Word: tunnel
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...separate Spain from Morocco, but the underlying sea bed—and possibly Spanish-Moroccan relations—will never be the same again. No, it isn’t a miscalculation of a Pangea Ultima configuration; the governments of Spain and Morocco just agreed to construct an underwater tunnel to connect their rail systems. But with their announcement came little fanfare...
...December of 2003, former Spanish Development Minister Francisco Álvarez Cascos likened the project to those of the Suez Canal in the 19th century and the Panama Canal in the 20th century. But unlike those grand feats of engineering and technological prowess, the building of the Gibraltar Tunnel seems more like a symbolic endeavor that the world can do without...
...little more than a decade ago, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and French President François Mitterand officially opened a similar experiment: The Chunnel, the underwater tunnel to connect England and France. The conclusions, however, speak to the failure of the results to satisfy the hypotheses. Eurotunnel, the group which manages and operates the tunnel predicted high passenger and freight traffic. Instead, low volumes of both passenger and freight traffic is trapping the company in quicksand—which Spain and Morocco did not heed as a cautionary tale...
...advantages purported in building the Gibraltar Tunnel include increases in trade and cooperation as well as development of communications. But attempts by both governments to solicit part of an estimated $10 billion budget from the European Union are not reassuring. Since the completion of the English Channel tunnel, shares of stock that funded the project lost a great percentage of their value and operator Eurotunnel is limping with minimal hope that freight and passenger train traffic will increase...
...past few years have seen an improvement in Spanish-Moroccan relations; mainly because cooperation on economic development and immigration enforcement substituted the bitter territorial disputes. Immigration issues, however, pose a grave problem for both countries and can only be exacerbated by the planned tunnel. Illegal immigration woes from the English Channel tunnel—refugees jumping from bridges onto moving trains, Eurotunnel losing ?5 million per month as a result—do not bode well for the two countries that continuously experience waves of Moroccan refugees crossing the strait in search of a better life...