Five Outlandish Geoengineering Schemes From History
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- Herman Sörgel proposed in the 1930s to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and lower the Mediterranean Sea by 200 meters to create new farmland and hydroelectricity under his Atlantropa plan, which survived into the 1960s.
- Soviet engineer PM Borisov proposed a dam across the Bering Strait to melt the Arctic ice cap; rival Soviet scientists countered with a plan to excavate 3,000 sq km of the Thompson-Wyville Ridge seabed instead.
- Harry Wexler, who led the US Weather Bureau's scientific services division from the 1940s through 1962, argued that 10 carefully placed hydrogen bombs could melt the Arctic ice cap and usher in an age of unprecedented warmth.
- Soviet engineers detonated three nuclear devices to redirect northward-flowing rivers but cleared only 700 meters of canal and released unanticipated radiation, halting the project.
- Project Znamya in the 1990s launched reflective foldable satellites to create a 'second moon' over Russia's arctic regions; the first batch produced a 5km patch of light before a second batch got stuck in the MIR space station and funding dried up.
- Laurie Hogan published Man Made Mountain in 1979 proposing a 2,000km-long, 4km-high mountain range along Western Australia's border, complete with 49 cities and 180,000 fish farms, then formed the Engineered Australia Plan party for the 1983 federal election—where it sank without trace.
- Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery published A Brief History of Climate Folly (Text Publishing), arguing that geoengineering is now treated as 'inevitable' despite a long record of grand climate-fiddling schemes ending in absurdity or failure.
Why it matters: As governments and entrepreneurs increasingly frame solar-radiation management—cloud brightening, atmospheric sulphur injection, space-based mirrors—as 'inevitable' responses to the climate crisis, the article catalogs past megaprojects from the Atlantropa Dam to Soviet nuclear river-redirection that collapsed under engineering impracticality or unanticipated side effects, giving readers a historical baseline for evaluating today's proposals.
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