Not only that, but the loss of that large a body of water would damage Europe's climate drastically. And the newly exposed sea bottom would be an enormous salt flat with temps hotter than the Dead Sea.
I'm no meteorologist but I think the global wind patterns are such that the Mediterranean gets most of its wind from the west. That's where the Atlantic ocean is, so it would be very humid. It would mostly not expand the Sahara. The climate would probably be similar to France or Italy in the northern regions, though the southern regions would be more like North Africa, of course. The reason the Sahara is so dry is that it gets most of its wind from the East, which is pretty much entirely covered by land. The wind is extremely dry for most of the year so it rarely rains in the Sahara. This wind continues traveling westward and eventually reaches the Amazon rainforest. Lots of sand/dust/minerals get carried to the Amazon this way and contributes to its fertility. The worst part of this plan is the fact that it will take millennia for the newly exposed land to develop into anything useful. The amount of salt in the ground is going to be a huge issue. The Mediterranean is about 900,000 cubic miles of ocean water. Ocean water has about 120 million tons of salt per cubic mile. All of that salt is just going to be sitting on top of the ground when the water melts away. I haven't actually watched the video yet so I don't know if they have a plan to deal with the salt but I can't imagine it's a good plan. Oh, and that doesn't mention the risk of building things below sea level. It's like New Orleans except one million times the size. So, a pretty terrible idea all around.
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*
This is the reason that London has such wacky tall buildings, nothing's allowed to be built that blocks the view to St Paul's cathedral nor can it overshadow it. Hence all the weird shapes and lack of skyscrapers, though why one is being built in the shape of a sex toy...
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.
Not to mention fundamentally altering the climate and weather. Warm up travelling up from Africa is responsible for a lot of Europe's rainfall. What would happen we are already fairly sure of because the African continent is already pushing into Europe, as that happens most of continental Europe will become a desert. Fortunately we'll never see it because it will take millions of years.
@@jooproos6559 Didn't the Rhein almost dry up recently? I live on a island in the North Atlantic (Britain) so rain comes with the territory most of the time.
What about the Suez Canal and all the rivers flow into the Mediterranean Sea it would need continual pumping etc unless his plan was to use the water to hydrate the Sahara
So, he wanted to raise the global sea level by about 10 meters in order to create a gigantic wasteland with geothermal temperatures somewhere in the ballpark of 60-80°C, covered by a 20 meters thick layer of salt, that is carried around the entire globe by the wind and poisons all fertile ground. ...Sounds like a perfect plan to create Lebensraum.
You missed the details of the plan. He proposed to change the Mediterranean Sea level by 200 m at most. This wouldn't change the global water levels as much as you claim. The adiabatic heating in the atmosphere being ~8 degrees per km, so it would change the temperature at the sea by 2-3 degrees.
He's an architect, not an engineer or environmental scientist. Basically a failed artist with a design degree... Hey, there was another failed artist in Germany who wrecked havoc... I see a common thread here 🤔🤔🤔
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.
It's only a part of the story. Those megaprojects have never gone away with the dissolution of the USSR. Now Uzbekistan is taking advantage of them. But Kazakhstan, of course, puts effort in refilling one part of the basin. Yet you didn't mention that the Aral sea used to dry out in the past. 400 years ago the Amudaria river flowed into the Caspian sea instead. This branch is Called Uzboy.
@@HoundGrinwell it was natural process but in 20th century it was man made , yes unfortunately Uzbekistan ca not afford stop using those canals for cotton irrigation , I wonder if Kazakhstan could make a wall and separate aral sea and try to restore their part
@@pauldruhg2992 well it is man made because of the canals and they took to much water from it because USSR needed cotton I think it was because egypt decided to not to sell their cotton to soviets.
Nature causes its natural disasters by itself. I see no harm in humanity causing a "natural disaster" to avoid famine, economic crisis and wars. It is better to build a dam in the Mediterranean than to go back to the Middle Ages or the Stone Age.
@@AnimeAne-fo8iz Better to do than not do. If humanity does not develop its means of production, it will die. Better to do than go back to the middle ages.
What about ocean level rise due to Mediterranean water going to the ocean? What about the land being useless due to being salted from the evaporated sea?
"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."
You would find tons of gold and historical treasures. People have been sailing the Mediterranean for over 3'000 years now and were transporting precious metals back and forward all the time, a lot of this ships sunk for various reasons. Of course I'm not "pro draining the Mediterranean" by any means, just saying.
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.
it was a different time that allowed dreaming big, the mediterian part is crap, but i wonder now if damming the congo river REALLY would have gotten some kind of big lake right into the sahara dessert... now that this mean disrupting so many african countries with all citizen that can't move freely between those african states this can not work.. but in total, making the sahara green by forcing a huge lake next to it.. could you use a huge pipe system to get a big chunk of water from a central african river to really only guide the lake creating right into the border region of the sahara... ?? could that actually work... that way you wouldn't also flood unimaginable areas of rain forest and fertille savana, that lake size really looked.. ridiculous! and you would also not influence local weather paterns that extreme, as a suddes huge lake could influence it.. at leaqst 10.000 times more manageble to try and build and 1000 km pipeline guiding some pretty big fresh water feed from big central african river then it would be to try and dam the mediterian. PS, video was a bit disappointing, climate science clearly would link a 200 meter below sea level cimate to simular climat conditions as death valley ... and the entire climate around the mediterinian would become so much dryer with less sea to start evaporation from... complete disaster.. so the more you limet all to huge changes, on places that are climate wise really okay right now, the better!
@@JeroenJA Sahara is so large I doubt building few pipelines from a central african river would prove adequate. More likely that there'd have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of desalination plants all around the coast of northern Africa, connected to vast water infrastructure to turn Sahara green once more
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.
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.
Putting a hydro power station at the strait of Gibraltar still sounds like a pretty good idea. The water that flows in to replace evaporation may as well be utilised somehow. It's not as if the water would be prevented from flowing in as first envisaged.
I dunno about draining the Mediterranian, but that whole plan to irrigate the Sahara does sound interesting, yes lives would be disrupted down south but if the desert could become habitable again it would add way more living space to make up for it (at least in theory).
To fix the sahara, you'd have to kick out all of the muslims that invaded & conquered Africa & turned it into a desert hellscape, compared to the lush grasslands it used to have along the coast under Roman rule & earlier. Muslims aren't farmers who know how to tend the land, they are herders which ultimately destroys land & turns it into desert.
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.
Does not have to be so. As long as the project actually makes sense from the get go. But problem is with most big projects these days they do not make sense as they are often created by people with highly inflated egos such as dictators.
