American Reacts to How the world's longest underwater tunnel was built 

I have been through several times. Quick, just 35 minutes and very pleasant. You drive on the shuttle, stay with car, then drive off. There is a TBM still down there, buried.

The Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world.

In the 1960s the tunnel was a standing joke, something that everyone thought would never happen! There were several schemes to build it that were abandoned. Everyone thought it was a "pie in the sky "project and just a pipe dream! Excuse the pun! There was talk once, not long ago, about digging a tunnel or putting a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland but I don't think it was a seriously considered proposal. The shortest distance between those two locations is only 12 miles. You may be interested to read about our Hovercraft service that was discontinued because of the Chunnel. (Chunnel is a term that was originally given to the Channel Tunnel. I've not heard anyone refer to it as the Chunnel recently.

You can drive your car onto a train and be transported through the channel OR you can climb aboard a Eurostar train in central London (St Pancras International Station) and be whisked straight to the centre of Paris or Brussels. Eurostar travels through the Channel Tunnel at a speed of 100 miles per hour (160kph) although when the train is outside the tunnel it reaches speed of 186 miles per hour (300 kph).

My family was one of the first driving to break down in the tunnel in 1994...PANIC !!

There are some decent videos showing how the vehicle shuttle under the English channel works. If you take the passenger train you get from London to Paris in less than 2.5 hours.

The channel is about 22 miles and the tunnel about 31 miles. Cars and trucks are driven onto a specially designed rail carriage and driven off at the other end.

The technicians had to check the fossils in the chalk to see whether they were drilling in exactly the correct geological layer, the one most stable and watertight. This chalk stone layer stretches from England to far into the continent, called the basin of Paris. It was formed during the Jura,

I've crossed the English Channel by car a few times. You drive onto the train platform and the train takes you to the other side. You can even get out of your car and walk around the platform during the trip, but that's about it. The platform is closed with a few windows but obviously, you can't see anything :) The journey takes about 30 minutes, but if you use the sea ferry, it takes up to 4 hours to cross the channel depending on the ferry. The price is not that expensive compared to the ferry. I paid around £150 one way few years ago

I was asked by an American, if you can see the fish swimming around you as you go through. 🤣

So American to think, "What about the cars?" If you let the video go longer than 10 seconds, you would get your answers in less than the time than it takes to ask the question.

They dug/bored from both sides of the Channel and the meeting point was within a few inches/centimetres. There are a lot of ships that go through that narrow point and on English side sand banks that can strand ships that go off course.

They were going to let people drive through the Tunnel but when they installed the air vents and fire suppression systems there were problems.

It’s a fantastic piece of engineering. And such a wonderful way to get to Paris - from central London straight to Gard Du Nord as a train passenger, not if you go by car which is a parallel tunnel and a train you can drive cars onto. My cousin was one of the men that worked on this. It was incredibly dangerous and he was badly hurt. But most massive engineering ends up with some damage to the humans making it. It’s an amazing feat it really is. And it made travelling across so so much easier and quicker

Roman concrete fixes itself It's not new It's really really old

The English Channel is small but one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world.

Been through it on the train. Really quick.

The victorians started to construct a tunnel but it failed, They came across it when constructing todays tunnel .

8:02 he's forgetting the land bridge between England a European. _Doggerland was an area of land in Northern Europe, now submerged beneath the North Sea, that connected Britain to continental Europe_ _It was repeatedly exposed at various times during the Pleistocene epoch due to the lowering of sea levels during glacial periods. It was last flooded by rising sea levels around 6500-6200 BC_ _According to a study published in 2021, a huge tidal wave, triggered by the Storegga slide, demolished 373 miles of Scotland’s coastline approximately 8,200 years ago_ which lines up with Doggerbank disappearing under the sea. The retreating ice from the last ice age was 12,000 years ago. So it was well after the end of the ice age that Doggerland sank due to rising sea level. The interglacial gap we are in now is why it's getting hotter and sea levels are rising, it spans the entirety of advanced humanoid life. Between ice ages the defining factor is rising temperatures and melting ice... That's what an interglacial gap is. It's another 80,000 years until the next ice age, so temperatures are going to rise more and more ice is going to melt raising sea levels. Until we enter a new ice age triggered by planetary cycles of 10,000 40,000 and 100,000 years with interactions between them causing slippage of up to 1,000 years, and the climatologist have about 200 years of real data and extrapolated data of 1,000 years.

The Japanese Saikan tunnel is 53km long- since 1985- but only 23 km are under water… The « English » channel is hundreds of kilometers long !

Britain's security has alway neen planned around our strategic advantage of being an island that's why we've never needed a large standing army. Because any invader would have to defeat the Royal navy and more recently the RAF before they could move troops over. The money saved allowed us to spend more on them and maintain one of the best Navy's in the world. Building a tunnel a land army could capture and use was a serious decision.

It wasn't built but dug :)

Let me make a suggestion. LISTEN to the video

Felt really claustrophobic to me. I’m sticking to the ferry 😂still a very impressive piece of engineering.

The best (and detailed) video I have found about crossing the Euro Tunnel with a car(campervan) is: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MjxWaaYztD8.html

I'm afraid this video is nonsense. Even if you could communicate with satellites from hundreds of meters underground (which you can't), satellite navigation is nowhere near accurate enough. Navigation was achieved using inertial nav. systems, which is supremely accurate and is independent of radio communications.

Do you have to stop so much

On the last statement, yeah just let your country be colonized, why have borders? i love being colonized, im sure the africans native americans and asians would agree! lets go colonizers!

It's a shame he finished his video by pushing a political message. The infography was cool but we have actual footage of the construction, the machines, the moment they met in the middle, etc. I think there are far better videos on the subject.