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The World's Longest Tunnel
fusconed writes "Bloomberg reports that the Russian government is proposing to build an underground tunnel between Russia and Alaska for transporting goods, electricity and natural resources. The tunnel would be twice as long as that between the UK and France. The $10 — $12b cost is not something to be overlooked, but Russia claims the benefits would pay it off in 20 years. It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
What about the crust movement? England and France are fairly stable compared to the "ring of fire".
My thoughts and prayers go out to the civil engineers responsible for maintaining 64 miles of tunnel in an international setting if it is indeed built.
I don't think it would be open to vehicle traffic. Instead they'd likely operate it like the channel tunnel where you and your vehicle are loaded onto a train and carried through.
If this is built with a rail line, please run a passenger train now and then... perhaps once or twice a week, connecting to the Trans-Siberian. It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only. London and Singapore are connected by passenger rail, so why not Alaska, and then the rest of the US and Canada?
This is a similar idea to the International/Intercontinental Peace Bridge proposed between Russian Kamchatka and Alaska. Most likely it would feature multiple railways and pipelines for oil and natural gas as well as fiber optic communication lines. It is highly doubtful it could be built to safely allow cars and trucks and unlikely that many people would be interested in making the drive. Talk about a long way to the next rest stop.
A tunnel might prove more expensive than a bridge, but given the extremely violent seas along the route, a tunnel would probably be safer. A bridge would have to be covered anyways.
I think it's a tunnelfromnowhere as well. From both points of view.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
That reminds me that the "Chunnel" was completed by starting on both ends and meeting in the middle, and IIRC, when they met, after several miles of digging in both directions, they were off by about a foot in one direction and 2 inches in the other (i.e., horizontal vs. vertical).
That IS quite remarkable. And it reminds me of a similar project on the island of Samos in the 6th century BC. They dug an aqueduct through a mountain over a km long. They dug it from both ends, though from what I read of it, nobody knows for sure how they managed to synchronize their digging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eupalinian_aqueduct
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...my two cents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piecrete
Its great stuff. Its cheap. And the geographic location is perfect for it.
(Hell, I've been thinking about Piecrete ever since I was a kid and I just
want someone to do SOMETHING with it)
Sure beats spending $20 Billion anyway.
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I've got to object to that. We British can easily build trains which can manage much more than 125mph.
The problem is we just can't get planning permission to build straight tracks. Locals object (because of noise), hippies object (to cutting down trees), environmentalists object (on principal) and so forth. By the time you incorporate the costs of fighting through all the planning, public enquiries, protestors, etc, building a high speed train link anywhere in the UK is un-economic.
Chunnel trains travel at high speed through France because they built a new, straight, track for them - when they get to the UK they have to slow to about 50% because they're running on old, curvy, tracks.
In the UK it's a real problem in all sorts of ways not just for trains. For example, everybody with half a brain knows that Heathrow Airport must have another runway. It's the only even nearly reasonable solution to current air traffic problems but the locals, hippies, enviros, etc, are fighting tooth and nail, it will take years to force it through despite the fact it's an absolute imperative and needs to be done yesterday.
The channel tunnel easily pays for itself in terms of what they spent on it compared to its income. The problem is the high interest rates on the loan.
If the government had paid for the project itself, then it would have been classed a huge success
That didn't stop the Japanese; although the Wikipedia article fails to mention it, the Akashi Strait Bridge [wikipedia.org] is not only located in an earthquake-prone area, but actually spans a fault line!
I drove over a bridge in Alaska once that had a little placard beside it detailing its unusual design. One end was firmly anchored onto one plate, the other end was mostly cantilevered from that end. Where it connected to the other plate (the other end of the bridge) there was an expansion joint - I think it was designed to withstand 10 or 12 feet of movement without failing. Fun stuff, but I'm happy to live in a more geologically stable locale.
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There's more to it than just bending the paths of the digs as you reach the middle. The linked article only shows how they tried to make the paths meet once they were in the middle. But, it doesn't talk about how they got them even that close to each other in the first place.
The linked article doesn't mention how they knew how to make sure the tunnels even started out at the right angles and positions in the mountain so that they would indeed meet in the middle. And due to conditions of the rock, they couldn't go in a strictly straight line in the tunnel. It also doesn't describe how they managed to keep the tunnels level.
It's an interesting problem. Given that the workers on each side of the mountain can't see each other, how do you make sure they start digging in a location and at an angle that will meet? If you start out being off by more than a meter or two and the whole thing could be messed up, even if you do the widening and changed angles in the middle.... and how do you know you're in the middle?
Quoting the article, "His precautions in the vertical sense proved unnecessary, since measurements show that there was practically no mistake." It doesn't talk at all about how they got where they did without even needing the precautions.