Proud Geek

I don’t know if it’s a Proud Geek thing, but I love geography. I love superlatives — the world’s tallest mountains above sea level (most of us know that Everest is the tallest, many of us know that K2 is the second highest, but probably very few of us — I didn’t — know that Kangchenjunga is the third highest), ranking all oceans by size (the Pacific Ocean is first, of course, but did you know that it’s larger than all of the Earth’s land area combined), and so on.

The list of the longest tunnels in the world is an interesting mix of superlatives. For railways, it’s 33.5 miles (in Japan), and the Channel between England and Italy [duh me, it's France] comes second at 31.1 miles. An even longer one — at 35.5 miles — is under construction in the Alps. For cars, the longest one is a mere 15.2 miles, and is situated somewhere in Norway. I always thought the Channel also had vehicular tunnels — oops, looks like I thought wrong.

A tunnel between Russia and the USA, currently in discussion, could eclipse these records. Designed for railway transport as well as vehicles, it would run approximately 64 miles — or nearly twice the length of the longest railway tunnel and more than quadruple the length of the longest vehicular tunnel. It’d run below the two Diomede Islands, surely bringing an economic boost to these islands. (One is owned by Russia, and the other — separated by only two miles of water — is owned by the USA.)

Right now, it seems a bit too pie-in-the-sky — and it looks like this would not become reality. But if the Russia-USA tunnel does get built, wow … Imagine being able to drive from Washington to Moscow! Taking an express train from New York City to London! Now I need to figure out how many days both trips would take.

Here’s a map I drew, based on my own predictions of what the tunnel’s route may be, in conjunction with CNN’s map (both maps of which I suspect will be rather inaccurate).

(Click on the image for a larger version)