They may have to build it just to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean especially if the collapse of the remaining glaciers on Earth is imminent
The Germans wanted "Lebensraum" because they have historically looked at Slavic Jewish people as "untermenschen" basic history covered up by English language pro-German propaganda@@MegaBuildsYT
@@sexgod6909 according to the paper by Chen et al. BMC Genomics (2017) 18:655 DOI 10.1186/s12864-017-4037-3 we a re still talking about 2% germination in water with 0.8% NaCl concentration: the average for seawater is 3.5%. May work, may take time.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
As long as it would take to remove tens of thousands of cubic km of salt that extend downward more that 10km below the bottom of the sea. In other words, about the same time as people in Hades get a supply of ice water.
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.
I'll mention that in 1940, Germany's population was around 70 million, compared to 83 million today. One can imagine that the prospects of 'overpopulation' might have *seemed* very real to people back then - there were fewer high rise buildings/apartment blocks, and food production wasn't as effective as it is today. Anyway, this plan, if realized, would've been a disaster for the planet, flooding other parts of the world, destroying cities and submerging islands, the list goes on.
I don't think they only seemed real. They were in a completly different situation than us Germans today, 1. There died a lot of people in WW2 what cleared a lot of space. 2. Many people were not born because of WW2 3. In 1920 nobody could predict that our population will sudenly stagnate after 1970 as this was a never before seen event If the opulation would have grown as it did back in 1920, we would easily have around 145 milion people here in Germany.....
In 1900 there were 140 million people in Africa. The population of Europe at that time was 300 million. Basically he was talking about the unpopulated unused areas of Africa not the overpopulated 1.3 Billion people in Africa today so it wasn't the same issue.
And what right you have in our continent?! Least entitled European, this is the crux of the world's problems, including Palestine now!! Europeans so entitled they made Palestine pay for European sins against the Jews.
1.3 Billion people in Africa over such a HUGE continent is hardly overpopulation. Why do ppl love to point fingers at Africa when the overpopulation really exists elsewhere
@@dagmarbubolz7999 overpopulation is a myth, nearly all countries have trouble to hold their current population, and even in African countries like Nigeria, the new middle classe don't want more as two kids. The population is in decline, at the moment we don't see it in the data, bcs people get older, but as soon as we lost our elderly people we will face a decline!
@@dagmarbubolz7999 that would be bc it went from 140 million to almost 10x that in 100 years. It's over populated for what it can support based on the infrastructure there or is that too hard for you to understand
No one knows that there is a tectonic fault right in the middle!? And it's moving?! Making a video about this is omitting this fact is even worse than the original idea.
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
I'd love to see more videos about other unrealized mega-projects from the past, such as the plan to flood the Qatara Depression in Egypt or the plan to build a second Atlantic/Pacific canal in Nicaragua using nukes to dig it.
I've always been fascinated by the Qatara Depression project. And the fact that back in the day nuclear blasts for engineering was a perfectly fine idea.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
This phenomenon of dependence of Mediterrian on the waters of Atlantic Ocean can be used for tidal power generation. This will help massively in increasing the renewable energy production in Europe
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
Yes, the Doggerland restoration! It's not just about sea control. They were projecting plans to drain it, bringing the Dogger Banks back to dry land as the were in the Mesolithic. One dam would shut off the English Channel. Canals would keep the ports on some rivers like the Thames, Rhine, etc. in contact with the sea. I've seen maps of the plan.
I wonder why Sörgel didn't consider closing the Baltic sea by dams through Denmark. After all, it's closer to Germany. Maybe he understood how Kiel would have a problem with that idea, while ignoring the problems of, say, Marseille.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
1:00 and 11:28 maps are quite inaccurate (for Interwar period): 1. Ireland is unified (or is still under British rule) 2. Germany doesn't own (southern) Prussia 3. Finland doesn't own Karelia, Salla and Petsamo 4. Belarus and Ukraine are independent 5. Soviet Union doesn't own Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) 6. Turkey seems to have lost Turkisth War of Independence and got even more carved up than it was supposed to be 7. Lithuania owns Vilnius
@danielbenson9942 Bro Hitler and the nazis didn't rise to power in Germany till the mid-1930s same with the idea of lebensraum, and the first world war ended in 1918. You cont your timeline completely messed up.
@@danielbenson9942 Here's what borders of Finland looked like in 1920-1940: fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:Finland_%281920-1940%29_location_map.svg and borders of Poland, Germany and Soviet Unio looked like during 1920s and 30s: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rzeczpospolita_1937.svg
What the video completely fails to mention are the ecological consequences of this project. For example, that the newly reclaimed land and the surrounding area would have become so hot and dry that it would not have been habitable anyway. Or that the global sea level would have risen by 10 meters.
But.....why would the seas rise? The water is evaporated. Gone! This question is to give you an idea of what it would be like for scientists to have to try to explain to politicians and the public what the problems connected with a crazy scheme like this are.
Damming the Mediterranean would have global environmental consequences that Sörgel never understood. The newly drained land area would have been hot salt flats, not only useless for farming be it would have raised the surrounding temperature of Southern Europe to an unbearable degree. This would have turned Europe as a whole into a hot and dry desert, and sand and salt kicked up would spread across continents further running their capacity to support human life. Sörgel thought his plan would have saved humanity from war, he didn't foresee that it would have doomed humanity by altering the global climate.
That was an insane project but another insane project has also been considered and that is to drain out the Baltic Sea by building dams or walls between the UK and Norway in the north and UK and Netherlands in the south.
Before the last ice age the island of Great Britain was connected to both Norway, France and what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. The North Sea was an inland salt water lake.
Yes!They really think about that!!Its just crazy!That would be a very low "polder"!!I am living in the polder they talked about as a example,but it is massive already and takes a lot of time to put into reality !
This talk about expanding into Africa makes it sound like people don't already live there, but we know from history how Europeans solve this "problem".
Honestly, the historical and archeological mysteries we could uncover and perhaps answer could alone make this a compelling idea. Imagine all the treasures and artifacts and lost civilisations that litter the seafloor.
given the flow from Atlantic to the Mediterranean I am surprised the lack of effort to use all that flow with undersea current generation techniques. there is a wave generation system for Gibraltar
lets not forget that adding all that water from the Med into the rest of the earth's oceans would raise sea levels significantly, so this is a HIGHLY dubious proposition.
