Again you're talking about a canal which is why it wasn't practical. Anyone can build a ditch. The Manych depression only requires at max a 23m deep hole.
The aral sea similarly needs only a small overflow before it is all downhill
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Again you're talking about a canal which is why it wasn't practical. Anyone can build a ditch. The Manych depression only requires at max a 23m deep hole.
The aral sea similarly needs only a small overflow before it is all downhill
Length of the "ditch" would be approximately 400 miles and it should be of a considerable width to make some difference.
As for the Aral sea, which part of "too small" is not quite clear to you? It was just a big salty lake which now pretty much ceased to exist because water of the main rivers feeding it was diverted to the agricultural purposes.
Not to mention that the whole idea does not have any obvious practical sense outside of a general context of the Soviet era hydroelectric plants which are post-1900 (and even within that context relation remains a big question mark).
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I mean too small is irrelevant, all water is an improvement. The inflow from the aral reduces the size of the other ditch.
Width just change the time until the Caspian reaches sea level anyway. If you wait 500 years it hardly has to be that wide
How is it not feasible to build a dam on the Congo for the purpose of creating a massive reservoir (so not like the Grand Inga Dam proposed OTL) by flooding the Congo Rainforest, and from there refill Lake Megachad by using the same methods proposed to refill OTL Lake Chad? The lake created would be something like 1/4 of Congo-Kinshasa's land area, and the hydro power in the dam could pump all the water you'd need. The only dam you'd need is the one on the Congo, which incidentally would be the smallest and only feasible dam of Atlantropa.
It's a stupid plan no one would ever do (besides maybe some engineering obsessed version of King Leopold), but it's feasible and arguably the most world changing (not in a good way) mega-project we could do right now since the cost and infrastructure needed is within the budget of a developed nation (who would be fronting the cost for any state in the area or just outright spending it on their colonial there). Yes, it's a hell of a lot of concrete and steel and would take a ton of workers, but it's all doable by today's tech. I'd be more curious as to the earliest date such a dam is possible technologically.
It doesn't compare with these vast water-born projects, but in the British Isles how about a railway tunnel under the North Channel between Portpatrick in Galloway, Scotland, and somewhere between Larne and Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland? [pobably post 1900]. Project would include a railway from Portpatrick to the existing line near Stranraer, improvements, including double tracking where single, to the Stranraer to Glasgow line, and in NI regauging the Larne to Belfast Central line from Irish to standard gauge. The second part of this project would be the rebuilding of the old Portpatrick & Wigtownshire Joint line (Stranraer to Dumfries) to give a direct route to Carlisle and England. Ideally the whole route (Glasgow or Carlisle - Stranraer - Belfast Central) should be electrified.
It would be a white elephant of course, but I could see some Unionist group extracting a promise to build it as a price for supporting a weak British Government.
It would be a white elephant of course, but I could see some Unionist group extracting a promise to build it as a price for supporting a weak British Government.