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How many continents are there? Nowadays we would answer, without any hesitation, 7. But there was a time, almost a hundred years ago, when this answer could have changed drastically, artificially reducing them to 5, uniting Europe and Africa in Atlantropa: a single , immense continent. The idea came from the German architect Herman Sörgel: using a system of dams, he hypothesized the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, artificially causing it to dry up and effectively uniting Africa and Europe.
But the utopian optimism, caused also by the historical period during which this project was hypothesized, soon ran out, especially when the consequences that such a monumental architectural work could have caused were understood, not only on the countries involved, but throughout the globe.
Atlantropa: a “controlled” drying
When the project was planned in 1927, it was not the first time that talk of a drying up of the Mediterranean Sea had been heard. It happened, in fact, millions of years earlier, during the Messinian salinity crisis. Even then, the great sea dried up, for reasons that scientists still try to discover today: almost certainly, it was a tectonic movement, or a glaciation. This event endend in a gigantic and catastrophic flood, which brought the Mare Nostrum back to its previous levels, saving it from becoming an immense expanse of salt.
Herman Sörgel, also thanks to the great positivism that characterized the early years of the 20th century, thought of emulating this natural cataclysm with his project, but in a more controlled way. For this reason, he reasoned about a system of dams, the largest of which would be built on the Strait of Gibraltar, blocking the only connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean and, in fact, creating a sort of artificial connection between Africa and Europe, making them a single continent.
Furthermore, further dams would have been created in other important points of the Mediterranean: for example, between Sicily and Tunisia, or even between the Suez Canal and the Dardanelles Strait. By controlling the drying of the sea, caused by its known salinity, a huge area would be freed up, which would be used for the construction of farms and agricultural centres.
Not only that: the dam system would have allowed the construction of numerous hydroelectric power plants. Furthermore, this project would have made it possible to irrigate the Sahara desert, creating an artificial lake thanks to a specially built dam on the Congo river, to be joined with Lake Chad and subsequently with the Mediterranean itself, bringing the water through the area of desert.
A project with global consequences
Despite the grandiose premises, Atlantropa was a project that never saw the light. The first to reject it, a few years after its conception, was Adolf Hitler himself: although one of the aims of the project was the expansion of the territories belonging to the Reich, the necessary collaboration between nations posed itself as an insurmountable obstacle.
Si susseguirono una serie di rifiuti, sia da parte dell’Italia fascista che persino dall’America: fu impedito a Sörgel di presentare il proprio progetto oltreoceano. Anni dopo la morte dell’architetto, si continua a discutere di tale, imponente opera architettonica: sarebbe fattibile al giorno d’oggi?
Il più grande imprevisto sarebbe costituito, in effetti, dalle catastrofiche conseguenze che un prosciugamento del mar Mediterraneo avrebbe su tutto il globo. Chiudendo lo Stretto di Gibilterra, infatti, si modificherebbe in modo evidente la Corrente del Golfo: il risultato sarebbe la fine del clima temperato che caratterizza l’Europa, con un raffreddamento costante e radicale.
Non solo: Sörgel non tenne in considerazione, nel suo progetto, l’alta salinità del mar Mediterraneo, mitigata proprio dal continuo scambio con le acque oceaniche. L’interruzione di tale interscambio potrebbe far prosciugare la distesa d’acqua ancor più di quanto progettato, riducendola alla stregua del Mar Morto: circondato da un deserto di sale, ed esso stesso talmente salato da potervi galleggiarci.
Atlantropa, dunque, resta un sogno certamente utopico, nato da un inizio di secolo all’insegna della positività e della fiducia nell’inventiva dell’uomo. Tale progetto a suo modo “green” resterà sempre un argomento di discussione tra architetti e ingegneri: la sua realizzazione, tuttavia, resta oltremodo lontana.
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