Not by much but enough for it to be a bad idea for that reason alone, less water evaporation and rainfall would be even worse and the best way by far for transportation of goods are by ship making the idea crazy
One of the reasons for the success of Europeans is that the European cost line is much longer than Africa despite Europe being much smaller, and the many nice port spots and navigable rivers Europe has compared to Africa which the Mediterranean coast and water evaporation which as stated in the video higher than all the rivers flowing into it, even though the Nile River also flows into it, one of the main reasons Europe is a sweet spot is because of all the water nearby wherever you are in Europe compared to most places. The inability for people like him to understand the consequences of this ideas makes his ideas as deadly as the “Great Leap Forward” in China, which were like this idea meant to improve people’s lives, but instead it was 5 times as deadly as the holocaust 6 million deaths, the Great Leap Forward cost the lives of 30 million people in a few years period, and almost all the birds in China were killed because a Communist can do nothing wrong = blame someone or something else, and a few % of their diet was human food, but almost all was insects like grasshoppers or locust, which you probably can figure out what happened when they didn’t have their natural enemies to eat them 😮 not a lot of food left for smart bird killers, who didn’t have the ability to self criticism or predict what consequences there actions would bring. The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say. Of course only if you can’t think what are the likely consequences of your actions, good intentions are not inherently bad, people who think they are good and right because they have good intentions are the dangerous ones.
Completely idiotic, creating a massive desert where no one can live and destroying millions of people living near the old coast does not exactly help make new living room
“Not everybody liked these proposals. In hindsight, they represented the colonialist tone in Europe at the time and didn’t take into account the people who already lived in Africa. People who didn’t want a stream of Europeans flowing into the continent and claiming the land as their own…” Swap these roles around and everyone would cry racism despite that being exactly what’s happening right now on an absolutely gigantic scale. *Oh* the irony!
The question unasked here, is what do you do with that volume of water? Displacing that much water would only cause more problems than any benefits of the dam. Not to mention the inconceivable ecological damage it would have caused. 😅
If you give everyone 100m2 of space you can still fit the worldpopulation in 60 percent of Alaska territory. So its nonsense that the world is overpopulated.
The problem is not room to stand up and walk around. Food production is the issue. Since you mentioned Alaska _ how much of the land there is suitable for agriculture ? If you allow for cold, heat, drought, elevation, erosion, roads and cities, forests, rivers and lakes, only a small part of the land on earth is farmable.
The real problem about this project is that the Mediterranean is already saltier than the ocean, and as it dry up, it would only leave salted lands to dry, turn into salty dust that would ruin the environment
It's not living space that's running out. The typical person only really needs a few hundred square feet. You can fit a million people in a square mile if you really want to. The reason for the misconception is because of artificially high residential costs. This is because of financialization, and because people that have houses vote their house prices into infinity. It's not difficult to find land to house people.
There seems to always be a crazy engineer that wants to do something absolutely unhinged. Another dude wanted to fill the San Francisco bay. They sound novel until you see the catastrophic effects, like with the Aral sea.
well, - off the South coast of Crete the sea floor drops away to around 1800 meters... it is a huge flat plain, tilted at an angle that slowly rises up to around 400 meters below sea level (just next to Gavdos) ...the surface of that plain is well worth a detailed study...
Obviously a BAD idea! The Med, a shallow, warm sea, greatly helps moderate the European climate, making it SO much warmer. Plus all the salt left by drying up the Med, would make farms + ranches impossible-
Hi, Sir. Great video. Thanks a lot for the hardwork you have put in to make this wonderful video. Just a request: Can you make a video about what would happen to Europe and Africa if this was constructed? Like, for example: the economic impact, environmental impacts, etc. Can you give your opinion, Sir? Thank you, Sir👍. Great video❤.
there was a video on youtube that talked about what would happen and basically all it would do was make North Africa and all of the Mediterranean a massive desert and ruin the nations that were on the coast
Cody from AlternateHistoryHub actually wrote a fiction book, The Atlantropa Articles, set in a world where this project was actually completed. Might be worth checking out if you want to see more speculation over the possible impacts of this plan
Dan Simmons sci-fi saga Ilium-Oliympos also depicts in some chapters a far future Mediterranean Sea, drained and used as huge food producing land...and many evil surprises. Recommended.
From what I had seen, when the Mediterranean basin was naturally cut off from the Atlantic in prehistory, its climate was rather similar to Death Valley, but on a massive scale. This projet may have created a lot of land, but whether it would be useful as living space is a different matter.
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.
Considering that such a mega project is still impossible shows that humanity still has to advance a lot before hallucinating about becoming interplanetary and interstellar species. Means more advancements in construction engineering and materials engineering is required so that such seemingly impossible megaprojects are very much possible to build and sustain.
Why would pre ww2 europeans care what happened to Africa? The europeans were industrialized with flight, guns, and the combustion engine. Africa was basically still in the middle ages technologically. You do not own what you cannot defend.
I propose Building the Dam at Gibralter. It's a narrow enough passage to the Giant Mediteranian Lake. It's not a Sea. It was empty back in the time of Noah and his Ark. When the great flood came, the Atlantic Ocean spilled over the Gibralter area and Flooded the Mediterranean Basin. It would be a Fantastic feat of engineering if and when this Dam gets built. We could use the Basin to grow Crops for an ever expanding World Population. And the Farmers could live there as well. I would ban any Mega Cities from being built there since they have a huge impact on Global Warming. This area might be called, Ecotopia.
"and people from Europe could more easily move into Africa" ... I think we all know that would not be the direction of travel and that it would not be Europeans filling up this new land.
We might need a dam like this to keep the level in the Mediterranean constant and could also produce a lot of energy. This dam might be far less cheaper than to create a dam for each city around the Mediterranean sea.
the video is based on extremely loose facts. WW2 was never based on the idea of lebensraum. It was based on the idea of germany dominating europe / the world.@@theowlfromduolingo7982
It is grandiose and should stay where it is, on paper. No mention was made of the fishing industry, or effects of climate change impacting Europe. It makes for a great exercise or classroom test in how one needs to look at big projects holistically.
This idea turned out to be bad for many solid technical reasons that were uncovered later by thorough analysis. There were other problems I don't think this video mentions, for example the land uncovered by the receding Mediterranean would have been far too salty to be fit for agriculture - so no new crops to feed the zillions of new inhabitants. It's important to note that it was a bad idea because of these problems, NOT because it was laughably obvious at a glance - as people nowadays tend to dismiss things. With grand-scale ideas we always have to keep our minds open and make judgements based on really studying the details.
Draining the Med would impact the weather systems in Europe, probably raising the air temperature by at least 3 degrees C if not more, insect pests and other diseases from Africa would travel quickly across the reclaimed land affecting agriculture across all of Europe. Basically not a good idea.
