As I noted above, it is possible to rehabilitate the soil into land good for growing crops. And even before that, halophyte plants (like saltgrasses of genus Distichlis, although that's a New World native) will grow there and some of those are useful as forage for animals. Some of those are good for humans too, like nipa grass (Distichlis palmeri), a native of the Colorado River Delta. I don't think the effect on the climate would be too bad. On the European side, the plain would be drier, yes, but not too dry, and it would be possible to irrigate vast amounts of the land. What couldn't be used could instead be used for ranching.
It's also the question of whether you want no sea at all or just a reduced sea. Allowing some water to go through can be used to generate a vast amount of hydroelectric power, which can in turn be used for desalination.
This can also be a big incentive for the surrounding countries.
FairlyUninformedGraduate
Gone Fishin'
I am sure I read discussions of this previously where people made strong cases that the effect of even a relatively modest sea level change would be catastrophic - increased salinity int he remaining water, disruption of the water cycle and the like, but I forget the details - that would basically mean the new land was desert, and worse, that the surrounding land became less useable too. If anyone can unearth the thread, i think it was on here, that might be useful to this discussion?
It'd make far more sense for Atlantropa to be carried out by Italian or Spanish Fascists, not Nazi Germany.
An Italy far more successful at trying to establish a New Roman Empire might have been able to pursue this as a post-war (where they conquered Spain) moral booster/job program. Not saying it wouldn't be a disaster either way, but it was an achievable megaproject for a strong state to pursue.
An Italy far more successful at trying to establish a New Roman Empire might have been able to pursue this as a post-war (where they conquered Spain) moral booster/job program. Not saying it wouldn't be a disaster either way, but it was an achievable megaproject for a strong state to pursue.
Damming the Oresund wouldn’t work. The Baltic is a net outflow of water to the North Sea—trying to dam it would just drown the surrounding countries.
Only the Med and Red Sea and Persian Gulf are real candidates for an Atlantropa-type project because they have such a large evaporative loss of water and so comparatively little river flow. The Gulf is too shallow to be a good hydropower source anyway, so that just leaves the Med and the Red Sea.
You know what might help, a little bit, discussing this sort of thing, is to decouple it from "Nazi" support. Are we or are we not talking about Hitler's National Socialist party here? If we are, it is deeply racist, embraces a nihilistic ethos of war as the natural state of human life, celebrates murder and absolute obedience to the whims of some mystically alleged to be Chosen dictator.
It is not logical for Nazis to support solving problems without stepping on people's toes by means of industrious labor. That's not what Nazis are about. Nazis are about basing society on the ethics of apex predators and treating most of humanity as prey.
So if "Nazis" were the major sponsors of Atlantropa, we already know up front just from that it is a bad idea. So it should not surprise us that the details have, shall we say, negatives.
Now then, I can well believe that there were quite other Germans than Nazis who were excited by this project, because unlike Nazis they did have scruples. They did understand that if you go around reorganizing the living conditions of other people on a continental scale, you owe them something--compensation at least, a place at the decisionmaking table, and in fact as noted, if it is "Lebensraum" for someone, it isn't for Germans anyway. (If the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not collapsed, at any rate there would be that German, more or less, outlet onto the Med).
Look at it fundamentally; the idea that the solution to any nation's population expansion is to expand onto "new" land is just fundamentally wrongheaded. At best that is a temporary solution, then growth fills the new land and you face the same problem once again on a bigger scale. Land area is a given; rising human populations can in fact use the greater labor power this population represents to work the land they have more intensively, and meanwhile a solution that is sustainable is for population not to grow so damn much! And in fact, it turns out that if we just respect women as equal persons, and leave the question of how many babies each one is to have to herself, population growth does slow down, as each woman considers seriously the question of how many children she can afford to care for. If she can care for more, and also chooses to go through the risks and pains of childbearing and the heavy time and energy drain of caring for young children (I do a fair amount of that myself lately, and it has its rewards--but face it, it is a major time and attention sink!) then having calculated shrewdly, we can see that piecemeal, the rate of population growth is being regulated to match her society's economic carrying capacity.
