What Would Happen If We Drained the Mediterranean Sea?

This RealLifeLore video is made possible by Brilliant. Get help learning calculus, algebra, gravitational physics and more for 20% off over at brilliant.org/reallifelore So this is the Mediterranean Sea, which is surrounded by 21 different countries. But what would happen to these 21 countries and the rest of the world if we somehow managed to drain all of the water out of it? It's not as far-fetched of an idea as you may think it is at first Back in the 1920s a man named Herman Sorgel had a very similar idea that helps to illustrate how this may be possible. His idea was called the Atlantropa project. And it's basically what engineers create whenever they've had a bit too much whiskey to drink the plan took into consideration that the Mediterranean Sea is naturally evaporative, which means that more water evaporates out of the sea then flows into it by rivers and streams. The difference is made up by salt water that flows into the sea through the Strait of Gibraltar, which means that in theory, if you could block off this water flow you could begin to drain the water out of the entire rest of the sea. Sorrell intended to build a colossal dam here for that exact purpose Along with another dam here between Sicily and Tunisia to divide the Mediterranean into two separate halves and a third dam here to block off the water from the Black Sea from getting through. The plan involved lowering the water levels by 100 meters on the western side of the Mediterranean and by 200 metres on the eastern side. This would have drained about one-fifth of the entire Mediterranean Sea, which means that it would have created about 576,000 square kilometers of new land (an area roughly the size of Spain and Ireland combined) The continents of Europe and Africa would be directly connected and this new continent was intended to be called Atlanta. The new land around the Mediterranean was intended to be colonized by new European settlers. The combined two dams could probably have provided enough clean hydroelectric power for all of Europe and the project would have employed hundreds of thousands of people for the 100 years that it was planned the project would last for. So why wasn't it ever built? Well, for starters, the Mediterranean Sea is salty which means that all that freshly exposed land would be salt flats and useless for any agriculture. It was also calculated by some architects that there wasn't enough concrete in the entire world to build the dam of Gilblter. Anyway let alone the other two dams that were part of the project, it would have also required an enormous amount of international cooperation and the 21 Mediterranean coast countries that I mentioned previously, all would have coastal cities. That would be very upset that they were no longer on the coast. Even if it was somehow built, one well-placed nuclear bomb on the Gibraltar dam would cause a biblical style flood that would destroy the entire project instantly and ruin the lives of millions of people. In addition, the planners didn't take into consideration at all how the project may have impacted weather patterns across Europe and Africa. But let's get back to what the title of this video is all about: what if the dam at Gibraltar was actually somehow built and we decided to drain out all of the water in the Mediterranean Sea? What would happen next? Well ,for starters, the entire area that once made up the sea would likely become a vast desert with the hottest temperatures anywhere on earth enormous canyons would plunge as deep as five thousand metres below sea level and the temperature down here could approach an unbearable 80 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the hottest temperature ever recorded so far on the Earth's surface was 54 degrees Celsius in Kuwait. In addition, even though the water in the Mediterranean would be gone, the salt that used to be in the water would remain on the land in thick built-up layers. All of the newly exposed land would be a salty dry and fiercely hot desert that would be incredibly hostile to any form of life or settlement. It could almost be seen as an extension of the Sahara Desert in Africa. But the desert wouldn't just end here: an enormous amount of southern Europe and Turkey would rapidly become a desert, as well with Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Albania, Greece and Turkey being the most severely affected. The entire balkan and Alpine regions would see significantly less rainfall as a result - which means that agriculture across most of Europe would be severely damaged. But the rest of the world would be severely impacted. Well, because the massive amount of water located inside the Mediterranean would have to go somewhere, it would end up being redistributed into the world's oceans. Which would raise sea levels everywhere else by roughly 10 meters from where they are today. This would be catastrophic in an opposite way and lead to cities like New Orleans, Sacramento Amsterdam Copenhagen and Shanghai going completely underwater. Predicting the weather is a very hard business AND predicting how exactly removing an entire body of water as large as the Mediterranean would impact the global climate is nearly impossible! But it certainly wouldn't be good needless to say this entire thing is probably a very bad idea. Figuring out what would happen if we drained the Mediterranean Sea without actually doing it is complicated. There are many different possible scenarios. And I've made several simplifying assumptions in this video to arrive at the answer. If you've watched other videos of mine then you know that I love figuring out all kinds of absurd scenarios from what the economy of a reunited British Empire would look like today to how much a supermassive black hole would weigh in units of Toyota Corollas. As much as I love explaining the absurd, I think that everyone should be able to do that and the best way is to practice it yourself. brilliant.org is the perfect website to do this on. It's a problem solving website that teaches you how to think like a scientist by guiding you through problems to solidify your understanding. They take real-life problems like these, dissect the problem into manageable bits, analyze the implications and present an interesting conclusion. If you visit brilliant.org/reallifelore or click the link in the description, you can sign up for free and begin learning about all kinds of things and as a bonus, exclusive for RealLifeLore viewers, the first 200 people will also get 20% off of their annual membership. If you learn anything interesting then please let me know below in the comments! :D

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 5,542,388

Rating: 4.8115339 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, mediterranean sea, mediterranean, what would happen if, drain the mediterranean sea, drain the ocean, drain oceans, drain, drained, ocean, ocean video, ocean documentary, atlantropa, documentary

Id: fQh0CPNzSmY

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Suddenly_Geography]

Sacramento would be under water? Am I high or does he mean San Francisco? Sacramento is in the middle of the state, cut off by mountains.