Atlantropa: The $1 Trillion Dam to Drain the Mediterranean

Herman Sörgel, a German architect came up with probably the most insane plan in history: he wanted to quite literally drain the ocean! This would have been the biggest megaproject in the history of humanity! But why did he want to do it? And could his plan have worked?

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0:00 Atlantropa: The $1 Trillion Dam to Drain the Mediterranean
0:25 Lebensraum
1:55 Atlantropa
4:08 Sörgel’s Insane Plan
10:23 Problems & Critism

#megaprojects #construction #engineering
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[MegaBuildsYT]

Do you think humanity could build a dam of this size? 🤔

[shatterquartz]

"The Sahara desert isn't large enough, let's expand it some more" is quite the take.

[MM-tetz]

Death Valley in California comes to mind seeing this video. The place is hot, dry, nice to visit and nice to leave. The world does not need more deserts.

[AustinTexasDaddyBear]

The enviromental impact alone would be crazy. Could you imagine how it would change weather patterns?

[maximvf]

In XX century Soviet agricultural megaprojects drained Aral sea, almost killing it. Hundreds of km2 turned into nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around. It was a gigantic disaster.
Now it's slowly recovering thanks to doing aftermath on complex hydrology in the region.

[EA_customersupport]

1) land around the Mediterranean won't get any rainfall because of zero precipitation

2) reclaimed land will turn into another desert expanding sahara

3) countries dependent on the sea ports, fishing and coastal tourism would lose everything

4)dam which is going to be made out of steel and concrete, will have to face corrosion from sea water and stresses from untameable ocean currents

5) inorder to build a dam, the Mediterranean sea has to be diverted to the sahara, causing major drawbacks to the livelihood, p0is0ning the groundwater reserves, causing desert to emerge as a sea itself.

6) middle eastern countries heavily relied on desalination plants will find themselves living in a uninhabitable place.

7) no countries in this planet can source in raw materials in such large quantity, to fill the seas that extends to a kilometer depth

Only plausible method is to build group of islands, just like china did in the south china sea and join these group of islands step by step fully closing the gap of gibraltar

But half the europe wont get rainfall, when Mediterranean dries up, and cargo ships have to traverse circumventing africa increasing the cost of life.

The land reclaimed will be full of brine pools and salty marshes making the living impossible for thousands of years

[brian]

Mr. Sorgel was clearly smoking some seriously good stuff.

[spacecube]

people today '' no you can't build this building 15m higher, it disrupts sun and local arhitecture''
people 100 years ago *LET'S DAM THE MEDITERANEAN SEA*

[PonchoANS]

That new land would be ridiculously low in elevation, and absurdly, blazingly hot. It would also disrupt pretty much every coastal community in the Mediterranean.

[joebloggs]

Thank goodness they solved the space problem by building up instead of drainging the entire Med sea! What a crazy idea

[Kodey-elyp]

I love the German ingenuity and the 'we can do it' mentality. Makes me proud to have it part of my background

[Paladin]

"Sir, I have a cunning plan."
"What is it, Baldrick?"
"What if we sawed the Rock of Gibraltar in half and dropped it across the Strait? Then we could drain the Mediterranean Sea so any European could walk to Africa."
"Or any African could walk to Europe."
"I didn't think of that."
"Naturally you didn't. Next you'll be suggesting we excavate an underground passage between England and France and call it the Chunnel."
"No sir, I'm not that crazy."

[entropybear]

You didn't mention the most obvious criticism of such a plan: Creating two shrunken hyper-saline seas at the bottom of the world's newest and biggest death valley which will by proximity cause heating and drying of adjacent former coastal lands lowering precipitation causing desertification would be a disaster rather than of any benefit.

[JJustMax]

The problem with big and ambitious projects is that the bigger they are, the more problems they cause, and more problems there are, the more likely they are not to be solved.

[evaavfc]

I'm glad this guy was in the past. Insane.

[intuitivme]

One aspect you failed to address is the very salty Mediterranean sea would result in highly salty land, not fertile, and an even saltier sea that would kill most of the fish. Al this would result in more downsides than benefits.
And no one was conscious of the balance of nature.

[lonnyyoung]

Every criticism aside (all of which are valid), I'll give the guy credit for trying to come up with a plan to better the world. It was wildly messed up, but he had good intentions.

[klabauterle]

I am German and have not heard of this project until today. Thanks for the video

[bitbucketcynic]

The bottom of a drained Mediterranean would be an uninhabitable deadly desert of death with temperatures over 160°F/71°C due to adiabatic heating, and the changes in weather and precipitation patterns would have horrific consequences both regionally and globally we can't even calculate.

[MrCovi]

To be fair, the congo dam would solve a lot of the water problems across many countries in Africa. But its an absurdly expensive project that a world power would struggle to achieve, much less a third world country in Africa.