This is some cool megaengineering: a 123km tunnel to cut travel time from 8h to 1h.

Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 123km long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s 2 longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through 2 fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century. And the project will cost a whopping $42.4B, nearly 3x as expensive as Boston’s Big Dig.

The drive between Dalian and Yantai takes around 8 hours. The Bohai Tunnel would shorten that to 1 hour. The State Council will begin reviewing the completed blueprint for the tunnel as early as next week.

The Bohai Strait tunnel would be 123km long, 90km of it under water. This would exceed the combined lengths of the 2 longest undersea tunnels on Earth, the Seikan Tunnel and the Channel tunnel. The project is estimated to cost $41n. Passenger vehicles would be loaded onto rail carriages and transported at up to 250km/h, shortening driving time between Dalian and Yantai to ~40 minutes. Currently ferries between the 2 cities, which are ~170km apart, require 8 hours to make a single trip. The investment was projected to break even within 12 years.

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