The Insane Plan to Build a Bridge Between Russia and Alaska

this video was made possible by skill share learn anything with skill share for free for two months by being one of the first 500 people to sign up using the link below North America and Asia seem pretty far away they're separated by the biggest ocean on the planet and the time difference between San Francisco and Tokyo is 16 hours but they're not really as far away as it may seem at first as recently as 11,000 years ago the two continents were actually connected by a landmass known as Beringia at the time Europe Africa Asia North America and South America were all technically connected with one another by land meaning that it was possible to walk between any of them and it's believed that's exactly what happened at Beringia which the ancient ancestors of modern-day Native Americans used as a migration route from Asia into the previously uninhabited Western Hemisphere about fifteen thousand years ago but the route didn't last forever rising sea level swallowed up Beringia about 11,000 years ago which severed the connection between the old world and the new a connection that was lost so badly that it wouldn't be reconnected again until nearly 10,000 years later when the Norse and later the Spanish rediscovered it along with the new societies that had developed there in total isolation from the rest of outside civilization the flooding of Beringia all that time ago created a new geographic feature that we still live with today the Bering Straits a shallow and sometimes narrow body of water that serves as the boundary between the two once connected continents despite this during winter in modern times when the Strait freezes people have journeyed across it with dog sleds skis some even by foot and in 2008 a team even drove across the Strait in a modified Land Rover Defender some people have even swam across the Strait during the summer but could the continents actually be connected again for everyday people like you or me to travel across even in our lifetimes with sea levels continuing to rise around the planet it's doubtful that nature will cause it to happen any time soon but what if we built something ourselves at narrowest point the Bering Strait is only 51 miles across but geography has given a small blessing two islands exist roughly in the middle of the Strait called the die amides if we built a bridge or a tunnel there would only need to be two connections roughly 25 miles long each and a third smaller one connecting the islands the depth of the water here is pretty shallow too just 55 meters deep at the deepest point which means that both tunnels or bridges could be feasible longer connections between two points over an open ocean have already been built like the recently completed Hong Kong zhuhai and macao bridge that extends 434 miles out over the sea the length and the sea depth of a Bering Strait connection do not pose significant challenges to modern construction so why hasn't it been built yet the bridge would open up the possibility for some truly outrageous road trips after all you could drive between Washington DC and Moscow or New York City to Paris or on the very extreme end of Miami to Cape Town but would driving even be worth it if it was built let's think about it right now for example it's entirely possible for you to drive from New York City to Fairbanks Alaska it's a four thousand two hundred and forty mile journey the Google estimates will take you 71 hours of non-stop driving to completes realistically that's probably in reality a week-long journey one way and round-trip will put close to nine thousand miles of wear and tear on to your car nobody does that especially not while you could just get a flight from Alaska Airlines in Newark to Fairbanks that only cost three hundred fifty seven dollars roundtrip and only takes a journey of nine hours and 40 minutes if a bridge was built over the Bering Strait that you could drive over the chances are that basically nobody would actually bother to drive across it and it's not like you'd really be able to even if you wanted to this is the real and the biggest challenge to overcome with building a Bering Strait bridge it's literally in the middle of nowhere this is what the highway system in modern-day Alaska looks like and as you can see no roads connect the Bering Strait to the rest of the states meaning that currently it's impossible to tribe to the Bering Strait in Alaska pretty much nobody lives around the area of the streets the biggest city is a town here called no which doesn't even have 4,000 people living in it the gnomes census area the territory immediately surrounding the Bering Strait is roughly the same size as Albania but only has nine and a half thousand people living there there simply hasn't ever been much of a demand to build a highway out here so far in the middle of nowhere and this creates two problems for the Bering Strait bridge in order for trains trucks and cars to drive across the bridge or a tunnel they need to you know actually be able to reach the Strait and as for the thousands of workers and the massive amounts of supplies required to build that bridge er tunnel they also need a way to reach the Strait and since the nearest major port is an anchorage on the other side of the state the road network would have to be built first before the bridge for the supplies to be able to get there at least 520 miles of new highway or railroad would need to be constructed just to connect Nome to Fairbanks the northernmost point of the existing Alaskan highway system and at an estimated cost of five million dollars per mile just building this part would cost an eye-watering 2.6 billion dollars to finish in the situation on the Russian side is even worse the entire western side of the strait belongs to the Chukotka autonomous accrued an area that's roughly the same size as turkey but home to only 50,000 or so people there are literally neighborhoods in New York City with more people than this entire massive province and as a consequence the road situation here is pretty dire there isn't a single existing railroad in over two thousand miles in any direction from the Straits the nearest major highway is the legendary m56 Kolyma Highway which isn't even paved and it's still located 1,200 miles away from the Strait also known as the road Bonz highway was built under Stalin with gulag labor where untold numbers of workers died while constructing it in the wilderness and were simply buried beneath it just to give you a picture of how hard it is to build roads out here when factored in with the Alaskan side thousands of miles of new roads and railroads would need to be constructed to connect a hypothetical bridge to anywhere notable in the outside world we're at the least to transport workers and supplies to the bridge the Strait is located just south of the Arctic Circle meaning that the construction site will have extremely dark and cold winters with temperatures plummeting to negative 50 degrees Celsius therefore it's likely that construction would have to be restricted to just five months of the year between May and September for the safety of the construction crew so who knows how many years the project could end up taking it's not really a technological challenge to build a Bering Strait bridge that is totally doable but it is an extreme logistical challenge and that's not so doable many studies have been made to estimate how much a project like this would cost a construct with one estimate from the Discovery Channel claiming a price tag of 105 billion dollars or about five times the price of the Channel Tunnel between England and France and all for a bridge between basically two uninhabited wilderness but with an ever warming Arctic and with the potential of building a pipeline across the bridge they could transport untold billions worth of gas and oil between the continents the project could become more lucrative in the future than it is now making videos like 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 1,336,290

Rating: 4.8692393 out of 5

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, bering strait bridge, bering strait, alaska, russia, bridge between russia and alaska, russian bridge, alaska bridge, insane plan, insane plans

Id: zx0OtAJDBKk

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/archontwo]

Yeah. A bridge is crazy. They should build a tunnel.

[u/sightwaster]

1989 US/USSR joint expedition postcard

[u/romarioarchi]

KGB it is on the way after you for=)) for sharing classified info=)))