>
> What was needed was a project so ludicrously ambitious, yet so immeasurably beneficial to all the European powers, that it would at last force them to put aside their differences and cooperate<p>Let's be honest, has that idea ever worked?