Geo-Joint: Kama-Pechora

Back in the 1960s and through the 1970s the Russians (and others, including the US of A) had some pretty wild ideas about how to alter the landscape using…..nuclear bombs! One of the biggest works proposed was the Kama-Pechora Canal Project. It had as its goal the diversion of the Pechora River in the far north of Russia, to the Kama river and thence the Volga river by way of a canal, in order to provide water to the shrinking Caspian Sea in the more populous south. In the spirit of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, the idea of blasting a series of A-bombs to create a canal seemed like a nifty labor-saving method. Fortunately, studies dragged on until the 1980s when saner minds and the growing environmental movement helped put the idea out of favor, but not before some short test canals were blasted using multiple bombs. And a couple of explosions were set off in other river beds, creating reservoirs that still exist today, like Lake Chagan, that round pool in the images below. The linear lake below Lake Chagan in the color picture is a result of the “dam” formed by the lip of the bomb crater. That’s some serious earth movin’! But don’t try this on your home planet.

Image: nuclearweaponarchive