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Weird plan/Nuclear bomb to create an inland sea in the Sahara

2023-04-14 07:56:00, Kuriozitete CNA

Weird plan/Nuclear bomb to create an inland sea in the Sahara

Illustrative photo

We humans love to experiment. From the idea of ??blowing up the moon, to shooting a bullet at the planet Jupiter, discovering history's biggest plans is always a wild ride.

Now we are adding to this list "the creation of a sea in the middle of the Sahara", again in an effort to change a trend that is thought to be negative, such as climate change. In fact, there have been many plans to flood parts of the Sahara, as large parts of the world's largest desert are actually below sea level.

It is worth remembering that the Sahara desert is a large area covering an area of ??about 9.2 million square kilometers in most of North Africa. This idea first started with the Scottish engineer Donald Mackenzie, who wanted to invert the El Juf basin, turning it into what he called the Sahara Sea.

In this framework, he proposed the creation of a 644-kilometer-long canal from Morocco to the El Juf Basin, thus creating an inland sea roughly the size of Ireland, or 96,560 square kilometers.

In the 1870s, French army captain François Rudard was inspired by the completion of the Suez Canal project. He suggested the construction of a 193-kilometer-long canal that would connect the Mediterranean Sea with a part of the Sahara desert called Shott El Fejhej in southern Tunisia, thus flooding over 4,828 square kilometers of land.

The areas are salt water lakes for half the year. The plan received the blessing of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat who was somewhat famous for his work on the construction of the Suez Canal. The cost at that time was about 25 million francs.

The idea was to open up more trade routes for French ships. De Lesseps and his friends wanted to make the middle of North Africa a much wetter and more fertile place. Despite Rudar's work on this project, the plan never came to fruition, although several exploratory trips to the area were also funded.

The discovery that the area was not actually below sea level, but also the rising costs, meant that the ambitious plans were never realized. While the plan ultimately failed, it inspired the French writer Jules Verne to include the construction of a canal in his 1905 novel Conquest of the Sea, in which an earthquake causes the creation of an inland sea in North Africa.

Another plan to create a sea in the middle of the Sahara was suggested by Egypt. Project Plowshare was an initiative by the US Atomic Energy Commission to use the "peaceful" symbol of nuclear bombs to create the canals needed to flood the Katara Lowlands, located 60 meters below sea level.

But the use of nuclear explosions was prohibited by several international treaties, so the "Plowshare" project was discontinued in 1977. Recently, in 2018, a Silicon Valley company called "Y Combinator" announced its idea to fight global warming by flooding the Algodones Dune desert area in California.

Their plan was to create millions of square micro-reservoirs with an area of ??0.4 hectares each, which would allow the growth of algae, which would act as a carbon sink. So the project has not started to be implemented as its cost is very high, about 50 trillion dollars./ Adapted from CNA.al