The Plan to Join Europe and Africa With One Dam

In 1928, a Munich architect announced a plan to lower the Mediterranean Sea by 200 metres: one colossal dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, and the sun would do the rest. Europe and Africa would become a single continent: Atlantropa. For 24 years, famous architects drew its cities and newspapers printed its maps. This is the story of Herman Sörgel, what would have happened if his dam had been built — and why the Mediterranean has already done it once before. The Almost Atlas: true stories of worlds that almost were. CHAPTERS 0:00 The plan to drain a sea 0:57 I · The Leaking Sea 2:10 II · The Machine 4:06 III · Selling a Continent 5:18 IV · The Wrong Direction 6:06 V · The Last Campaign 7:27 VI · The World That Almost Was 9:45 VII · It Happened Before 11:10 Epilogue SOURCES • Alexander Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt (1998) · Wolfgang Voigt, Atlantropa – Weltbauen am Mittelmeer (1998) • Deutsches Museum Archive, estate of Herman Sörgel (NL 092): https://www.deutsches-museum.de/forsc... • Deutsches Museum blog, "Ein Mann und das Meer" (2018): https://blog.deutsches-museum.de/2018... • Ricarda Vidal, The Conversation (2015): https://theconversation.com/atlantrop... • Felix Mauch, Arcadia (2012): https://www.environmentandsociety.org... • Cabinet Magazine, issue 10 (2003): https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issue... • Garcia-Castellanos et al., "Catastrophic flood of the Mediterranean after the Messinian salinity crisis", Nature 462 (2009): https://www.nature.com/articles/natur... • Knowable Magazine, "The case against the Zanclean megaflood" (2026): https://knowablemagazine.org/content/... • Groeskamp & Kjellsson, "NEEDS: The Northern European Enclosure Dam", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (2020) • Sea-floor depths: NOAA ETOPO1 global relief model. Coastlines: Natural Earth. A note on numbers: the 660,200 km² of new land is Sörgel's own estimate; modern sea-floor data gives roughly 470,000 km² for the same sea levels. Maps of the planned African inland seas are approximate. #History #Atlantropa #Mediterranean