Hi everyone. I wrote this thing before SNL did its now-famous George Washington sketch about how ludicrous the U.S. system of weights & measures is - so since that sketch just got a sequel, and since in writing that newsletter I found a few reasons to defend Imperial (only a few ) I thought some of you might find it interesting, or at least a chance to teach me something by explaining to me how wrong I am. Cheers!
I'm the author of this piece. Since a few of my geology stories were very kindly received on here a while back, I thought I'd give this a go, with the hope I'm not being spammy in foisting my own stuff upon you all. Cheers for taking a look - and it's a pretty remarkable natural feature which I previously knew nothing about (if it was laid across Europe, it'd run from London to Belgrade).
Hi everyone. Since you were kind enough to upvote a couple of my pieces a good while back on the Zanclean Megaflood and Atlantropa, I thought I'd give this a whirl here, on the last & maybe the most ludicrous acquisition of the British Empire - a 20-metre high island in the Atlantic, surrounded by some of the roughest seas in the world, that's become the focus of a lot of paranoia and high farce over the last century. Cheers!
Hi everyone. Since a bit over a year ago many of you were kind enough to upvote and leave comments on my newsletter about the Zanclean megaflood (which seems to have filled up the Mediterranean basin in a matter of months), I figured you might be as interested as I was to learn that the English coast had its own version.
(And if this is me being tediously self-promotional, huge apologies.)
Couldnt agree more. (I grew up in Cyprus.) From what I could tell, it didn't occur to Sörgel what effect the dams and evaporation would have on sea-life, and on the coastal economies depending on it. Probably catastrophic. But one thing that was encouraging about the Orkney turbine mentioned elsewhere in these comments: they ran a trial first, to see how wildlife would be affected. Result: negligible impact. So a modern-tech version that respects all that beauty does seem to be possible - if mining the raw materials required to build it is factored in, because that is a massive ongoing issue.
Hah. Not at all! If it sounds like that, I've misrepresented myself - I agree with you here, and the Strait is the perfect place to do it, using something like this: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid
> But - purely as an exercise in trying to answer hilariously daft questions - how much would it cost to lower the level of the sea?
Never answered?
> But this is far from the worst thing about Atlantropa.
> It’s alarming to look back just a century and realise just how deeply baked and widely-disseminated these kinds of racist assumptions were in Europe.
> It’s proper shivers-down-the-spine stuff.
> Atlantropa may have been wildly unfeasible for countless reasons, a perfect turducken of Nopes.
Which reasons?
I got to the end of the post and was still waiting for content...
The article notes that even just the dam in the Gibraltar Strait (ignoring the others) would have required more concrete than existed in the entire world at the time. I think that single reason is enough.
Agreed. There's a tidal turbine off Orkney, the most powerful in the world, that just went live: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid It's powering 2,000 homes and an electrolyzer creating green hydrogen. A few of those - or a few arrays of them- in the Strait might do wonders.
The final part of a trilogy of stories I ran in my newsletter - and since the first two were well-received on here a few months back, and got me some generous & good advice on tightening them up, I thought I'd push my luck a final time. Plus, this topic's both wtf-barmy and perhaps timely, considering Europe's energy supply issues right now.