The reason "Nazis," and other people less vile but I fear basically wrongheaded in their thinking on this, were obsessed with this kind of expansionism was that they wanted German population to grow without limit, the better to beat down and exploit other people. The less cruelly intentioned "Lebensraum" types were clearly half baked in their thinking and I suppose these were people who resisted the idea of women's liberation to control their own lives and assumed large birth rates were some kind of virtue in themselves. But clearly that kind of thinking has no sustainable solutions, and leads straight to war and brutal exploitation of others as the Malthusian solution to the problem. It makes sense for Nazis to think this way, because they were on the side of the Four Horsemen, thinking they could harness them to turn on other people.
But then, why labor so heroically (and futilely) to create desiccated salt dust bottom lands of little use to anyone, and ruin perfectly habitable land all around it, when frankly you can just go steal someone else's more or less decent land that already exists? This is of course the real Nazi solution.
I suppose other people, less vicious in their intentions, looked to this as a solution and kidded themselves into avoiding facing how it still amounts to a land grab of other people's homes, pointing to the exposed sea bottom acreage as new land but sidestepping how much they are screwing up other people in the process, and thus kidded themselves into ignoring how poor the new land they were proposing to create would be. But this is not a solution to a problem that can be solved in this way!
It is not logical for Nazis to support solving problems without stepping on people's toes by means of industrious labor. That's not what Nazis are about. Nazis are about basing society on the ethics of apex predators and treating most of humanity as prey.
So if "Nazis" were the major sponsors of Atlantropa, we already know up front just from that it is a bad idea. So it should not surprise us that the details have, shall we say, negatives.
Now then, I can well believe that there were quite other Germans than Nazis who were excited by this project, because unlike Nazis they did have scruples. They did understand that if you go around reorganizing the living conditions of other people on a continental scale, you owe them something--compensation at least, a place at the decisionmaking table, and in fact as noted, if it is "Lebensraum" for someone, it isn't for Germans anyway. (If the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not collapsed, at any rate there would be that German, more or less, outlet onto the Med).
Look at it fundamentally; the idea that the solution to any nation's population expansion is to expand onto "new" land is just fundamentally wrongheaded. At best that is a temporary solution, then growth fills the new land and you face the same problem once again on a bigger scale. Land area is a given; rising human populations can in fact use the greater labor power this population represents to work the land they have more intensively, and meanwhile a solution that is sustainable is for population not to grow so damn much! And in fact, it turns out that if we just respect women as equal persons, and leave the question of how many babies each one is to have to herself, population growth does slow down, as each woman considers seriously the question of how many children she can afford to care for. If she can care for more, and also chooses to go through the risks and pains of childbearing and the heavy time and energy drain of caring for young children (I do a fair amount of that myself lately, and it has its rewards--but face it, it is a major time and attention sink!) then having calculated shrewdly, we can see that piecemeal, the rate of population growth is being regulated to match her society's economic carrying capacity.
The reason "Nazis," and other people less vile but I fear basically wrongheaded in their thinking on this, were obsessed with this kind of expansionism was that they wanted German population to grow without limit, the better to beat down and exploit other people. The less cruelly intentioned "Lebensraum" types were clearly half baked in their thinking and I suppose these were people who resisted the idea of women's liberation to control their own lives and assumed large birth rates were some kind of virtue in themselves. But clearly that kind of thinking has no sustainable solutions, and leads straight to war and brutal exploitation of others as the Malthusian solution to the problem. It makes sense for Nazis to think this way, because they were on the side of the Four Horsemen, thinking they could harness them to turn on other people.
But then, why labor so heroically (and futilely) to create desiccated salt dust bottom lands of little use to anyone, and ruin perfectly habitable land all around it, when frankly you can just go steal someone else's more or less decent land that already exists? This is of course the real Nazi solution.
I suppose other people, less vicious in their intentions, looked to this as a solution and kidded themselves into avoiding facing how it still amounts to a land grab of other people's homes, pointing to the exposed sea bottom acreage as new land but sidestepping how much they are screwing up other people in the process, and thus kidded themselves into ignoring how poor the new land they were proposing to create would be. But this is not a solution to a problem that can be solved in this way!
But for that very reason, isn't it quite plain that reducing the open water area in these regions can only lead to drying out the surrounding lands worse, and thus any gains in exposed sea bottom acreage you get will be offset by ruining formerly viable land by drying it out?
