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Reading this article about some German's idea to drained the Mediterranean in the late 1920 which I found out from a YouTube video to create Atlantropa... Supposedly due to WWII happening this Bizarre Ideal was put on hold... With plan to actually start the project after the War...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/t ... and-europe
I'm not sure aside from a few followers of the German architect Herman Sörgel, how seriously anyone took this idea, especially out of Germany. But way would he think that any Nation along the Mediterranean and of course dependent on the Sea would go along with this crazy plan, I have no clue...

While never explicitly mentioned, the scheme would also have cut the UK off from the Suez Canal (of which it was a majority owner until Nasser nationalized it). I'm sure that that concept played some role in the plan.

Captain Ned wrote:

While never explicitly mentioned, the scheme would also have cut the UK off from the Suez Canal (of which it was a majority owner until Nasser nationalized it). I'm sure that that concept played some role in the plan.

Well I never heard of this batty thing until maybe last week. I'm not sure if this would have worked even if all the Massive Dams required were actually built.

So the Mediterranean was considered the "Swamp" back then?

Flying Fox wrote:

So the Mediterranean was considered the "Swamp" back then?

Nope... The "Reasons" for this idea was to create large amounts of Farmland and huge power generation for Europe, and to bring water to the giant African desert..

Of course entire Mediterranean Sea would be completely drained, but instead two large lakes would be left. However wouldn't the extra land be Well Salted, preventing crops from being grown there? Desalting land and that much land would be massive project in itself.

Yeah, the salt content of the soil would've been problematic.

Would've probably caused catastrophic changes to the weather patterns of southern Europe too.

just brew it! wrote:

Yeah, the salt content of the soil would've been problematic.

Would've probably caused catastrophic changes to the weather patterns of southern Europe too.

Well that and what to do with all of this damn salt they removed... What would have been done with it?

This is the YouTube Video I heard this from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEdsQmjLMKs
And another article:
https://www.damninteresting.com/mediter ... be-dammed/
Enjoy...

The more fun thing is the black sea is also linked to the mediteranean.

Either way that is a TON of water to displace.
I had a link to a page somewhere that listed the amount of water flowing into the mediteranean because of evaporation of those two bodies of water and it was a LOT something similar to all of the Mississippi, Amazon, and Nile combined.

whm1974 wrote:

Of course entire Mediterranean Sea would be completely drained

No, it wouldn't. That wasn't the idea.

The Mediterranean is a concentration basin, it's saltier because of the evaporation, which is on the order of ~1 meter a year.

The idea was to eventually lower it by 100m or 200m , and it would take 100 or 200 years or so to complete. It's sort of like, do the math?

There were further ideas, about damming across the strait of Sicily and the Strait of Messina, with differing levels between what would then be a bisected sea. Other things too, it was a very general concept.

But as far as I know, the idea was never to drain it completely or anything close to that. The sea itself would still be largely recognizable-- Sardinia and Corsica would be a single island, Malta would be huge, the Ionian isles wouldn't be islands anymore, the Aegean would have a huge unified landmass, The Adriatic would be halved or more in surface area...

Obviously, it would still have had an enormous impacts on all sorts of things, so it's not like it's a great idea assuming it was really feasible.