The German architect Herman Sörgel, planned ATLANTROPA in 1927 which was officially presented in 1928. The project which preached to isolate the Mediterranean Sea by closing the straits of Gibraltar, Suez and Dardanelles. Therefore this project took place under the Weimar Republic and not during Nazism, indeed Hitler opposed this project when it was presented again, by Sorgel, because Germany would have had to involve many other European and African nations in the realization, therefore it would clash against his ideologies.
If you're going to drain the mediterranean, make sure to hire Dutch Engineers from the Netherlands to do it. Put them in charge of the operation and you can turn all that reclaimed land into the best fertile soil for farming.
Some have already pointed out the effect on the Sahara. The known tectonic movements mean a certainty of catastrophic failure. Much better to use garbage to create artificial islands, if you want to increase land area.
So the people living on any island in the Med would find themselves living on top of a mountain three miles high. Italy would be surrounded by cliffs of the same height. The Suez canal would be rendered useless and all shipping to Europe would have to sail around Africa.
The entire idea is utterly insane, yet oddly intriguing. I stand to wonder what the world would be like if humans hadn't been so hastily violent and oppressive of others. If all had worked together to create a better utopia for both the African continent and the European continent then maybe an idea like this could have been 60 to 80 % complete by this time. I can imagine a world where diversity and learning rival the commitment seen by religion, politics, and death. I see a world where humans have worked together to alter the land scape of both continents to form a symbiotic relationship between the two converting now baren wasteland deserts into great megacities that now will never see the light of day, building a beautiful future together free of ever knowing what hate is. Having always worked as friends together for the last 10,000 years instead of killing each other could have brought so much more to humanities table rather then the last ten centuries only causing constant death and destruction.
It’s not possible. Diversity isn’t really a strength, it’s especially apparent nowadays. Even if it did work, it would only work by cultures becoming similar to one another, thus destroying their own unique culture in the process
Do you think humanity could build a dam of this size? 🤔
no
yes i think in next century maybe
Yeah, we could. But we are not gonna
sounds like another Aral sea disaster but much worse
yeah, but it would not be good for us
"The Sahara desert isn't large enough, let's expand it some more" is quite the take.
"Oh wait, there is too much desert. Let's build another humungous dam to solve the problem and create another sea."
Not only that, but the loss of that large a body of water would damage Europe's climate drastically. And the newly exposed sea bottom would be an enormous salt flat with temps hotter than the Dead Sea.
I'm no meteorologist but I think the global wind patterns are such that the Mediterranean gets most of its wind from the west. That's where the Atlantic ocean is, so it would be very humid. It would mostly not expand the Sahara. The climate would probably be similar to France or Italy in the northern regions, though the southern regions would be more like North Africa, of course.
The reason the Sahara is so dry is that it gets most of its wind from the East, which is pretty much entirely covered by land. The wind is extremely dry for most of the year so it rarely rains in the Sahara. This wind continues traveling westward and eventually reaches the Amazon rainforest. Lots of sand/dust/minerals get carried to the Amazon this way and contributes to its fertility.
The worst part of this plan is the fact that it will take millennia for the newly exposed land to develop into anything useful. The amount of salt in the ground is going to be a huge issue. The Mediterranean is about 900,000 cubic miles of ocean water. Ocean water has about 120 million tons of salt per cubic mile. All of that salt is just going to be sitting on top of the ground when the water melts away. I haven't actually watched the video yet so I don't know if they have a plan to deal with the salt but I can't imagine it's a good plan.
Oh, and that doesn't mention the risk of building things below sea level. It's like New Orleans except one million times the size. So, a pretty terrible idea all around.
I heard that they want to nuke bomb on deserts for creating a large lake.
I think they would still let all the river water still come into the "lake" : )
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*
This is the reason that London has such wacky tall buildings, nothing's allowed to be built that blocks the view to St Paul's cathedral nor can it overshadow it. Hence all the weird shapes and lack of skyscrapers, though why one is being built in the shape of a sex toy...
XD
Good spelling 😂😂😂
and thats why people today are paying for the mistakes of the people from the past. like the invention of plastic and the stupid smart phone
@@rumaanahadjee7349 what?
xD
plastic itself isn't a problem.
it's the way we did (not) dispose of it
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.
Not to mention fundamentally altering the climate and weather. Warm up travelling up from Africa is responsible for a lot of Europe's rainfall. What would happen we are already fairly sure of because the African continent is already pushing into Europe, as that happens most of continental Europe will become a desert. Fortunately we'll never see it because it will take millions of years.
YES, JUST LIKE THE AMERICAN DESERT IN THE SOUTHWEST,
@@darthwiizius Well,we could easily cope with a lot less rain than today with all that rain we have already in the past few years!
@@jooproos6559
Didn't the Rhein almost dry up recently? I live on a island in the North Atlantic (Britain) so rain comes with the territory most of the time.
What about the Suez Canal and all the rivers flow into the Mediterranean Sea it would need continual pumping etc unless his plan was to use the water to hydrate the Sahara
So, he wanted to raise the global sea level by about 10 meters in order to create a gigantic wasteland with geothermal temperatures somewhere in the ballpark of 60-80°C, covered by a 20 meters thick layer of salt, that is carried around the entire globe by the wind and poisons all fertile ground.
...Sounds like a perfect plan to create Lebensraum.
You missed the details of the plan. He proposed to change the Mediterranean Sea level by 200 m at most. This wouldn't change the global water levels as much as you claim.
The adiabatic heating in the atmosphere being ~8 degrees per km, so it would change the temperature at the sea by 2-3 degrees.
He's an architect, not an engineer or environmental scientist. Basically a failed artist with a design degree... Hey, there was another failed artist in Germany who wrecked havoc... I see a common thread here 🤔🤔🤔
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.
Very interesting, I never heard of that. I'll look into it.
It's only a part of the story. Those megaprojects have never gone away with the dissolution of the USSR. Now Uzbekistan is taking advantage of them. But Kazakhstan, of course, puts effort in refilling one part of the basin.
Yet you didn't mention that the Aral sea used to dry out in the past. 400 years ago the Amudaria river flowed into the Caspian sea instead. This branch is Called Uzboy.
@@HoundGrinwell it was natural process but in 20th century it was man made , yes unfortunately Uzbekistan ca not afford stop using those canals for cotton irrigation , I wonder if Kazakhstan could make a wall and separate aral sea and try to restore their part
It drained after privatization happened. If you don't maintain something it will wither.
Also there is a project to feed Aral with Ob river 😊.
@@pauldruhg2992 well it is man made because of the canals and they took to much water from it because USSR needed cotton I think it was because egypt decided to not to sell their cotton to soviets.
The enviromental impact alone would be crazy. Could you imagine how it would change weather patterns?
