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Language: en

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I'm in Gibraltar, a bit of British territory
on the south coast of Europe.

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Over there is Spain,

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and over there, visible on the horizon,

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is the north coast of Africa.

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In the 1920s,

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a German architect named Herman Sörgel saw
an opportunity right here.

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He came up with a plan:

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to drain the Mediterranean Sea.

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It didn't seem entirely impossible.

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The Mediterranean naturally evaporates:

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more water comes in from the Atlantic than
flows out,

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so if you actually managed to put a dam across
the Straits of Gibraltar,

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the sea would slowly start to dry up.

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Sörgel said that, after the sea level had
dropped maybe 100 or 200 metres,

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and a fifth of the water area had turned to
land,

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Europe and Africa would be united into one
continent,

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and there'd be huge amounts of new land for
settlement and agriculture.

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And you could use the dam as a massive hydro
power station,

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on a scale never considered before,

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letting just enough water through to meet
the energy needs of all of his new continent.

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Sörgel made his plan public in the years
after the First World War:

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perhaps, he thought, all that new land and
exploration

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might be the solution to making sure there
wasn't a Second.

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The project was called Atlantropa,

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and it is one of the most ambitious plans
that has even been announced.

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It would have taken an effort on the scale
of the Apollo moon shot.

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And it certainly got attention from the press
and the public:

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but there were a few slight problems with
it.

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First, there might not have been enough concrete
in the world to build a dam that big,

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let alone all the other secondary dams and
earthworks elsewhere needed to make the project work.

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And Sörgel didn't want the dam here,

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where the Strait of Gibraltar is narrowest,
no,

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he wanted to build it about thirty kilometres
that way, making it much, much longer.

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It'd have needed to be 300 metres high,

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and the foundations would be two and a half
kilometres wide.

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But those are practicalities, right?

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Humanity could probably overcome that with
enough effort and enough political will.

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Not that there would have been enough political
will:

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the people on the Mediterranean coast would
be, let's say,

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rather disappointed that they now lived inland,

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perhaps hundreds of miles from the sea.

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Venice and Genoa, the folks there, were particularly
unhappy with that.

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The plan was popular in his native Germany
but not particularly outside.

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And as for Africa: well, it was the early
20th century,

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their opinion apparently didn't matter.

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It wasn't so much a merging of Europe and
Africa as an attempt at assimilation.

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But let's assume that, somehow, over decades,

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the Atlantropa project was built.

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There would have been some other problems.

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All that new land would be salt flats,

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completely unusable for growing crops or...
well, for anything, really.

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And although Sörgel couldn't have known it
at the time,

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some meteorologists now reckon that the project
might have diverted the Gulf Stream,

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sending temperatures plunging in most of Europe
and ending local agriculture as we knew it.

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And also, when Sörgel first came up with
his grand plan,

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there likely wasn't a bomb in the world large
enough to destroy a dam that big.

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Certainly not in one go, you could just about
make it work...

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but that changed quite quickly during the
Second World War.

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Having a single point of failure for millions
of people's homes and lives is not ideal.

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Sörgel died in 1952, and any hope of the
project died with him,

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after he'd spent a lifetime promoting it.

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But his idea lives on in science fiction,
and as a testament, perhaps,

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not to how big we can actually build,

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but just how big we can dream.