My boyfriend and I were having a discussion about it this morning and he was trying to fight my ignorance on the issue, but I don’t think he did a very good job! I tried googling and looking it up on wikipedia, but I didn’t really get all the information I wanted. It was all very confusing and it didn’t help that my boy was muddling some information up.
He said he saw two segments on the Discovery channel about it and according to those it’s been already finished. Is it really??? I thought that there would be some big news items about it if it were truly finished or closed to its finishing stages and until he brought it up this morning, I had absolutely NO idea such a project existed! I know that wasn’t a very valid argument, but really, I haven’t been living in a cave or anything. Looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems to imply that it’s been started but not finished, and somehow, I still doubt it. The article isn’t very big, so it’s not a really good source. The websites popped up on my google search yielded sites with contradictory claims, so what is the Straight Dope on the Transatlantic Tunnel??
I’m pretty sure there is not now, nor will there ever be a transatlantic tunnel; the engineering obstacles are just too great. If nothing else, the fact that the Atlantic spans at least two continental plates which are in motion relative to one another would make it nearly impossible. Additionally, the deep water in the midocean means fantastically huge pressures that any putative tunnel would have to support. Nah, I just can’t see it happening with current technology.
Assuming we saw the same shows, IIRC, the tunnel is nothing more than theory and will likely never happen due to the extremely high cost of materials and labor realtive to the minimal benefit to be derived from such a thing.
Air travel is fast, safe, and cheap, and should only continue to get faster, safer, and cheaper. By the time they could build the huge project, who knows what kind of advances in air travel will be?
No, but the anchors would be. I’m sure they would have a certain amount of give, true, but eventually the motion of the seabed would pull apart the tunnel. Of course, tectonic drift is slow enough so that we could probably keep up with it, but at what cost? Then you’vbe got currents to deal with, and tsunamis and all kinds of other wonderful things. As you say, simply not practical.
Lots of things have a different name here than they do over there. Lorry:truck, bonnet:hood, lift:elevator. Yet, the name “Chunnel” perplexes you somehow?
Passenger tolls would be so high (in order to pay for the tunnel costs) that nobody would ever want to pay. Next problem, are you going to have fueling stations and rest stops every 100 miles (at least 45 pit stops total)? What about pumping auto exhaust out and fresh air in?
A train going mach 6 though a vacuum tunnel would remove the need for fueling stops and such, but that just increases the technological hurdles.
Given the difficulty of maintaining transAtlantic cables and the )relatively shallow-water) SOSUS net, one can only imagine the challenge of maintaining a ~3000mi airtight tunnel, suspended thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. We can barely send surface-supplied manned vessels to those depths; creating a tunnel at those depths is being the state of the art of marine engineering and a single failure would invite catastrophe. One might more easily lay rail across floating platforms spanning the Atlantic as to build a tunnel beneath it.
Personal air travel and bulk cargo marine transport provide adequate transportation between the continents. I can’t see that a tunnel is either necessary or desirable. Heck, the Channel Tunnel, despite regular use, hasn’t been a fiscally successful enterprise and it’s only 50km in length and under the relatively shallow English Channel. If high speed bulk transport is needed across the ocean, one would more profitably invest in development of hydrofoil supertransports, ground effect cargo seaplanes, or hypersonic air travel.
The only link that seems promising is broken, but I seem to recall seeing a segment about a tunnel under construction to connect Denmark to Sweden. It used the proposed trans-Atlantic technology (submerged tube anchored to the floor). Could that be what he was thinking of?