Nature causes its natural disasters by itself. I see no harm in humanity causing a "natural disaster" to avoid famine, economic crisis and wars. It is better to build a dam in the Mediterranean than to go back to the Middle Ages or the Stone Age.
yes i guess impact could be much more danger than we ever thaught
@@AnimeAne-fo8iz Better to do than not do. If humanity does not develop its means of production, it will die. Better to do than go back to the middle ages.
People believed god made earth for human still many
What about ocean level rise due to Mediterranean water going to the ocean? What about the land being useless due to being salted from the evaporated sea?
"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."
you mean all the poor Africans could walk to Europe.
@@johnduch2815 Well, the poor ones can't afford to drive or ride.
Baldrick, make a sentence out of the following words: face, sodding, your, shut.
@@thePronto Very well, sir. Shut your sodding face.
Well, there's not only Africans in France. A few frenchmen are left.
Draining the Mediterranean would have immense consequences
for example? Im just curious. I mean yes, some species would die ofc
@@ExileLBLCostal cities would lose the coast, port cities would be destroyed, the Suez canal would be unusable, etc.
. You would create a massive salt desert
@@ExileLBL african immigration more and more bigger
@@aaaa-sd3wf Back then europeans didn't accept black immigrants
Imagine all the archeological treasures
You would find tons of gold and historical treasures. People have been sailing the Mediterranean for over 3'000 years now and were transporting precious metals back and forward all the time, a lot of this ships sunk for various reasons. Of course I'm not "pro draining the Mediterranean" by any means, just saying.
....and looting hey.
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.
Yes, that is what happened to Aral sea.
Mr. Sorgel was clearly smoking some seriously good stuff.
and he was allowed out of the mental hospital to promote it (was he sponsored by shrinks)
My thoughts exactly. Did the first person he suggested this to not give him the are you mad look?
it was a different time that allowed dreaming big,
the mediterian part is crap, but i wonder now if damming the congo river REALLY would have gotten some kind of big lake right into the sahara dessert...
now that this mean disrupting so many african countries with all citizen that can't move freely between those african states this can not work..
but in total, making the sahara green by forcing a huge lake next to it..
could you use a huge pipe system to get a big chunk of water from a central african river to really only guide the lake creating right into the border region of the sahara... ?? could that actually work...
that way you wouldn't also flood unimaginable areas of rain forest and fertille savana, that lake size really looked.. ridiculous!
and you would also not influence local weather paterns that extreme, as a suddes huge lake could influence it..
at leaqst 10.000 times more manageble to try and build and 1000 km pipeline guiding some pretty big fresh water feed from big central african river then it would be to try and dam the mediterian.
PS, video was a bit disappointing, climate science clearly would link a 200 meter below sea level cimate to simular climat conditions as death valley ... and the entire climate around the mediterinian would become so much dryer with less sea to start evaporation from... complete disaster..
so the more you limet all to huge changes, on places that are climate wise really okay right now, the better!
Man you ain't lying. Dude is crazy.
@@JeroenJA Sahara is so large I doubt building few pipelines from a central african river would prove adequate.
More likely that there'd have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of desalination plants all around the coast of northern Africa, connected to vast water infrastructure to turn Sahara green once more
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.
Probably have turned Northern Europe into a desert.
Just a moronic idea.
It would also be extremely salty, so any thought of arable land there would prove to be fantasy.
no matter heat lot, newermind, petter dry all mediterraine area water all off and delete many place. and move all water to sahara desert.
It is a bad idea, that sane people do not entertain for a second.
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.
Levels of the lakes would be maintained through the dams.
@@johnburns4017but the lakes would be dead, due to the salinity.
@@DinoAlberini
The point was the levels.
@@johnburns4017 fair enough
money
Putting a hydro power station at the strait of Gibraltar still sounds like a pretty good idea. The water that flows in to replace evaporation may as well be utilised somehow. It's not as if the water would be prevented from flowing in as first envisaged.
The water "flows" at such a small rate that it wouldn't generate a meaningful amount of energy.
Imagine how much force would pushing onto the dam from the atlantic side
I dunno about draining the Mediterranian, but that whole plan to irrigate the Sahara does sound interesting, yes lives would be disrupted down south but if the desert could become habitable again it would add way more living space to make up for it (at least in theory).
Irrigate, with what ? Salt water ?
Typical bonehead colonizer talk
@@sbkenn1 Congo river is fresh water
@@akneebreeated not nearly enough and places downstream need it.
To fix the sahara, you'd have to kick out all of the muslims that invaded & conquered Africa & turned it into a desert hellscape, compared to the lush grasslands it used to have along the coast under Roman rule & earlier. Muslims aren't farmers who know how to tend the land, they are herders which ultimately destroys land & turns it into desert.
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.
Does not have to be so. As long as the project actually makes sense from the get go. But problem is with most big projects these days they do not make sense as they are often created by people with highly inflated egos such as dictators.
This one is big and ambitiously stupid
@@kidandresu We really need to make sure liberals don't hear about it then.
Most likely get half built and then just abandoned.
They may have to build it just to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean especially if the collapse of the remaining glaciers on Earth is imminent
this would drastically affect my fishing season
😂
The Germans wanted "Lebensraum" because they have historically looked at Slavic Jewish people as "untermenschen"
basic history covered up by English language pro-German propaganda@@MegaBuildsYT
Ok, let’s cancel the project then. We will built 167 km line city in a desert instead
😂@@pompom6675
Exactly… same level of idiocy, different locations. I think they will now reduce it to about 2km.
I wonder how long it would have taken to desalinize the now-exposed bottom of the sea to a level suitable for any kind of agriculture.
Genetically modified crops would work just as the Chinese have proved with SEA RICE..
@@sexgod6909 according to the paper by Chen et al. BMC Genomics (2017) 18:655
DOI 10.1186/s12864-017-4037-3 we a re still talking about 2% germination in water with 0.8% NaCl concentration: the average for seawater is 3.5%. May work, may take time.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
As long as it would take to remove tens of thousands of cubic km of salt that extend downward more that 10km below the bottom of the sea. In other words, about the same time as people in Hades get a supply of ice water.
I believe they imagined they had a thousand years...
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.
Sörgal's project survived only through the TV series Man In The High Castle.
I'll mention that in 1940, Germany's population was around 70 million, compared to 83 million today. One can imagine that the prospects of 'overpopulation' might have *seemed* very real to people back then - there were fewer high rise buildings/apartment blocks, and food production wasn't as effective as it is today. Anyway, this plan, if realized, would've been a disaster for the planet, flooding other parts of the world, destroying cities and submerging islands, the list goes on.
