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1920s plan sought to drain the Mediterranean


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At the time he would of course seen this as a plan for Europeans to spread into Africa, not the other way around. A potentially good idea then would be catastrophic now.

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Not at all a "potentially good idea." Europeons were already invading Africa by World War II, so draining the Mediterranean would mean more land for people to make more war and fighting.

Edited by exojjl
will only post a few words of my post.
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Two things came to mind, how to pump all that water out into the Atlantic (seems technically unfeasible, in the extreme) and how much does the sea level rise world-wide as a result ? It can safely be filed under "hare-brained schemes".

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Where could this crazy idea have originated from? O I know - Revelation 20:1 "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away: and there was no more sea." This German architect took the bible and the 1,000 year Reich of Hitler much too literally.

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I wonder what he was going to use to fill in the hole?  Maybe the Sahara?

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there's a short but interesting review of Hoergel's ideas here along with the original pamphlet circulated at the time

there's also an artists sketch of the dam complex stretching between Africa and Europe

http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/04/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-691-blog-bookstore-simply-the-thing-i-am-shall-make-me-live-from-jorge-luis-borges-sha.html

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On 9/18/2016 at 8:50 PM, Habitat said:

Two things came to mind, how to pump all that water out into the Atlantic (seems technically unfeasible, in the extreme) and how much does the sea level rise world-wide as a result ? It can safely be filed under "hare-brained schemes".

Since I had the time I did a rough estimation of how much the ocean level would increase if the Mediterranean was emptied and the water pumped into the ocean.  It would be no less then a 5 meter increase and no greater then a 26 meter increase.  Given the nature of volume and spheres the actual increase is probably around 10 meters.

Since I'm lazy and figuring out the actual increase would require complex vector calculus which I didn't feel like doing I just found the upper and lower bounds for a rough estimate and if anyone is interested I can post the math for the estimator's bounds.

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On 9/20/2016 at 2:23 AM, paperdyer said:

I wonder what he was going to use to fill in the hole?  Maybe the Sahara?

Schnapps, imo. He must have taken to it in a big way to come up with this idea ! All the pumps in all the world would not have drained it in a thousand years.

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