An Unbuilt Gigantic Water Project from Each Continent Ranked by Insanity

[kernals12]

Many people have dreamed of building a strategically placed dam somewhere to make great changes to the world's geography for a variety of reasons. And as it turns out, this urge is global, with such projects having been proposed on every single continent besides Antarctica. Here they are from least insane to most.

6. The Bradfield Scheme (Australia)


John Bradfield was a well respected Aussie civil engineer having designed the Sydney Harbor Bridge. So in 1938, when he suggested that damming a few rivers could turn 3,000 square miles of the Outback into lush farmland, people listened. He suggested diverting the Tully, Herbert, and Burdekin rivers, which "wastefully" flowed into the Pacific over the Great Dividing Range into the Thomson River from where it would flow into Lake Eyre, irrigating a huge amount of land in the process. This proposal was almost tame compared to the others, not being much more ridiculous than, say, California's State Water Project. But it was later discovered that Bradfield massively overestimated how much water would be available for diversion, by 2 and a half fold, making the project uneconomical. But still, to this day, a few fringe politicians call for its revival.

5. Reversal of the Yenisei and Ob Rivers (Asia)


Going back to Tsarist times, the Russians have dreamed of turning around the great rivers flowing into the Arctic to provide water to arid Central Asia. Over the years, the scale of the proposals have varied, reaching their peak during Stalin's time. In the late 40s, the engineer Davydov suggested diverting ⅓ of the Yenisei and Ob Rivers southward, building 2 dams that would've created an inland sea 250,000 square kilometers in size. The reservoir would've inundated farmland, cities, and, unknown at the time, massive oilfields. Then nuclear bombs (obviously) would dig a canal to send all this water into the Aral and Caspian basins. Over the decades, the Soviets toyed with the idea. But in 1986, Gorbachev cancelled a massively scaled down version, presumably due to the high cost and a level of environmental damage that even Moscow thought was excessive. More recently, some have suggested reviving this to increase the salinity of the Arctic and thereby melt the ice cap, allowing more of the Arctic's heat to escape into space, as a way of mitigating global warming (read about it here).

4. The North American Water and Power Alliance (North America)


And on the other side of the Arctic Circle, a very similar idea was proposed in 1964 by the Ralph M Parson Corporation of California. They called it NAWAPA. The idea was to dam the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers, pumping about 1/5 of their flow into a massive reservoir formed from the Rocky Mountain Trench, from where the water would be transferred east to the Great Lakes and south to the American West and Northern Mexico. The project would've cost $200 billion in 1964 dollars (over $1 trillion today), it would've required 100,000 residents of British Columbia to move, it would've dammed up every watershed from Vancouver to Anchorage, doing untold environmental damage, and some say that by the time the water had arrived in the southwest, it would have accumulated so much sediment as to be unusable. The project got some support from high places in the 60s, from Interior Secretary Stuart Udall and Utah Senator Frank Moss, although the former renounced his support after he left office. Even the Canadians showed some interest. But with the outrageous price tag and the predicted water shortage that was supposed to make the project a necessity never materializing, it went nowhere. Though it is cited in that paper I mentioned earlier. Although, the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche had a deranged obsession with it, he loved it almost as much as he hated the British Royal Family.

3. The Amazon Great Lakes (South America)


In 1967, the Amazon Rainforest was still considered a barrier to civilization that needed to be tamed. So, the Hudson Institute, a think tank in New York founded by Herman Khan, suggested flooding large chunks of it with a series of dams for the purpose of generating hydropower and creating an inland waterway system. I can't find much about this outside of this paper, but apparently due to several waterfalls, the resulting waterway would not have been navigable. And Brazil was not about to flood a huge chunk of its landmass for the benefit of its neighbors, so the idea went nowhere.

2. African Great Lakes (Africa)


This one was largely simple but still incredibly crazy. It would entail building a massive dam at the mouth of the Congo River, creating a huge inland sea which would, with a canal, then flow north into the Sahel, recreating Lake Megachad (no longer a virgin). The idea was dreamt up by German engineer Herman Sorgel, though it wasn't his most famous idea (we'll get to that one). Looking at elevation maps, I can say with 90% certainty that that "eventual overflow to the Mediterranean" is BS, it would most likely flow south into the Niger River. The idea behind this was, like the Amazon Great Lakes, to generate hydropower and create an inland waterway system to make exploitation of the Congo's mineral reserves easier. Plus it would've turned a big chunk of the Sahara green. But it would've taken 150 years for just the Congo lake to fill up, and it would've left much of both Congos underwater, which wasn't going to fly.

1. Atlantropa (Europe)


Unlike the others, this was meant to eliminate a sea, rather than create one. This was Herman Sorgel's lifelong obsession. The Mediterranean is a unique body of water, inflows from precipitation and from river runoff are not nearly enough to balance out evaporation, so a lot of water flows from the Altantic through the Strait of Gibraltar. In the 20s, Sorgel suggested building a dam there, plus another one at the Bosporous. This would've caused the Med to shrink. Sorgel suggested it would create new land equal in size to France, for farmland. The dams would've generated 100 GW of power. He also saw the project as a way to relieve unemployment in Europe and he believed that the necessary cooperation would've brought peace to Europe, the horrors of World War I being fresh in his mind. The Nazis did not like the idea, so he had to go quiet in his advocacy and by 1945, cheap nuclear power seemed to be on the horizon, so there was no need for such massive dams. In 1952, Sorgel was killed when a hit and run driver hit him while bicycling, and his dream died with him. With hindsight, we can see the many, many problems this would've caused. First off, lots of valuable waterfront real estate would've been left high and dry, ruining the economies of places like Genoa and Marseille. Venice would lose its canals, although Sorgel quickly "fixed" that problem with another dam that would've created an inland lake around the city. And yes, it would've been an environmental disaster. The Mediterranean would've gotten saltier and sewage and pollution would've accumulated. Think Salton Sea on steroids. And that farmland would've been way too salty for any agriculture. Plus, removing the weight of all that water might've resulted in earthquakes, possibly one destroying the dams, creating a flood straight out of the bible.

[kkt]

These are crazy.  Don't show Fritzowl.

[Bruce]

The modern version: the Lake Powell Pipeline to divert water from Lake Powell to St George, Utah.

https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2020/06/11/mgk-lake-powell-pipeline-hits-an-important-milestone-with-roll-out-of-environmental-study/

The St George area shouldn't be allowed to sprawl out and suck up water meant for downstream cities (who also need to stop wasting so much).

[kernals12]

These are crazy.  Don't show Fritzowl.