In the Bay Area, we had the Reber Plan[1], to turn the bay into two fresh water lakes by building dams between Richmond-San Rafael, and Oakland-San Francisco.

Great photo of what it could have looked like[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan [2] https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b5/1a/d6/b51ad6d2a...

Personally, I think we should go the other way and build this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

I'd prefer the Nile variant, which would be hard to do for sure. But like the Salton Sea, flooding parts of the desert seems to have ecological benefits.

In the long term, maybe it's a fantastic idea. But in the short term, the economic damage of all those ports suddenly ceasing to be ports alone, to say nothing of all the other disruption, probably means the idea fundamentally has too high an activation energy to happen in any forseeable future.

(activation energy in chemistry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_energy )

But very interesting to think about.

Also XKCD did a comic series that probably technically constitutes the majority of XKCD's output by area which is worth looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)

As expected, this was not thought up by anyone who actually lived or grew up in a country along the coast of the Mediterranean.

The way the Aegean islands were supposed to be replaced by a plateau is particularly freaky, like hearing a plastic surgeon tell you they plan to replace your head with that of a donkey.

A truly callous, tone-deaf proposal, even given its historical context.

What I don't understand is how Sörgel claimed that this plan would create more farmland. Wouldn't any land exposed by drops in sea level be irredeemably contaminated by salt, just like land being inundated by rising sea levels?

What's not even mentioned in the article is that this could protect the entire Mediterranean coast line against rising sea levels[1].

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-015-1821-8

Title is inaccurate. Atlantropa was never meant to "drain" the Mediterranean, just lower the water level by 200m--compare to the current 1500m average/5267m maximum. Most of the original water surface area would remain, as the diagram in the article shows. Still pretty impractical, of course.

Dividing the new land would be crazy. Maybe even inner countries (Germany, ...) would want a piece.

And there is also this theory that the great Bible flood was the Mediterranean Sea spilling into the Black Sea. If the Gibraltar dam fails we would see the mother of all floods from the Atlantic rushing in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

Speaking of a drained Mediterranean, Harry Turtledove wrote a called Down in the Bottomlands, about a world where the Mediterranean did not refill after the Messinian Salinity Crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_in_the_Bottomlands

There is a one-hour documentary about the Atlantropa project on Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/92381391

Moving water really enhances places aesthetically.

I noticed that the disused Clyde docklands in Glasgow (UK), were being filled in a few years back. A missed opportunity for waterside property.

The Mediterranean was also damned at Gibraltar in the Star Trek The Motion Picture novelization.

Where would all that water go? Atmosphere? Isn't water vapor a greenhouse gas?

Wonder how much this would have raised global sea levels.

The Mediterranean Valley would have been hella deep.

So that's what they meant when they said they'll stop illegal migrants drowning, they'll drain the sea.