2023-05-15 21:25:39
The world’s largest underwater tunnel is being built right now. It is the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel. It will be 18 kilometers long and will be built under the sea. It is the largest active work in Europe. It will cost about 8,000 million of euros, and looks for a shortcut to unite Germany and Denmark. He does so by uniting the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland. By car it now takes two hours to complete that path. When the tunnel is finished it will take just ten minutes. The tunnel will have five galleries: two for cars to circulate, one in each direction. Another two for the train and a fifth for repairs and maintenance.
It will be very different from the Channel Tunnel, the one that connects the United Kingdom and France. In this case, what was done was to use tunnel boring machines to make a tunnel by digging into the ground under the sea. This time the technology used is different. The tunnel will be built on land with concrete parts. There will be 89 equals. They are created in a factory in Denmark on the shore where the tunnel will begin. Once they are ready, they are sealed and dragged by ships to the exact point in the Baltic Sea where the tunnel will pass. At that moment, they go down to the bottom of the sea that has been perfectly smoothed so that the pieces sit perfectly. The precision must be maximum. Only there is 15 millimeters of margin.
are going to be used almost 90 pieces of concrete to build 18 kilometers of tunnel. Each piece measures 217 meters long, 42 meters wide and nine meters high, and weighs the same as 13,000 elephants. Once they are all placed and attached, the second phase arrives. Earth is placed on the sides to level the ground and then covered with stones. They assure that in a few years the seabed will grow normally again.
This system has advantages. The first is that it is cheaper than digging under the sea with tunnel boring machines. The second, which is more practical, is always open. It is not affected by bad weather. And the third is that it is earthquake proof. According to its creators, there is only one bad news: we will have to wait until 2029 to see it finished.
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