Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Atlantropa: The Most Ridiculous Idea Ever

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

In the aftermath of the horrors of WWI, many people in Europe wanted to find a better future going forward. A future of peace and prosperity, where energy, food, and jobs would be available for everyone. One man from Germany named Herman Sörgel had a VERY ambitious idea. An idea which would literally change the map of the planet Earth, and was the biggest proposed engineering project ever put forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, many people in Europe wanted to find a better future going forward, a future of peace and prosperity, where energy, food, and jobs would be available for everyone. One man from Germany named Herman Sorgle had a very ambitious idea, an idea which would literally change the map of the planet Earth and was the biggest proposed engineering project ever put forward. Learn more about Sorgle's staggering, sweeping, and ultimately ridiculous idea of Atlantrovia. on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode of Everything Everywhere Daily is sponsored by listener. like you. Creating a daily show like this isn't easy. Researching, writing, and recording a daily show takes quite a bit of time, and you have to do it every single day. Over on patreon.com, there is a small but growing community of listeners who support the show with their donations. In addition to showing your support for the show, you can also get some extra benefits as well. Depending on your level of

sponsorship, you can be listed as an associate or executive producer of the show. There's monthly original wallpapers for your desktop and smartphone, as well as merchandise like stickers, t-shirts and hoodies. Depending on your sponsorship level, you can also submit ideas directly to me, because this is a daily show and I need a lot of show ideas. Next month, patrons will also be able to get monthly e-books of the episode transcripts as part of their support. As new projects, products, and events roll out over the next several months, patrons will have first dibs on everything. If you would like to be a sponsor, go to patreon.com slash everything everywhere, or click on the link in the show notes. To succinctly summarize Herman Sorgle's Atlantropa project, it's an attempt to

create a new continent by merging Europe and Africa. I don't mean that it is an attempt to join Europe and Africa in a political and economic union like the European Union or the United Nations. I mean the idea behind it was to literally physically link Europe and Africa via several mega-engineering projects, the center of which would be draining the Mediterranean Sea. And when I say mega project? I mean mega project. There would be no fewer than five different projects which would be required that would be the largest

engineering projects ever done on the planet Earth. The linchpin of the whole project would be the Strait of Gibraltar Dam. Yes, a dam that would shut off the entire Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. Dams are big projects.

Many of the biggest engineering projects in the world have been dams. The Three Gorges Dam in China, the Antoine high dam in Egypt, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam currently under construction, are all examples of massive projects that took years to build. To put a Gibraltar dam in perspective, the largest dam in the world is currently the three gorgeous dam in China, which is 1.4 miles wide or 2.3 kilometers, and it's 630 feet tall or 192 meters.

The highest dam in the world is the Jinping Dam in China, which is 305 meters tall or 1,001 feet. Both of these are tiny in comparison to a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Gibraltar is 14.3 kilometers, or 8.9 miles wide. At its deepest point, the straight is 900 meters, or 2,953 feet deep, and that doesn't include the fact that any dam would still have to be 100 meters or 300 feet above sea level on top of that. Initial estimates of such a proposed dam in the early 20th century concluded that all the concrete production in the world wouldn't be sufficient to create the dam. Even building a bridge or tunnel to allow cars to cross the strait would be one of the greatest engineering feats in history, let alone trying to build a concrete barrier across the entire stretch. Then there is the other issue of where the water would go.

Most dams are located on rivers and use gravity to create the energy that's used to power the turbines. Energy from water from a higher elevation is stored and then captured as it flows downstream to the sea. The Mediterranean Sea is already at sea level. Where does the water on one side of the dam go? The answer is evaporation. The Mediterranean Sea is a unique body of water in that very little water really flows out of it. Water flows in from the Black Sea, rivers surrounding the Mediterranean, but mostly through the Strait of Gibraltar. If the water in the Mediterranean wasn't replenished by the Atlantic Ocean, it would drop about one meter a year just from evaporation. In fact, this is why the Mediterranean Sea is slightly more salty than the rest of the ocean. The idea for this project came from geologists, which concluded that 5.5 million years ago,

