Ridiculous Land Reclamation Projects

kernals12

Banned
Here are some of the more ridiculous proposals to take land from the sea.
In 1849 there was this proposal in the Netherlands to completely drain out the ijsselmeer
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There was this plan to extend Mannhattan Island in 1911
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And in 1959, the Army Corps of Engineers made this map showing their predictions of what the San Francisco bay would look like by 2020.
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So, what are some other ridiculous reclamation proposals? Please, tell me.
 
There was a posting here several months ago describing a project to build enormous dikes and dams to seal off Japan's Inland Sea and than pump out the water. It certainly struck me as a very unrealistic concept for technical, geologic and economic reasons. I wish I could've recalled the name of that thread so as to provide a link.
 
James Bay is at the southernmost end of Hudson Bay. Several Americans have proposed damming it off from Hudson Bay and pumping fresh water south to thirsty Americans.

Shear distance is the biggest problem between James Bay and the headwaters of the Mississipi, near Chicago. Even digging a canal to the Great Lakes requires blasting hundreds of kilometres through Canadian Shield Rock.
 
If the Bay Area were settled a century or two earlier, I wonder how extensive the land reclamation might be there?

why do they want to lower the Sea level in the first place?

I guess if you're like me and you support the flooding of the North African depressions (Qattara, Algerian chotts) for economic/climate reasons, it's like Team Aqua vs Team Magma in Pokemon. Atlantropa would only benefit Northern Europeans (maybe why it's a trope in Nazi victory scenarios), since Mediterranean Europe would get destroyed by the additional land (and Africa would be even worse off).
 
Atlantropa would only benefit Northern Europeans (maybe why it's a trope in Nazi victory scenarios), since Mediterranean Europe would get destroyed by the additional land (and Africa would be even worse off).

The reality is quite different. Sörgel was a pacifist, who hoped that the task of building such a gigantic dam would force the nations to cooperate and secure peace for hundreds of years. He also thought that irrigating the Sahara would create millions of acres of arable land and put an end to hunger. No wonder that the Nazis didn't listen to him, even if he tried to sold them his ideas.
 
The reality is quite different. Sörgel was a pacifist, who hoped that the task of building such a gigantic dam would force the nations to cooperate and secure peace for hundreds of years. He also thought that irrigating the Sahara would create millions of acres of arable land and put an end to hunger. No wonder that the Nazis didn't listen to him, even if he tried to sold them his ideas.

That is true, yet Atlantropa is still a cliche for Nazi victory scenarios, and in those scenarios you never see realistic irrigation of North African land (I mean, it was an idea which Ferdinand de Lesseps and Jules Verne were interested in) which in the best case scenario you'd be able to process the seawater (solar/nuclear desalination?) used to flood the land in some concepts into freshwater and thus create massive amounts of newly irrigated land (in addition to the beneficial climatic effects it would have).
 
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