The Man Behind the 1928 Atlantropa Supercontinent Plan
Herman Sörgel was born in Regensburg, Bavaria, in 1885 and educated as an architect in Munich. He lived via the devastation of the First World Struggle, watched Europe stagger via financial collapse and mass unemployment within the Twenties, and noticed fascism gaining floor in his personal nation. Like lots of his technology, he turned satisfied that Europe’s issues — poverty, joblessness, and the fixed menace of one other battle — may solely be solved by one thing radical.
Round 1927, after studying a geographer’s description of the Mediterranean as an “evaporation sea,” Sörgel had his large thought. As a result of the Mediterranean loses way more water to evaporation than it receives from rivers, its degree is successfully propped up by a relentless influx from the Atlantic via the Strait of Gibraltar. Block that influx, Sörgel reasoned, and the ocean would begin draining itself.
By the spring of 1928, he had turned this perception right into a full-blown continental blueprint, which he first known as Panropa earlier than renaming it Atlantropa.
What Atlantropa Truly Proposed
The centrepiece of the plan was an enormous dam throughout the Strait of Gibraltar, in some variations greater than 20 kilometres lengthy, that will reduce the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic Ocean. Sörgel calculated that when sealed off, evaporation alone would decrease the ocean’s degree by roughly a metre a yr, ultimately dropping it by 100 to 200 metres.
He did not cease at one dam. His plan included a second barrier between Sicily and Tunisia, splitting the Mediterranean into two individually managed basins, and a 3rd throughout the Dardanelles to carry again the Black Sea. Locks can be wanted on the Suez Canal to deal with the large drop in water degree.
The payoff, in Sörgel’s telling, can be staggering. Newly uncovered seabed working into the a whole bunch of 1000’s of sq. kilometres would turn into farmland and residing area. Italy would develop bigger, Sicily would fuse with the mainland, and the Greek islands would merge into it too. The Gibraltar dam alone was projected to generate tens of 1000’s of megawatts of hydroelectric energy — sufficient, by some estimates, to provide roughly half of Europe’s electrical energy wants on the time. A unified authority overseeing this shared vitality grid, Sörgel argued, would bind European nations collectively so tightly that battle between them would turn into economically unthinkable.His final imaginative and prescient was even larger than the dams themselves: a brand new merged landmass of Europe and Africa — “Atlantropa” — certain by shared infrastructure, shared vitality, and, in his utopian framing, shared peace.
A “Loopy Thought” Taken Severely
What makes Atlantropa outstanding is not simply its scale, it is that no person laughed it off. Sörgel spent the remainder of his life, till his demise in 1952, selling the venture relentlessly via books, fashions, exhibitions and lectures. He based an Atlantropa Institute to maintain the concept alive. The venture drew real curiosity from architects, engineers, and political figures via the late Twenties and early Nineteen Thirties, and once more after the Second World Struggle, when it was even mentioned in worldwide boards on the lookout for methods to rebuild a shattered Europe.
It by no means received constructed, for causes which can be pretty apparent in hindsight. The engineering calls for have been far past what the expertise of the period may ship. The plan required unprecedented cooperation between rival Mediterranean and African nations who have been by no means consulted about having their coastlines redrawn or their cities left stranded miles from a retreating sea. Nazi Germany confirmed little curiosity in a venture constructed on worldwide cooperation moderately than territorial conquest. And by the Nineteen Fifties, the world’s urge for food for “limitless vitality” had shifted decisively towards nuclear energy, making Sörgel’s hydroelectric dream really feel outdated even to his supporters.
Sörgel himself by no means noticed the venture deserted. On 25 December 1952, he was biking to a lecture in Munich when he was struck and killed by a automobile whose driver was by no means recognized. He was 67. Atlantropa largely light from public reminiscence quickly after.
Why It is Being Talked About Once more
There are a few causes Atlantropa retains arising in trendy dialog. More and more, historians see it as an early, although deeply flawed, blueprint for European unification, a continent scarred by battle imagining itself certain by shared infrastructure a long time earlier than the idea turned the European Union.
As for the surroundings , we now know that it will have been a catastrophe . Draining a part of the Mediterranean would have triggered an increase in sea ranges elsewhere on the planet , disruption of ocean currents linked to the Gulf Stream , and destruction of coastal ecosystems . And the very audacity of the concept, one architect making an attempt to redraw two continents with a single dam, continues to draw individuals rediscovering it on-line, in documentaries, and even within the alternate-history novel and TV sequence The Man within the Excessive Fortress, which depicts a model of the plan.
A century on, the Mediterranean is strictly the place it has all the time been. However Atlantropa survives as one in every of historical past’s most extraordinary “what ifs” — a reminder of how far one individual’s obsession can journey when it guarantees to unravel the largest issues of its time.
