The worst dam idea: evaporating the Mediterranean to power Europe | Hacker News Reader

The worst dam idea: evaporating the Mediterranean to power Europe

everythingisamazing.substack.com

109 pointsbandibus58 comments

While not directly related, it reminded me of another plan (from 1963), sponsored by the US to create an alternate to the Suez Canal, through the Israeli Negev Desert using... 520 nuclear bombs:

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-altern...

They had a similar plan to blow a second Panama Canal through the Darien Gap with nuclear bombs. Just batshit crazy stuff.

The US had an entire national project around using nukes for excavation and construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

Un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/muZg5

The Mediterranean sea is, to me, the most beautiful place on earth. Be it mainland Spain (with, sadly, way too many concrete all along the coast), France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, ... It's just beautiful. Then the islands: Corsica, Sicily, Ibiza, Formentera, ... It's heaven on earth.

I drive my kid to school on the french riviera, along the coast and among the vineyards every day.

Famous poets and painters would go and settle there.

It requires a very special kind of a sad fuck to want to destroy that.

Couldnt agree more. (I grew up in Cyprus.) From what I could tell, it didn't occur to Sörgel what effect the dams and evaporation would have on sea-life, and on the coastal economies depending on it. Probably catastrophic. But one thing that was encouraging about the Orkney turbine mentioned elsewhere in these comments: they ran a trial first, to see how wildlife would be affected. Result: negligible impact. So a modern-tech version that respects all that beauty does seem to be possible - if mining the raw materials required to build it is factored in, because that is a massive ongoing issue.

I'm pretty sure he was a "change it all and we will make our own opportunity" type of dreamer, per the article.

> It requires a very special kind of a sad fuck to want to destroy that.

On the other hand it's recreating a different entirely natural state the sea was once in, beautiful in its own way.

I'd still say it's wrong but I don't think it's a "special kind of sad fuck". The status quo is not king.

Agreed, my childhood summers spent on the Egyptian North Coast/Sahel are some of my favorite memories.

I get a feeling that the author may have a teeny-weeny ideological axe to grind. A large underwater turbine with totally predictable generation cycle might indeed be a useful thing for Europe and north Africa.

Hah. Not at all! If it sounds like that, I've misrepresented myself - I agree with you here, and the Strait is the perfect place to do it, using something like this: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid

It definitely sounds like that.

> But - purely as an exercise in trying to answer hilariously daft questions - how much would it cost to lower the level of the sea?

Never answered?

> But this is far from the worst thing about Atlantropa.

> It’s alarming to look back just a century and realise just how deeply baked and widely-disseminated these kinds of racist assumptions were in Europe.

> It’s proper shivers-down-the-spine stuff.

> Atlantropa may have been wildly unfeasible for countless reasons, a perfect turducken of Nopes.

Which reasons?

I got to the end of the post and was still waiting for content...

> Which reasons?

The article notes that even just the dam in the Gibraltar Strait (ignoring the others) would have required more concrete than existed in the entire world at the time. I think that single reason is enough.

Yes, that's one reason.

But if you're going to take the words and sentence to refer to reasons... list the reasons. Or, don't refer to them and write about something else.

The entire post felt like "We're going to go over {X}. So here are a bunch of things that are {not X}."

Smaller scale project - Czech dam (the red lines are dams):

https://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/screenshots/7/3/242837-ceska...

"The Czech basin can be conveniently used to build a giant reservoir"

I like his use of convenient. But the concept is quite interesting, barring the practicality of flooding Prague and half the country.

I believe this project would greatly improve the capabilities of the Czech Navy.

http://cz-fleet.info/index_en.htm

"At present, the Czech Republic is working on the design of their own non-nuclear aircraft carriers. Planned to build at least two aircraft carriers."

Neither Wikipedia nor a quick DDG have anything about this. Fake site probably.

It's a joke, the Czech Republic is landlocked.

Wouldn‘t that take forever to fill up?

Approximately 100 years. Then it would produce 2 PWh of power (300x average nuclear power plant). Volume 160x Three Gorges Dam. More here: https://prehrada.hrach.eu/en.html

If it takes 100 years to fill the dam and emptying the dam will generate 2PWh, then the expected average power is 2.3GW. That's closer to 3 nuclear reactors.

You will not empty the dam. You need 100 years to move water level 500m up, then you will use the current flow of the Elbe but raised 500m up. That gives you the power increase.

The final part of a trilogy of stories I ran in my newsletter - and since the first two were well-received on here a few months back, and got me some generous & good advice on tightening them up, I thought I'd push my luck a final time. Plus, this topic's both wtf-barmy and perhaps timely, considering Europe's energy supply issues right now.

With rising sea levels perhaps it might be an option to keep the levels in the mediterranen? Seems at least more feasible than the Norther European Enclosure Dam*

*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_European_Enclosure_Da...

The rise in sea levels is extremely slow at human lifetime scale. We are looking at less than 1 meter (just over 3 feet) by year 2100 in the worst case scenario analyses by IPCC. This is not nearly enough to make Gibraltar power plant practical, as it is on the order of magnitude of existing difference between high and low tide.

Since parts of Northern Europe still experiences Post-glacial rebound and will rise faster than the expected rise of the ocean level I find this project unnecessary. (I am still a sucker for megaprojects though)

On the other hand, parts of Western Europe also still experience Post-glacial rebound and will drop, increasing the effects of rising sea levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound#Vertical_...:

“the post-glacial rebound of northern Great Britain (up to 10 cm per century) is causing a corresponding downward movement of the southern half of the island (up to 5 cm per century)”

IIRC, the Low Countries also are sinking because of post-glacial rebound.