most of the Mediterranean Sea dried up in an event called the Messian salinity crisis. The goal of Atlantropa is to recreate this event via human engineering. Assuming the Gibraltar Strait Dam was built, the plan would be to lower the water levels in the Mediterranean Sea by 100 meters or 300 feet. At this level, more land would start appearing off the shore. The Adriatic Sea would basically disappear and turn into a giant flat grassland, and Greek islands would disappear as well as they became connected to the mainland of Europe. Most importantly, Sicily would become connected to Italy, and Sicily would also become very close to Tunisia. This is important because this would be the location of the second dam, which would separate the eastern and western Mediterranean,

and it would be even larger than the Gibraltar dam. The goal of this dam would be to drop water levels in the eastern Mediterranean by another 100 meters. There would also need to be another dam built in the Dardanelles to hold back the Black Sea and a system of locks for the Suez Canal to take ships up 200 meters to sea level, far greater than the 26 meters or 85 feet that the Panama Canal has to raise in lower ships. The goal for all of this would be to create new farmable land and electricity. The dams, in theory, would have provided all of the electricity for Europe and Africa, and the new land reclaimed by the reduction in sea levels would be equivalent to the size of France and Belgium combined.

There were a lot of unanswered questions about the project, like what would happen to the turbines in the dam if they had to process seawater? Salt water is very corrosive on metals, and there's a reason why there are no hydroelectric dams that use salt water. Also, if the level of the Mediterranean Sea were to drop by evaporation, that also means the remaining water would become very salty, far saltier than anything which lives there currently could survive in. Over time, it would become a giant version of the Dead Sea, and the sea would be devoid of all life. What would happen if a major earthquake, like the 8.7 magnitude Lisbon earthquake of 1755, hit the dam? If the dam broke, it isn't just an artificial reservoir which would quickly empty out. It would be the entire Atlantic Ocean.

You'd see the largest torrent of water in the history of the planet refill the Mediterranean basin in just a few days. And finally, where would all the evaporated water go? If you remove all that water from the Mediterranean, it would result in sea levels rising. by a few feet all over the rest of the earth. Mind you, I haven't even touched the political, economic, and engineering feasibility of such a project, any one of which would make this project impossible. However, draining the Mediterranean wasn't even the biggest part of this plan.

That would be reshaping Africa in such a way that it would totally redraw the globe. The goal in Africa was to create several dams, which would create several enormous freshwater lakes in the middle of the continent. By enormous, I do mean enormous. the dam would be built across the Congo River. The two lakes would fill the Congo Basin, which is most of the northern half of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a massive expansion of Lake Chad, which would submerge most of what is today the countries of Chad and Niger.

The idea being that this water could be used for irrigation and water transportation for the interior of Africa, and of course, more massive power generation. Looking at a theoretical map of Africa after the Atlantropa project would be completed, it barely looks the same with several massive bodies of water in the middle of the continent. Also, the plan for this didn't really involve asking anybody who lived in Africa about it. Herman Sorgle spent 30 years promoting Atlantropa, even creating an Atlantropa Foundation. While he was a pacifist,

Sorgle was a German right through the entirety of the Third Reich. He wasn't a member of the Nazi Party, but he did, quote, Hitler in some of his writings, trying to gain sympathy for the idea in the Nazi hierarchy. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick used Atlantropa as one of the ideas the Nazis implemented in his alt-history story The Man in the High Castle, and in the Amazon series by the same name, the project isn't explicitly mentioned, but it is shown on some of the maps in the background in some of the scenes.

Herman Sorgle died in 1952, promoting the idea of Atlantropa to the very end. The Atlantropa Foundation he established dissolved in 1960, after developing very little interest in the idea. Atlantropa was ultimately a utopian plan. There was no way a plan like this could ever be done. Politically, governments could never possibly agree to this, given how much it would transform their territories. Economically, something like this would cost in the many trillions of dollars.

Environmentally, it would have destroyed almost all life in the Mediterranean Sea and much of the ecology of Central Africa. Even from an engineering perspective, it's doubtful of many of these projects are even possible. Nonetheless, you have to give Sorgle credit for thinking big, even if Atlantropa was the most ridiculous idea ever. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Please remember to leave a review over on Apple Podcasts.

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