The vision sounds fascinating. I stepped onto a New York train and appeared in London 54 minutes later, traveling through tunnels beneath the Atlantic Ocean. This type of trip has been mentioned in some recent suggestions. But is a transatlantic tunnel really possible or is it science fiction?
A simple answer: Probably not possible with current technology.
First of all, a 54-minute journey requires a vacuum train travelling at 5,000 mph (8,000 km/h). This is a technology that does not exist yet. Traditional rail speeds take around 15 hours to travel, slower than an 8-hour flight.
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Today, the longest seabed of the tunnel, the world’s longest seabed, belongs to a waterway tunnel with a 23.5-mile (37.9 km) underwater section connecting England and France. Construction on the tunnel cost 13,000 workers in 1994 for six years, £4.65 billion (or £12 billion, or $16 billion today).
Depending on where the tunnel is built, it will cost much more in terms of both time and money. The Hudson Tunnel Project, for example, is an effort to build a nine-mile (14 km) rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, and is projected to take 12 years and cost $16 billion.
“It’s one project, but it’s a very ten different project in one project, each one is almost a mega project in its own right,” Steve Sigmund, the chief of public outreach for the Gateway Development Committee, the organisation behind the Hudson Tunnel Project, told Live Science.
Of course, the transatlantic tunnels are quite long.
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The most popular dream of a transatlantic tunnel will lie between London and New York, and will last approximately 3,400 miles (5,500 km). “There will be some challenges,” Civil Engineer tunnel expert and facility Bill Gross told Live Science.
The first challenge is the logistics that build it. “We’ll need to solve how to ventilate such tunnels, how to power boring tunnel machines, and how to bring workers to the scene,” Grose said.
He said the time it takes to transport workers from one end of the tunnel to the halfway point is unrealistic, so the project would require a completely autonomous tunnel boring machine.
And that’s before you explain the demands of power. Even a 6-mile-long tunnel (10 km) long, a typical tunnel boring machine requires roughly the same amount of electricity as a small town, Grose said.
Furthermore, tunnel boring machines are slow. For a tunnel that spans around 1,600 miles (2,575 km) from the Atlantic, which ranges from Gambia to Brazil, “it’s probably going to take something like 500 years at the current speed of the tunnel boring machine,” Grose said. “You really want something that works 50 times faster than modern technology.”
There are also issues with water pressure. “We really need to be aware of the amount of pressure present in terms of not only digging the boring machines in the tunnel itself, but also ensuring that people are safe,” Sigmund said. “And that’s only a mile across Hudson. So multiply that by a thousand, [and] Leaks, eruptions, and tunnel collapses have led to economic losses and deaths of past undersea tunnel projects.
The world record for water pressure facing tunnel boring machines is atmospheric pressure 15 times above sea level, approximately 500 feet (150 meters) below the surface. At depth, the Atlantic Ocean is over 27,000 feet (8,000 m) deep and has a pressure of 800 bars.
“So you didn’t encounter water while you were trying to make every effort, so if you did, you could imagine it would be catastrophic and mega-devastating,” Gross said.
Finally, there is the issue of funding such a huge number of projects. “Construction, materials, time, labor, planning planning – that’s really a major part of that,” Sigmund said, explaining what promotes tunnel costs even for relatively short projects.
Given the enormous costs and the catastrophic risk of a single leak, it is nearly impossible to fund such a project.
“At this point, you’re probably going to say that the challenges are pretty insurmountable,” Gross said. “There are a few things that need to be invented.”
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