And then there is the fact that to create significant area around the rim of the shrunken Med (or Red Sea, or Persian Gulf) you have to bring the sea level down a lot? Not really so about the Persian Gulf, maybe...but Red Sea and Med are rather steep shored bodies, and you don't get much extra land per meter of reduction, so you have to lower the level a great deal, many hundreds of meters. If you do that, the adiabatic air temperature is higher than at Terran sea level, and thus evaporation rates are even higher. At some point, it is just too damn hot to colonize the shores, and this totally leaves aside the issue of salinity.
I think most of us here are aware that in the past ten million years or so, the Gibraltar strait has been closed naturally for periods of hundreds of thousands of years, and during these, the Med did shrink. The result was not to have some kind of lush farming land down there, it was to create a desert poisoned by very salty dust.
I have to wonder if this geological fact was known at all back in the 1920s?
Anyway if they could not be faulted for not anticipating this nasty result (and I do fault them, for not thinking it through) then we at any rate know it is a colossally stupid idea.
The Congo rediversion northward is also arrogant, high handed, hubristic and liable to fail in unanticipated ways, but at least it involves bringing more moisture, not less, into the dry belt. Probably futile to do this, probably the artificial water courses northward cannot be made to work right. And we can be sure if expanded Lake Chad is initially fresh water, it will gradually get more saline over time. Meanwhile the Sahara has depleted aquifers under it, and I suppose a lot of water would be "diverted" into filling these--I put it in scare quotes because actually pouring fresh water into these aquifers is a better investment of the liquid than letting it sit in lakes exposed to the desiccating climate of these latitudes, where air that welled up into the upper atmosphere and was dried out during its ascent sinks down to the surface, dry already at altitude and with relative humidity plummeting further as it warms. This is why (in this era, it cycles around over 20,000 years as the North African monsoon center shifts due to polar axial tilt variations) the Med has more evaporation than inflow. But maybe perhaps pouring a whole major river's worth into the middle of the zone might mitigate the low humidity even so.
In this context, blocking the inflow of Atlantic seawater into the Med is the most counterproductive thing I can think of. The region, from a selfish human point of view, needs more moisture, not less!
From a body as large as the Mediterranean? Economically? With 1940s technology?
Nick P
Donor
How long will this all take? 10 years to build the dam, 50-80 years to drain the Med, another century to clean up and de-salt all the soil? 200 years?
In that time you'll put 20+ million fishermen and cargo sailors out of work, dry up all the vineyards and farmlands because of reduced rainfall, destroy international trade, ruin diplomatic relationships and cause the extinction of numerous fish and bird species.
Not to mention that all the rivers flowing into the Med will drain out quicker so it will disrupt the growing patterns in central France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, North Africa etc.
And then one day Mother Nature wakes up, gives a little shudder at the increased weight on the Gibraltar Straits and the ensuing earthquake sees the utter destruction of 2 centuries of work plus the mass death of millions who have moved into the Med basin.
It'd be far more reasonable to try reseeding the Sahara by refilling the underground lakes.
In that time you'll put 20+ million fishermen and cargo sailors out of work, dry up all the vineyards and farmlands because of reduced rainfall, destroy international trade, ruin diplomatic relationships and cause the extinction of numerous fish and bird species.
Not to mention that all the rivers flowing into the Med will drain out quicker so it will disrupt the growing patterns in central France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, North Africa etc.
And then one day Mother Nature wakes up, gives a little shudder at the increased weight on the Gibraltar Straits and the ensuing earthquake sees the utter destruction of 2 centuries of work plus the mass death of millions who have moved into the Med basin.
It'd be far more reasonable to try reseeding the Sahara by refilling the underground lakes.
From the new land, yes, controlling soil salinity is of ancient origin and over a few decades techniques can be used to build new soil. All would be known to mid-20th century science.
Germans promising/building canals would probably mollify some of the Mediterranean countries, e.g. Italy, but GB would probably still be pissed.\
Re: the tangent, any sources? I find that interesting... where does the circa 6000 BC = Noah come from?
Derek Pullem
Donor
The volume of water in the Mediterranean would increase sea levels by approx 10m
Volume of Mediterranean = 3,750,000,000 km3
Area of oceans and sea = 361,000,000
That would swamp many of the worlds major cities
Volume of Mediterranean = 3,750,000,000 km3
Area of oceans and sea = 361,000,000
That would swamp many of the worlds major cities