I don't think they only seemed real. They were in a completly different situation than us Germans today,
1. There died a lot of people in WW2 what cleared a lot of space.
2. Many people were not born because of WW2
3. In 1920 nobody could predict that our population will sudenly stagnate after 1970 as this was a never before seen event If the opulation would have grown as it did back in 1920, we would easily have around 145 milion people here in Germany.....
Not the mention that out of those 83 million, about over 15 million are non Germans. Fear of overpopulation turned into fear of native depopulation.
70 million white people in 1940. Now there's only around 65 million white people in Germany. You have declined.
a desaster to the planet? I think the planet doesnt care if people can live on it.
4. Germany was bigger then.
In 1900 there were 140 million people in Africa. The population of Europe at that time was 300 million. Basically he was talking about the unpopulated unused areas of Africa not the overpopulated 1.3 Billion people in Africa today so it wasn't the same issue.
today we need a wall around Europe!
And what right you have in our continent?!
Least entitled European, this is the crux of the world's problems, including Palestine now!! Europeans so entitled they made Palestine pay for European sins against the Jews.
1.3 Billion people in Africa over such a HUGE continent is hardly overpopulation. Why do ppl love to point fingers at Africa when the overpopulation really exists elsewhere
@@dagmarbubolz7999 overpopulation is a myth, nearly all countries have trouble to hold their current population, and even in African countries like Nigeria, the new middle classe don't want more as two kids. The population is in decline, at the moment we don't see it in the data, bcs people get older, but as soon as we lost our elderly people we will face a decline!
@@dagmarbubolz7999 that would be bc it went from 140 million to almost 10x that in 100 years. It's over populated for what it can support based on the infrastructure there or is that too hard for you to understand
I am German and have not heard of this project until today. Thanks for the video
What stone have you been living under? A bunker?? You do know the war has ended right?
xD
@@2wheels1guy25
some library may have had this document only 100yrs back to scroll back
@@2wheels1guy25 There was zero need for that crap answer. This was the first time I'd heard it too.
No one knows that there is a tectonic fault right in the middle!? And it's moving?! Making a video about this is omitting this fact is even worse than the original idea.
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
I'd love to see more videos about other unrealized mega-projects from the past, such as the plan to flood the Qatara Depression in Egypt or the plan to build a second Atlantic/Pacific canal in Nicaragua using nukes to dig it.
She MegaProject Channel some are real some are just theories
I've always been fascinated by the Qatara Depression project. And the fact that back in the day nuclear blasts for engineering was a perfectly fine idea.
Imagine thinking the world would say "Yeah, we don't need shipping through the Med, let's turn it into a giant desert".
There would still be shipping through the lower sea levels and just need locks to raise and lower the ships
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
@@benitofranklyn4237 At least the Soviets didn't go through with the plan of turning Siberia in a land of dammed lakes ...
@@Rickuo They wanted to do what? I'll look into it. They once turned Nazino Island in Siberia into an island full of cannibals tho.
I'm Greek and I don't want to to stop going to my beloved sea 🥰
If you pre buy I bet you would a great deal on future beachfront. You can buy several plots then sell them to build a house.
@1:00 Lol, putting Finland, Sweden in this population explosion map is hilarious... 😂😂😂
Random guy: *makes a hole in the dam*
The mediterranean:🌊🌊🌊
So I finally can retake the sunglasses I lost last summer
This feels like a reference to a certain mod for a certain game.
Where a ancient kingdom returns as a freaky state
Where someone wants you to verify your clock
Does anyone wanna eat some Streng-Geheim-Os.
The brain rot is real
This phenomenon of dependence of Mediterrian on the waters of Atlantic Ocean can be used for tidal power generation. This will help massively in increasing the renewable energy production in Europe
Sorgel was truly a mad scientist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
The Austrian painter painting his own world rn
Make a video about the people who want to drain the Baltic sea and the North sea. Those plans are quite recent!
Those plans are not about draining the sea but to subdue it.
Yes, the Doggerland restoration! It's not just about sea control. They were projecting plans to drain it, bringing the Dogger Banks back to dry land as the were in the Mesolithic.
One dam would shut off the English Channel. Canals would keep the ports on some rivers like the Thames, Rhine, etc. in contact with the sea. I've seen maps of the plan.
I wonder why Sörgel didn't consider closing the Baltic sea by dams through Denmark. After all, it's closer to Germany. Maybe he understood how Kiel would have a problem with that idea, while ignoring the problems of, say, Marseille.
Yeah, lets bring back Doggerland 😆
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
1:00 and 11:28 maps are quite inaccurate (for Interwar period):
1. Ireland is unified (or is still under British rule)
2. Germany doesn't own (southern) Prussia
3. Finland doesn't own Karelia, Salla and Petsamo
4. Belarus and Ukraine are independent
5. Soviet Union doesn't own Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan)
6. Turkey seems to have lost Turkisth War of Independence and got even more carved up than it was supposed to be
7. Lithuania owns Vilnius
Bro, I saw the first map and instantly needed to see if anyone else talked about it, and now there's more at 11:28?😭
I'm by no means an expert on the exact borders but the map looks pretty good for the early 1920s. Which is the period that this video is about.
@danielbenson9942 Bro Hitler and the nazis didn't rise to power in Germany till the mid-1930s same with the idea of lebensraum, and the first world war ended in 1918. You cont your timeline completely messed up.
@@danielbenson9942 Here's what borders of Finland looked like in 1920-1940: fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:Finland_%281920-1940%29_location_map.svg and borders of Poland, Germany and Soviet Unio looked like during 1920s and 30s: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rzeczpospolita_1937.svg
what are you even talking about ^^ the maps and the project arent new proposals from today...
Politicians and engineers can't even agree on a bridge from Spain to Morocco
wonder why 🫣
Usefull for corrupt people and politicians.
@@alexandredacunha4224shut up
Given the current events I'd say that bridge would be a VERY bad idea
what's the benefit of such a bridge for Europe?
I was more intrigued about the congo dam to store freshwater. That could have serious positive developments
What the video completely fails to mention are the ecological consequences of this project. For example, that the newly reclaimed land and the surrounding area would have become so hot and dry that it would not have been habitable anyway. Or that the global sea level would have risen by 10 meters.
Very good comment. If the seas rise by even 5 M I got no idea how much coastal land and islands vanishing!
But.....why would the seas rise? The water is evaporated. Gone!
This question is to give you an idea of what it would be like for scientists to have to try to explain to politicians and the public what the problems connected with a crazy scheme like this are.
It would have turned into a huge desert.