Something like this kind of drew me into geology. The inside jacket of my intro textbook explained the Mediterranean used to be damned naturally at Gibraltar or whatever the inlet is called and that so much salt water evaporated there where miles deep salt land features. Was instantly hooked

This article links to another which discusses exactly that [1] — some geological event dammed the Mediterranean from the Atlantic 6 million years ago, after which the sea mostly dried out, then subsequently the entire thing refilled in the space of a couple years in the Zanclean Megaflood (at least, there’s mounting evidence that it happened in one cataclysmic event). First the western Mediterranean filled up to Sicily, then the eastern med, via a 1500m (5000ft) high waterfall!

[1]: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-fl...

Epic XKCD comic on this topic.

https://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/

I'm sure I read about this in one of the later editions of Principles of Physical Geology by Arthur Holmes...

> What was needed was a project so ludicrously ambitious, yet so immeasurably beneficial to all the European powers, that it would at last force them to put aside their differences and cooperate

Interesting, so he was a sort of inverse Ozymandias.

The Qattara depression portion of the project still seems worth doing. While I’d prefer the freshwater flavored version, it’s not hard to imagine it turning into another Salton Sea as droughts occur.

There are strong currents at work in the strait of Gibraltar. Would be interesting to harness their energy in some way.

Agreed. There's a tidal turbine off Orkney, the most powerful in the world, that just went live: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid It's powering 2,000 homes and an electrolyzer creating green hydrogen. A few of those - or a few arrays of them- in the Strait might do wonders.

Like an underwater turbine.

Japan is apparently going to give it a shot: https://www.inputmag.com/tech/japan-kairyu-ocean-turbine-dee...

Looks like Scotland’s is a roaring success: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl...

No need to evaporate the sea.

This also draws energy out of the sea, a net positive for climate change mitigation.

If global warming continues to raise sea level, it could well become the case that such a project is undertaken but with the goal of keeping the Mediterranean roughly where it is, which would simplify changes necessary elsewhere to keep the Black Sea a sea and keep harbors navigable.

Lowering the Mediterranean a few feet and running turbines at a flow rate to counteract evaporation might work, especially since evaporation and power usage track somewhat. Hot days evaporate more water, and require more air conditioning. The volume of the reservoir would allow quite a bit of buffer if you wanted to time shift some of that usage, aiming for monthly or quarterly averages instead of daily.

Someone with more engineering sense than I can debunk this:

The Baltic is dramatically less saline than the Atlantic. That's why the Vasa [1] was so well-preserved after 300 years at the bottom.

So could we not take advantage of that salinity difference, somehow?

[1] https://www.vasamuseet.se/en

Edit: Every engineering student sees the movie of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing. To me, the Vasa is a much better career lesson: Marketing dictating a stupid Engineering decision.

"Hey, let's put another gun deck on that thing! It'll be so much more imposing."

We could. The technology you would use for this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmotic_power . Unfortunately, it is not currently cost-effective.

The salinity of the Baltic varies but is generally below 13 g/kg, which is a lot less than the salinity of the Atlantic (around 35 g/kg). This corresponds to an osmotic pressure differential around 1.8 kJ/L (1.8 MPa). If you were to build a dam which had a gravity pressure which matched this pressure differential it would be about 180 m high. So, yes, there is plenty of energy in that salinity difference, but getting it out in a cost effective manner is an open problem.

Excellent. Thanks!

I visited the Vasa museum in late 2019 and it was stunning. Not just how well it had been preserved but how few people died in it.

They noted that one of the biggest contributors to its preservation was simply the location: since it had barely left the harbor, it was shielded from most storms and buried in mud in relatively shallow water.

Even better, when it sank, the Vasa was still just a few hundred feet from shore so only a few dozen people died instead of the hundreds onboard.

It is not the salinity as such that protected Vasa, but the absence of the ship worm, which does not like the Baltic brack water.

TIL. I did go to that museum and I thought that was what they said.

What do you mean by "brack water"?

> Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater.

> Some seas and lakes are brackish. The Baltic Sea is a brackish sea adjoining the North Sea.

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

Brack water have a salinity between sea water and fresh water.

They use exactly this in De Afsluitdijk in The Netherlands [1], which seems to use technology from redstack [2].

[1] https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/zakelijk/duurzame-leefomgevin...

[2] https://redstack.nl/en/?

We beat you by over 80 years with the Mary Rose, although she at least managed to get into battle before she went over.

TIL the Mary Rose. [1] doesn't say for sure it was top-heavy, though.

"Marsden has suggested that the weight of additional heavy guns would have increased her draught so much that the waterline was less than one metre (c. 3 feet) from the gunports on the main deck."

gosh, you'd think someone would have noticed that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rose

Not mentioned in this article: In Philip K. Dick's alternative history The Man in the High Castle, in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won World War II, the Nazis execute this plan and drain the Mediterranean. As the author mentions, there wasn't much care for what happened to the people living in Africa. In Dick's book, the Nazis visited some unspeakable holocaust on them.

If it is done can it easily for 1 country to threaten the whole euro … instead of nuclear bomb, we will bomb this dam. Giving the whole ww1 he has experienced can he just believe all countries are in it for peace. Also who will share the costs of losing the sea and maintain it.

Any thoughts on the idea to expand the Mediterranean with the Sahara Sea idea?

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

How much sea level rise would it mitigate?

The idea is part of a very problematic episode in European history. But would the idea be really that bad?

> What was needed was a project so ludicrously ambitious, yet so immeasurably beneficial to all the European powers, that it would at last force them to put aside their differences and cooperate

Let's be honest, has that idea ever worked?

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