It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Isn't that area too seismically active to build a tunnel?
You don't need to be on a subduction zone to be affected by big earthquakes, as you can see here.
Originally posted by ErtaiNaGia
Technically, the Bering straight is north of the "Ring of Fire" in the pacific... so the proposed subterranean line would not pass through the subduction zones, merely skim along the edges...
I live in a region that has some earthquakes (I remember some 5 or 6, the last one was something like a 6.5) and the biggest European earthquake ever recorded, and we are not on the Ring of Fire or any of those very active regions, earthquakes can be a problem anywhere, any time.
Which may become a problem in about 100,000 to 1,000,000 years...
Originally posted by Taupin Desciple
I've been scratching my head on this one and I'm not seeing any practical purpose for this whatsoever. The only thing I can think of is that the russians thought of this simply to do a chain rattling. I think that because of all the media attention focused on Greece, Libya and the U.S., the Russians were starting to feel a little left out. So they came up with something as absurd as this to get people talking about them.
Source
The concept of an overland connection crossing the Bering Strait goes back before the 20th century. William Gilpin, first governor of the Colorado Territory, envisioned a vast "Cosmopolitan Railway" in 1890 linking the entire world via a series of railways. Two years later, Joseph Strauss, who went on to design over 400 bridges, including the Golden Gate Bridge, put forward the first proposal for a Bering Strait railroad bridge in his senior thesis.[6] The project was presented to the government of the Russian Empire, but it was rejected.[7]
A syndicate of American railroad magnates proposed in 1904 (via a French spokesman) a Siberian-Alaskan railroad from Cape Prince Wales in Alaska through a tunnel under the Bering Strait and across northeastern Siberia to Irkutsk via Cape Deshnev, Verkhnekolymsk and Yakutsk. The proposal was for a 90-year lease, and exclusive mineral rights for 8 miles (13 km) each side of the right-of-way. It was debated by officials and finally turned down on March 20, 1907.[8]
Czar Nicholas II approved a tunnel (possibly the American proposal above) in 1905.[9] Its cost was estimated at $65 million[10] and $300 million including all the railroads.[9]
Considering the lowest point on the Bering strait is only 55 metres, I don't think that would work either.
Originally posted by ANNED
Take a tube with joints that are semi flexible and anchor it with massive anchors to the sea bed so that it is below the level of any ice passing over it.