DAMMING MEDITERRANEAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 230, 28 September 1929, Page 9 (Supplement)

DAMMING MEDITERRANEAN.

DRYING XJP A SEA AND FLOODING A DESERT. ROOM FOR MUSSOLINI'S SURPLUS MILLIONS. Drying up the Mediterranean by building a dam from Gibraltar to Africa, and closing th& Dardanelles! Hard on the heels of the rocket-car to the moon, and the plan to flood the Sahara to make it arable, comes this— the latest in the realms of fantasy. The new Jules Verne is Hermann Soergel, a German engineer and architect or "Master-Builder," as his German title proclaims him. Herr Soergel explains immediately that the "drying up of the Mediterranean" is merely a figure of speech. Hβ does not mean to go quite so far, but only wants to lower the level of the Mediterranean. That, he explains, is quite sufficient to bring to the light of the sun many hundreds of thousands of acres of land for cultivation. The ■. enterprising "MasterBuilder" does not think it would be .impossible to build the world's greatest dam connecting Europe and. Africa from Gibraltar. A considerable portion of the mountains of Southern Spain, would have to be dumped into the Straits in order to shut out the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. The closing of the very narrow Dardanelles would be comparatively easy. These two tasks accomplished, the Mediterranean turned into a lake, evaporation by the sun and batteries of Cassel pumps would do the rest. The water pumped from the Mediterranean could be used to make certain areas of the Sahara fertile. Sun and pumps would- bring to the surface a stretch of land between Italy and the Balkans as large as Italy itself. Room for Mussolini's surplus , millions, for which the Duce is having difficulty in finding a place in the sun. Sicily would "grow" to Africa. Room for more millions of Italians! It would prevent war in the Balkans, says Herr Soergel. The fact that the damming up of the Dardanelles would tend to raise the level of the Sea of Marmora, Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, swallowing some land row above sea-level, he does not consider a serious matter, for those lauds are worthless, anyhow.