Only inflows from the Atlantic keep the Mediterranean from drying up. If you could actually build the fifteen kilometer long dam needed to plug up the flow at the Straits of Gibraltar, it would only take a thousand years to dry up the entire basin, and you can use the dam to generate gigawatts of electricity by allowing a small percent of the regular influx from the Atlantic to flow through the dam once the level differential gets high enough. Hey, where else are you going to get irrigation water for the basin from? (how to desalinate all that is another problem…)
This was actually proposed by a German engineer before WWII. And no, Swastikas were not part of the original proposal… this is a much later artwork created by Andrea Dopaso)
Not that the extra land or irrigation would do you a lot of good, since the previous drying of the basin left salt beds dozens of meters thick (and supposedly over a kilometer thick at some points), making it unsuitable for mass agriculture without a lot of soil engineering. Which, honestly, would be better applied to non-arable land that is already dry… and safe from biblical flooding. Because there is a very real danger of tectonic movement destroying the Dam (Isthmus?) of Gibraltar. And if you lift nearly four million gigatons of water off that basin, you are damn well assured that those plates are going to shift around!
In the meantime, having all that water dry up and leave the basin semi-permanently would lower precipitation (rain) around the basin, further hurting agriculture around it. Not to mention the huge loss of fishing stock. And the pesky issue of having global sea levels rise several meters or so. (that water has to go somewhere….). Which means even less livable space for humanity, over all.
(italkali.com)
But hey, they'd have enough salt to last forever…
- Edited for all the spoilsports who don’t want to see a movie set in a parallel universe where Nazis create an undersea nation that is eventually destroyed when the Allies hit the Gibraltar dam with nukes.
0 Comments