Normally, in these “Maphead” posts, we look at places that actually exist—or at least used to. But this time I’m going to show you a geographical oddity that seems like it’s straight out of science fiction—but could conceivably be built in our lifetimes. Would you like to drive from Los Angeles to Beijing? Or even from New York all the way around the world to Paris? The dream is one tantalizing U.S.-Russian engineering project away.
Russia and Alaska are remarkably close to one another, as Sarah Palin reminded us during the 2008 presidential campaign. The Bering Strait, scientists believe, was once spanned by a land bridge called Beringia, by which the ancestors of the American Indians first came to the continent. Rising sea levels submerged Beringia like Atlantis at the end of the last Ice Age.
But even today, 15,000 years later, the Bering Strait is not the impassable obstacle you might imagine. For one thing, it’s quite shallow—only 100-150 feet deep, on average. Tides and currents are both mild. Most importantly, the Diomede Islands are conveniently located smack-dab in the middle of the strait. Little Diomede, an American island, sits 23 miles off the Alaska coast. Its uninhabited Russian counterpart, Big Diomede, is about 22 miles east of mainland Siberia.
The world’s longest bridge at the moment is the 26-mile Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in China. Do you see what that means? Two bridges or tunnels across the Bering Strait are totally do-able. We could build a road across the Pacific Ocean! There would certainly be challenges, of course: dark and frigid construction conditions, ice floes, the thousands of miles of new highway or railroad that would need to be built just to link the strait to existing transportation infrastructure…and that’s just for starters. It’s a multi-billion dollar project, for sure. But it’s not impossible.
A Bering Strait crossing is hardly a new idea—in fact, it’s been batted around for well over a century. In 1905, Czar Nicholas II approved a plan for a railway tunnel, though the idea soon fell through. But the project is far from dead. In 2011, the Kremlin allocated $100 billion to a Bering tunnel, on the theory that a tunnel would soon pay for itself in the savings on international freight. Maybe this time, all the “strait talk” will finally pan out.