Bomb the Arctic, dam the Mediterranean and build a second moon: five outlandish plans to remodel our climate
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- Herman Sörgel proposed in the 1930s damming the Strait of Gibraltar to lower the Mediterranean by 200 meters, creating new fertile "lebensraum" for African laborers and limitless hydroelectricity; the plan survived World War II and persisted until the 1960s.
- Soviet engineer PM Borisov proposed damming the Bering Strait to warm the planet and melt the Arctic ice cap, with counter-proposals suggesting excavation of 3,000 sq km of sea floor at the Thompson-Wyville Ridge — part of Stalin's 1948 "great plan for the transformation of nature."
- US Weather Bureau chief Harry Wexler believed 10 carefully placed hydrogen bombs could melt the Arctic ice cap, while Soviet engineers actually detonated three nuclear devices to redirect northward-flowing rivers, clearing only 700 meters of canal before radiation made further work impossible.
- Russia's Project Znamya in the 1990s successfully launched reflective satellites to create a "second moon" illuminating arctic regions, producing a 5km patch of light before subsequent satellites got stuck in the MIR space station and Russia's economic crisis killed the program.
- Laurie Hogan published "Man Made Mountain" in 1979 proposing a 2,000km-long, 4km-high range in Western Australia populated by 49 gridded cities and 180,000 fish farms, then founded the Engineered Australia Plan party to contest the 1983 federal election — both of which sank without trace.
- Tim Flannery frames these as evidence that "serious efforts have been made to increase rainfall, control the paths of hurricanes and use weather to win wars, all to no avail," concluding humanity now faces a stark choice between geoengineering and life in a hostile new climate.
Why it matters: Every scheme Flannery catalogs consumed serious engineering talent and decades of effort — and delivered nothing or actively backfired (Soviet nuclear river-diversion, Sörgel's Atlantropa persisting into the 1960s). With the article noting that an increasing number of scientists now consider geoengineering "inevitable," that 80-year track record of hubris and unintended consequences is the most relevant precedent for the cloud-brightening and sulfur-injection proposals gaining traction with governments and entrepreneurs today.
