December 15, 2003
Spain and Morocco plan tunnel under the Mediterranean.
Guardian article. Continuing the spread of tunnels and bridges connecting various parts of the world, Spain and Morocco announced a plan to construct a tunnel under the Mediterranean.
Plans for a rail tunnel between Africa and Europe have taken a step forward with the agreement by Spain and Morocco on a programme of engineering tests. Machines could be digging under the Strait of Gibraltar in five years.
The Spanish transport ministry said €27m would be invested over the next three years in a geological survey of the rocks between Punta Paloma, on the south-western coast of Spain near Tarifa, and Punta Malabata, near the Moroccan city of Tangier.
A decision whether to start digging will be made in 2008.
The tunnel would be 24 miles long, of which 17 miles would lie under the fast-moving waters of the strait.
Technical studies for three potential routes between the two points suggest that the tunnel could descend to between 100 and 300 metres under the sea.
The sea bed in this part of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet, lies at about 300 metres at its deepest point.
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The two countries first began talking about a tunnel project in the 1980s, and both set up state bodies to help prepare the project.
The Spanish transport ministry said it had already bored an experimental tunnel 560 metres long.
A similar tunnel on the Moroccan side had been sunk to 300 metres.
The longest tunnel currently being planned anywhere in the world is for a 34-mile stretch of the route between Lyon and Turin, which will not be completed until between 2015 and 2020.
There are also proposals for a tunnel to link China and Taiwan, which would stretch at least 78 miles.
This development hasn't been getting much notice since it's been happening gradually. But slowly the world is being connected together. Tunnels and bridges are also being built between Scandinavia and the European mainland, the Japanese islands and many other places.
The Spanish-Moroccan link is especially important since it would link not just the two countries, but effectively all of Africa and Europe.
The implications for national sovereignty, the environment, travel and the tourist industry, public health and other areas are quite significant. It's likely that by the end of the century, if not by mid-century, people will be able to drive from anywhere in the world to anywhere else.
The people constructing these deserve a lot of respect. It is probably the most difficult and challenging of all engineering tasks. Not to mention extremely dangerous. Much more so than space for instance, which gets a lot more attention.