What???
more like a big dry Salt Lake
Damming the Mediterranean would have global environmental consequences that Sörgel never understood. The newly drained land area would have been hot salt flats, not only useless for farming be it would have raised the surrounding temperature of Southern Europe to an unbearable degree. This would have turned Europe as a whole into a hot and dry desert, and sand and salt kicked up would spread across continents further running their capacity to support human life. Sörgel thought his plan would have saved humanity from war, he didn't foresee that it would have doomed humanity by altering the global climate.
That was an insane project but another insane project has also been considered and that is to drain out the Baltic Sea by building dams or walls between the UK and Norway in the north and UK and Netherlands in the south.
Before the last ice age the island of Great Britain was connected to both Norway, France and what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. The North Sea was an inland salt water lake.
Yes!They really think about that!!Its just crazy!That would be a very low "polder"!!I am living in the polder they talked about as a example,but it is massive already and takes a lot of time to put into reality !
you mean the North Sea... Baltic is east of Denmark
This talk about expanding into Africa makes it sound like people don't already live there, but we know from history how Europeans solve this "problem".
Honestly, the historical and archeological mysteries we could uncover and perhaps answer could alone make this a compelling idea. Imagine all the treasures and artifacts and lost civilisations that litter the seafloor.
given the flow from Atlantic to the Mediterranean I am surprised the lack of effort to use all that flow with undersea current generation techniques. there is a wave generation system for Gibraltar
lets not forget that adding all that water from the Med into the rest of the earth's oceans would raise sea levels significantly, so this is a HIGHLY dubious proposition.
Not by much but enough for it to be a bad idea for that reason alone, less water evaporation and rainfall would be even worse and the best way by far for transportation of goods are by ship making the idea crazy
One of the reasons for the success of Europeans is that the European cost line is much longer than Africa despite Europe being much smaller, and the many nice port spots and navigable rivers Europe has compared to Africa which the Mediterranean coast and water evaporation which as stated in the video higher than all the rivers flowing into it, even though the Nile River also flows into it, one of the main reasons Europe is a sweet spot is because of all the water nearby wherever you are in Europe compared to most places. The inability for people like him to understand the consequences of this ideas makes his ideas as deadly as the “Great Leap Forward” in China, which were like this idea meant to improve people’s lives, but instead it was 5 times as deadly as the holocaust 6 million deaths, the Great Leap Forward cost the lives of 30 million people in a few years period, and almost all the birds in China were killed because a Communist can do nothing wrong = blame someone or something else, and a few % of their diet was human food, but almost all was insects like grasshoppers or locust, which you probably can figure out what happened when they didn’t have their natural enemies to eat them 😮 not a lot of food left for smart bird killers, who didn’t have the ability to self criticism or predict what consequences there actions would bring.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say.
Of course only if you can’t think what are the likely consequences of your actions, good intentions are not inherently bad, people who think they are good and right because they have good intentions are the dangerous ones.
I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that dam blocking the Mediterranean Sea if it was real and it collapsed..
But imagine the wave you could ride 🏄
@@stealthis💀☠️
Completely idiotic, creating a massive desert where no one can live and destroying millions of people living near the old coast does not exactly help make new living room
"Golly, what does this red-colored valve do?"
"Oops, sorry about that."
“Not everybody liked these proposals. In hindsight, they represented the colonialist tone in Europe at the time and didn’t take into account the people who already lived in Africa. People who didn’t want a stream of Europeans flowing into the continent and claiming the land as their own…”
Swap these roles around and everyone would cry racism despite that being exactly what’s happening right now on an absolutely gigantic scale.
*Oh* the irony!
The question unasked here, is what do you do with that volume of water? Displacing that much water would only cause more problems than any benefits of the dam. Not to mention the inconceivable ecological damage it would have caused. 😅
Agreed, it's impossible to imagine how many more problems this would create.
The best thing that ever happened to Africa was colonialism.
When the whites left, civilization left too.😂
Think of all the lost history under that sea. Also - once they drain it - think of the smell! And the toxic windstorms.
The Aral Sea was just a preview!
no matter smell, italy and etc countrys have lot smell now no matter if have more. good idea dry all area. no problem all other peoples.
Also another thing - draining the Mediterranean will most likely change the climate as well. See what happened to the Aral Sea...
Iceland contributing funds to this dam series:
HELL NO!
If you give everyone 100m2 of space you can still fit the worldpopulation in 60 percent of Alaska territory. So its nonsense that the world is overpopulated.
The problem is not room to stand up and walk around. Food production is the issue. Since you mentioned Alaska _ how much of the land there is suitable for agriculture ?
If you allow for cold, heat, drought, elevation, erosion, roads and cities, forests, rivers and lakes, only a small part of the land on earth is farmable.
As someone from Tunisia, i see this an absolute loss 😢
There was a novel made by Cody Franklin about the world if that project came to be. It’s called the Atlantropa Articles.
Wowser..❤❤
The real problem about this project is that the Mediterranean is already saltier than the ocean, and as it dry up, it would only leave salted lands to dry, turn into salty dust that would ruin the environment
But atleast Poleland wouldn't have been...a~salted
It's not living space that's running out.
The typical person only really needs a few hundred square feet.
You can fit a million people in a square mile if you really want to.
The reason for the misconception is because of artificially high residential costs.
This is because of financialization, and because people that have houses vote their house prices into infinity.
It's not difficult to find land to house people.
There seems to always be a crazy engineer that wants to do something absolutely unhinged. Another dude wanted to fill the San Francisco bay. They sound novel until you see the catastrophic effects, like with the Aral sea.
was the Aral sea now the Aral salt flats
well, - off the South coast of Crete the sea floor drops away to around 1800 meters... it is a huge flat plain, tilted at an angle that slowly rises up to around 400 meters below sea level (just next to Gavdos) ...the surface of that plain is well worth a detailed study...
HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS THAT A FUCKING FORMER TNO REFERENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????
HOLY FUCKING SHIT SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS TNO!!!!!!?????
Obviously a BAD idea! The Med, a shallow, warm sea, greatly helps moderate the European climate, making it SO much warmer. Plus all the salt left by drying up the Med, would make farms + ranches impossible-
good idea, no matter come heat more mediterrains area country newermind, and all water need pump to sahara desert have perfect new work.
What I heard was an ambitious plan to build a mega-structure which would benefit one continent, not thinking about the other.
I think they'd be able to do it. When humanity focuses on something they can achieve it. Nothing is impossible🤔🤔🤔
Just because u can do it doesnt mean u should do it
Hi, Sir.
Great video. Thanks a lot for the hardwork you have put in to make this wonderful video.
Just a request: Can you make a video about what would happen to Europe and Africa if this was constructed? Like, for example: the economic impact, environmental impacts, etc.
Can you give your opinion, Sir?
