In 1928, a German architect proposed draining the Mediterranean Sea to create a Eurafrican supercontinent Atlantropa. This is why
The Man Behind the 1928 Atlantropa Supercontinent Plan
Herman Sörgel was born in Regensburg, Bavaria, in 1885 and skilled as an architect in Munich. He lived by means of the devastation of the First World Conflict, watched Europe stagger by means of financial collapse and mass unemployment within the Twenties, and noticed fascism gaining floor in his personal nation. Like a lot of his technology, he grew to become satisfied that Europe’s issues — poverty, joblessness, and the fixed menace of one other warfare — may solely be solved by one thing radical.
Round 1927, after studying a geographer’s description of the Mediterranean as an “evaporation sea,” Sörgel had his massive concept. As a result of the Mediterranean loses way more water to evaporation than it receives from rivers, its degree is successfully propped up by a continuing influx from the Atlantic by means of the Strait of Gibraltar. Block that influx, Sörgel reasoned, and the ocean would begin draining itself.
By the spring of 1928, he had turned this perception right into a full-blown continental blueprint, which he first known as Panropa earlier than renaming it Atlantropa.
What Atlantropa Really Proposed
The centrepiece of the plan was a large dam throughout the Strait of Gibraltar, in some variations greater than 20 kilometres lengthy, that may lower the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic Ocean. Sörgel calculated that after sealed off, evaporation alone would decrease the ocean’s degree by roughly a metre a yr, ultimately dropping it by 100 to 200 metres.
He did not cease at one dam. His plan included a second barrier between Sicily and Tunisia, splitting the Mediterranean into two individually managed basins, and a 3rd throughout the Dardanelles to carry again the Black Sea. Locks can be wanted on the Suez Canal to deal with the large drop in water degree.
The payoff, in Sörgel’s telling, can be staggering. Newly uncovered seabed operating into the a whole lot of 1000’s of sq. kilometres would turn out to be farmland and residing house. Italy would develop bigger, Sicily would fuse with the mainland, and the Greek islands would merge into it too. The Gibraltar dam alone was projected to generate tens of 1000’s of megawatts of hydroelectric energy — sufficient, by some estimates, to produce roughly half of Europe’s electrical energy wants on the time. A unified authority overseeing this shared power grid, Sörgel argued, would bind European nations collectively so tightly that warfare between them would turn out to be economically unthinkable.His final imaginative and prescient was even larger than the dams themselves: a brand new merged landmass of Europe and Africa — “Atlantropa” — certain by shared infrastructure, shared power, and, in his utopian framing, shared peace.
A “Loopy Thought” Taken Critically
What makes Atlantropa exceptional is not simply its scale, it is that no one laughed it off. Sörgel spent the remainder of his life, till his loss of life in 1952, selling the undertaking relentlessly by means of books, fashions, exhibitions and lectures. He based an Atlantropa Institute to maintain the concept alive. The undertaking drew real curiosity from architects, engineers, and political figures by means of the late Twenties and early Thirties, and once more after the Second World Conflict, when it was even mentioned in worldwide boards searching for methods to rebuild a shattered Europe.
It by no means obtained constructed, for causes which can be pretty apparent in hindsight. The engineering calls for had been far past what the expertise of the period may ship. The plan required unprecedented cooperation between rival Mediterranean and African nations who had been by no means consulted about having their coastlines redrawn or their cities left stranded miles from a retreating sea. Nazi Germany confirmed little curiosity in a undertaking constructed on worldwide cooperation reasonably than territorial conquest. And by the Fifties, the world’s urge for food for “limitless power” had shifted decisively towards nuclear energy, making Sörgel’s hydroelectric dream really feel outdated even to his supporters.
Sörgel himself by no means noticed the undertaking deserted. On 25 December 1952, he was biking to a lecture in Munich when he was struck and killed by a automobile whose driver was by no means recognized. He was 67. Atlantropa largely light from public reminiscence quickly after.
Why It is Being Talked About Once more
There are a few causes Atlantropa retains developing in fashionable dialog. More and more, historians see it as an early, although deeply flawed, blueprint for European unification, a continent scarred by warfare imagining itself certain by shared infrastructure a long time earlier than the idea grew to become the European Union.
As for the surroundings , we now know that it could have been a catastrophe . Draining a part of the Mediterranean would have precipitated an increase in sea ranges elsewhere on the planet , disruption of ocean currents linked to the Gulf Stream , and destruction of coastal ecosystems . And the very audacity of the concept, one architect trying to redraw two continents with a single dam, continues to draw folks rediscovering it on-line, in documentaries, and even within the alternate-history novel and TV sequence The Man within the Excessive Citadel, which depicts a model of the plan.
A century on, the Mediterranean is strictly the place it has at all times been. However Atlantropa survives as certainly one of historical past’s most extraordinary “what ifs” — a reminder of how far one particular person’s obsession can journey when it guarantees to resolve the most important issues of its time.
