A Russian company is proposing to build a train tunnel pipeline across the Bering Strait to Alaska. I am speechless, even more so by the fact that this was first propsoed in the early 20th Century.
Ouch. Preview is my friend. This could really change the way trade is conducted. For various reasons, land links are usually prefered to sea links. US-China trade would shift from seaborne to rail borne, and you might also see some European-US trade shift to rail. Of course, it is all pie in the sky right now, and I doubt this will have any effect on the Third Lock project.
It is cool, and the engineering challenges are not insurmountable -- if we ("we" being the human race) can build the Channel Tunnel, build a bridge across the Oresund between Denmark and Sweden, and build tunnels to connect the main islands of Japan, we can build a tunnel under the Bering Strait -- but I'm not sure how useful it would be. Sending freight up from China, across a big chunk of Siberia, and then all the way across Alaska and and the Yukon Territory, does not sound very efficient compared to current shipping options. Maintaining all that rail in land which is frozen for a large part of the year won't be cheap. (I'm assuming that there is not already rail going to either end of the Bering Strait -- why would there be?)
They don't even have flights from Alaska to Vladivostok. There's not enough movement of people in that area. The movement of goods through that area is not practical. Most manufactured goods from Asia come from Southern China which would be very far by train to get to the lower 48. Timber is a natural product in that part of Russia that we might be interested in, but even that usually gets processed in Southern China first before it gets shipped here. Fish is another natural product up there, but I don't think the US needs to import fish when we have a large fishing industry already in Alaska Natural gas might be the only other reason left.
The nearest rail heads are in Fairbanks Alaska (about 600 miles away) and Yatusk. As for the usefulness, I know that the South Koreans have been pushing for a rail link through North Korea as they feel it would be more efficient to ship by rail. One thing also is that a major reason for the tunnel is that the Russians are building some sort of tidal hydoelectric complex in the Yatusk region and feel it want to tap into the North American markets.
On a sort of related issue, I read an article not long ago over people planning to buil a tunnel beneath Gibraltar, connecting Spain with Morocco.
That's plausible. There's a lot of traffic there, and the distance is about the same as a large river.
It still is about 9 miles, with the additional complication of earthquakes. But the prelimiary studies should be compleated, and construction could begin, next year.
The people on Diomede would make a fortune. What would it be called? I always thought Chunnel was a stupid word. Check out Herman Strogels plan to lower the Med. Atlantropa. http://cu-megablog.blogspot.com/2006/09/atlantropa-europe-africa.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa He would have remade Africa as well
Extreme Engineering did an episode about a proposed rail / highway / pipeline bridge across the Bering Strait. http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/beringstrait/interactive/interactive.html It seems more plausible than a tunnel. The TransAtlantic tunnel idea is my favorite, though. http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/transatlantictunnel/interactive/interactive.html
