A plan from the 1920s to drain the Mediterranean Sea and create the nation of Atlantropa

On the leaflet of the Great Depression , designer Hermann Soergel had a radical idea : Why not expand the landmass of Europe by drain part of the Mediterranean ? It was all part of his plan to found the Carry Amelia Moore Nation of Atlantropa .

Here you could see one of his design for the dams that would be part of this geoengineering project . He ’d also make channel in the Sahara Desert with the excess water .

Science historian and rare book afficionado John Ptak lately acquired a monograph where Soergel explains his expansive scheme :

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His most spectacular share - hatch in the mid-1920 ’s and still stick by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers - was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar . The dam would bring forth electrical energy of course , but most importantly to Soergel , it would also empty an tremendous amount of water ( bring down the sea by 200 metres ) from the Mediterranean leaving vast newfangled expanses of res publica to be developed and colonized over generations into the future . The water of course would have to go somewhere , and that somewhere was the Sahara Desert , somehow in its wake make farmable and productive country . Soergel was creating a sure , very broad , fantastical future tense of uncertain monumental prospects . . .

Soergel think that this design would add at least 660,000 KM2 to the base of the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean , or around the equivalent of the aggregate land the great unwashed of Italy and Germany . possess the sea pulled back from hundreds if not thousands of seaboard towns and city would no doubt be a “ problem ” , for them ; but that does n’t matter to Soergel , as they were inferior thoughts to the deluxe idea of come forth a young continent . . . The captain plan at work was that the world would be carve up into three economical sphere in the future , all beginning with the alphabetic character “ A ” : American , Asia , and the new land to be created by Soergel , “ Atlantropa ” , which was the former Europe enlarge into the Modern dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa . And also of course Egypt , which would be cover with “ thousands ” of canals and become semi - deluge by the unexampled borders of the meandering sea . This would be the way for Europa to compete with the relaxation of the mankind in the future .

Some of Soergel ’s contemporaries got so aroused by the idea that they started designing computer architecture for the new metropolis , including the bridge you see above , which would have spanned the entire ( drained ) ocean . Hey , if you ca n’t colonise the countries border the Mediterranean anymore , why not colonise the sea itself ?

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