A plan from the 1920s to drain the Mediterranean Sea and create the nation of Atlantropa

http://io9.com/#!5794669/a-plan-from-the-1920s-to-drain-the-mediterranean-sea-and-create-the-nation-of-atlantropa

"His most spectacular contribution-incubated in the mid-1920's and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers-was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar. The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water (lowering the sea by 200 metres) from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future. The water of course would have to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the Sahara Desert, somehow in its wake creating farmable and productive lands. Soergel was creating a certain, very wide, fantastical future of uncertain monumental prospects . . ."