Thank you, Sir👍. Great video❤.
there was a video on youtube that talked about what would happen and basically all it would do was make North Africa and all of the Mediterranean a massive desert and ruin the nations that were on the coast
Cody from AlternateHistoryHub actually wrote a fiction book, The Atlantropa Articles, set in a world where this project was actually completed. Might be worth checking out if you want to see more speculation over the possible impacts of this plan
Dan Simmons sci-fi saga Ilium-Oliympos also depicts in some chapters a far future Mediterranean Sea, drained and used as huge food producing land...and many evil surprises. Recommended.
From what I had seen, when the Mediterranean basin was naturally cut off from the Atlantic in prehistory, its climate was rather similar to Death Valley, but on a massive scale. This projet may have created a lot of land, but whether it would be useful as living space is a different matter.
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.
I like how this guy didn’t really think of the ecological collapse that would occur.
He was a German... those don't think more than two steps in the future.
They didnt know about ecological problems..
@@virgiliustancu9293 cred ca nu ii cunosti pe nemti.
Neither "collapse" nor "problems". "Changes" is the word. Changes.
@@cristinabutasimon9159 Nemtii sunt niste criminali psihopati la scara industriala. Romanul fura la o masina, doua, neamtul fura la 10 milioane.
Considering that such a mega project is still impossible shows that humanity still has to advance a lot before hallucinating about becoming interplanetary and interstellar species. Means more advancements in construction engineering and materials engineering is required so that such seemingly impossible megaprojects are very much possible to build and sustain.
peste câteva sute de ani oricum planeta va fi de nerecunoscut față de ce este acum
I love to learn so thanks for the info!
"....who didn't want a stream of Europeans flowing into their countries..." I laughed and laughed and laughed, at that one.
Why would pre ww2 europeans care what happened to Africa? The europeans were industrialized with flight, guns, and the combustion engine. Africa was basically still in the middle ages technologically. You do not own what you cannot defend.
This has to be the most self-centered architectural concept ever.
Definitely a narcissist!
@@alidabotes6264 Although he was to his credit thinking of ways to avoid war. Just a very misguided one.
No country wants to be land locked.
Europe with its existing size did enough problems to the world.
I propose Building the Dam at Gibralter. It's a narrow enough passage to the Giant Mediteranian Lake. It's not a Sea. It was empty back in the time of Noah and his Ark. When the great flood came, the Atlantic Ocean spilled over the Gibralter area and Flooded the Mediterranean Basin. It would be a Fantastic feat of engineering if and when this Dam gets built. We could use the Basin to grow Crops for an ever expanding World Population. And the Farmers could live there as well. I would ban any Mega Cities from being built there since they have a huge impact on Global Warming. This area might be called, Ecotopia.
as someone that lives on the western coast of the mediterranean, I like my beach, thanks.
"and people from Europe could more easily move into Africa" ... I think we all know that would not be the direction of travel and that it would not be Europeans filling up this new land.
We might need a dam like this to keep the level in the Mediterranean constant and could also produce a lot of energy. This dam might be far less cheaper than to create a dam for each city around the Mediterranean sea.
The idea that you even think this was ever anything more than a german fever dream is amusing.
He was a man with a vision before his time. One day it will be possible.
This is a GREAT idea !
Don't give Gates, Musk, Bezos or the WEF any ideas for population control.😮
is this a joke?
No? Have you watched the video?
the video is based on extremely loose facts. WW2 was never based on the idea of lebensraum. It was based on the idea of germany dominating europe / the world.@@theowlfromduolingo7982
The video is truly not researched at all, and thrown together. @@theowlfromduolingo7982
It is grandiose and should stay where it is, on paper. No mention was made of the fishing industry, or effects of climate change impacting Europe. It makes for a great exercise or classroom test in how one needs to look at big projects holistically.
Imagine the energy required to empty more water out than the combined rivers dump into the Med.
The idea is ridiculous.
This idea turned out to be bad for many solid technical reasons that were uncovered later by thorough analysis. There were other problems I don't think this video mentions, for example the land uncovered by the receding Mediterranean would have been far too salty to be fit for agriculture - so no new crops to feed the zillions of new inhabitants. It's important to note that it was a bad idea because of these problems, NOT because it was laughably obvious at a glance - as people nowadays tend to dismiss things. With grand-scale ideas we always have to keep our minds open and make judgements based on really studying the details.
Draining the Med would impact the weather systems in Europe, probably raising the air temperature by at least 3 degrees C if not more, insect pests and other diseases from Africa would travel quickly across the reclaimed land affecting agriculture across all of Europe. Basically not a good idea.
The German architect Herman Sörgel, planned ATLANTROPA in 1927 which was officially presented in 1928.
The project which preached to isolate the Mediterranean Sea by closing the straits of Gibraltar, Suez and Dardanelles.
Therefore this project took place under the Weimar Republic and not during Nazism, indeed Hitler opposed this project when it was presented again, by Sorgel, because Germany would have had to involve many other European and African nations in the realization, therefore it would clash against his ideologies.
He was a smart and ambitious man.
If you're going to drain the mediterranean, make sure to hire Dutch Engineers from the Netherlands to do it. Put them in charge of the operation and you can turn all that reclaimed land into the best fertile soil for farming.
Some have already pointed out the effect on the Sahara. The known tectonic movements mean a certainty of catastrophic failure. Much better to use garbage to create artificial islands, if you want to increase land area.
So the people living on any island in the Med would find themselves living on top of a mountain three miles high. Italy would be surrounded by cliffs of the same height. The Suez canal would be rendered useless and all shipping to Europe would have to sail around Africa.
The entire idea is utterly insane, yet oddly intriguing. I stand to wonder what the world would be like if humans hadn't been so hastily violent and oppressive of others. If all had worked together to create a better utopia for both the African continent and the European continent then maybe an idea like this could have been 60 to 80 % complete by this time. I can imagine a world where diversity and learning rival the commitment seen by religion, politics, and death. I see a world where humans have worked together to alter the land scape of both continents to form a symbiotic relationship between the two converting now baren wasteland deserts into great megacities that now will never see the light of day, building a beautiful future together free of ever knowing what hate is. Having always worked as friends together for the last 10,000 years instead of killing each other could have brought so much more to humanities table rather then the last ten centuries only causing constant death and destruction.
It’s not possible. Diversity isn’t really a strength, it’s especially apparent nowadays. Even if it did work, it would only work by cultures becoming similar to one another, thus destroying their own unique culture in the process
A dam that spans the Gibraltar straight would be a dangerous settling
Amazing how simple solutions reveal themselves in time. Instead of war, we could have had residential apartment towers.