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The vision sounds tempting: step onto a train in New York, and emerge 54 minutes later on in London, having actually taken a trip through a tunnel underneath the Atlantic Ocean. This sort of travel is explained in some current propositionsIs a trans-Atlantic tunnel truly possible or the things of science fiction?
The brief response: It’s most likely not possible with present innovation
Of all, the 54-minute journey would need vacuum trains taking a trip at 5,000 miles per hour (8,000 km/h)– innovation that does not exist. With traditional rail speeds, the journey would take around 15 hours, making it slower than an 8-hour flight.
Presently, the world’s longest undersea area of a tunnel comes from the Channel Tunnel, which has a 23.5-mile (37.9 kilometers) undersea area linking England and France. Building on the tunnel, nicknamed the Chunnel, took 6 years, 13,000 employees, and 4.65 billion pounds in 1994 (12 billion pounds, or $16 billion today).
Depending upon where you construct the tunnel, it can cost a lot more– both in time and cash. The Hudson Tunnel Project, for instance, is an effort to build a 9-mile (14 km) rail tunnel in between New York and New Jersey that’s forecasted to take 12 years and cost $16 billion.
“It’s one project, but it’s really 10 different projects within one, each of which is almost a mega project in and of itself,” Steve Sigmundchief of public outreach for the Gateway Development Commission, the company behind the Hudson Tunnel Project, informed Live Science.
A trans-Atlantic tunnel, obviously, would be substantially longer.
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The most popular imagine a trans-Atlantic tunnel would be in between London and New York, which would extend around 3,400 miles (5,500 km). For a tunnel like that, “there’s going to be several challenges,” Costs Grosea tunnel professional and Institution of Civil Engineers fellow, informed Live Science.
The very first difficulty would be the logistics of developing it. “ One would have to solve how to ventilate a tunnel like that, how to supply power to a tunnel boring machine, and how you would get the workers to site,” Grose stated.
The time it would require to transfer employees from one end of the tunnel to the middle would be unwise, Grose stated, so the task would need a completely self-governing tunnel boring device– a gadget that hasn’t been created yet on a scale that might burrow an undersea tunnel for human cars.
Which’s before you represent the power needs. For even a 6-mile-long (10 km) tunnel, a common tunnel boring device needs about the very same quantity of power as that of a village, Grose stated.
A tunnel that covers the fastest width the Atlantic– Gambia to Brazil, around 1,600 miles (2,575 kilometers )– would take around 500 years to make at the existing speed of the tunnel dull maker. ( Image credit: Map information © 2025 Google, INEGI, Mapa GISrael)
Plus, tunnel dull devices are sluggish. For a tunnel that covers the quickest width the Atlantic– Gambia to Brazil, around 1,600 miles (2,575 km)– “that would probably take something like 500 years at the current speed of the tunnel boring machine,” Grose stated. “You’d really want something that works 50 times faster than modern technology.”
There’s likewise the obstacle of water pressure. “You have to be really careful about the amount of pressure that exists, both in terms of digging the boring machines in the tunnel themselves, but also … making sure people are safe,” Sigmund stated. “And that’s just 1 mile across the Hudson. So multiply that by a thousand, [and] you’re going to run into some very serious issues.” Things like leakages, gushing water and tunnel collapse have actually caused monetary losses and death in previous undersea tunnel tasks.
The world record for water pressure dealt with by a tunnel dull maker is 15 bars, or 15 times air pressure at sea level, around 500 feet (150 meters) listed below the water’s surface area. At its inmost, the Atlantic Ocean is more than 27,000 feet (8,000 m) deepwhich is 800 bars of pressure.
“So you can imagine that while you would make every endeavor to get so deep that you didn’t encounter any water, if you did, it would be mega catastrophic,” Grose stated.
There’s the issue of moneying such a massive task. “Construction, materials, time, labor, people planning — that’s really the major pieces of it,” Sigmund stated, explaining what drives tunnel expenses even for reasonably brief tasks.
Offered the huge expense and disastrous danger of a single leakage, moneying such a task would be almost difficult.
“At the moment, I would say that the challenges are fairly insurmountable,” Grose stated. “There are some things that need to be invented.”
Ashley Hamer is a contributing author for Live Science who has actually blogged about whatever from area and quantum physics to health and psychology. She’s the host of the podcast Taboo Science and the previous host of Curiosity Daily from Discovery. She has actually likewise composed for the YouTube channels SciShow and It’s Okay to Be Smart. With a master’s degree in jazz saxophone from the University of North Texas, Ashley has a non-traditional background that provides her science composing a special viewpoint and an outsider’s viewpoint.
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