20 Things You Didn't Know About...

Tunnels
New York has a forgotten one, Texas has a $2 billion wasted one, and Switzerland's building the longest.

© Alptransit Gotthard
LTD.

1 This month marks the 15th anniversary of the longest underwater tunnel in the world: the 31-mile Chunnel linking
France and England.

2 Construction took seven years and chewed through 11 tunnel-boring machines and about $6.6 billion—80 percent
over budget.

3 Quantum bummer: In 1993, $2 billion and 14 miles in, Congress axed the Superconducting Supercollider, which was
designed to create the world’s greatest particle accelerator in a 54-mile-long circular tunnel beneath Texas.

4 The Department of Energy decided to seal the tunnel, rejecting proposals to make it into a drug company distribution
depot, antiterrorism training facility, cancer treatment center, or mushroom farm.

5 So that’s what they were holding out for. The abandoned collider buildings were finally put to use as the set for the
sci-fi flick Universal Soldier: The Return.

6 Maybe a tunnel for people will have better luck. The Swiss are currently constructing the AlpTransit Gotthard rail
link (shown above), scheduled to open in 2017.

7 When finished, it will include the world’s single longest tunnel, 35.4 miles in length.

8 To make sure they are tunneling in the right direction, AlpTransit engineers use a gyroscope that always points north.
Satellite navigation is useless underground, and magnetic compasses are not accurate enough.

9 Since the 1970s, New York City has been working on a new aqueduct system to replace its crumbling, leaking
system of water tunnels.

10 Called Water Tunnel #3, the new one will not be completed until 2020; it will include more than 60 miles of tunnels
10 to 24 feet wide.
11 New York City has so many tunnels that some get lost. What is said to be the world’s oldest subway tunnel, built in
1844, lay forgotten under Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue until 1979.

12 Natural volcanic tunnels, called lava tubes, made cozy homes for prehistoric humans in Chile 12,000 years ago.

13 At the subatomic scale, nature makes tunnels all the time. A spooky phenomenon called quantum tunneling lets
particles appear in places where they should not be, as if they had burrowed through the space in between.

14 This effect is the basis of the scanning tunneling microscope, which creates images so detailed that individual atoms
can be seen.

15 Human nature makes tunnels all the time too: In 2005 federal agents shut a drug-smuggling tunnel between British
Columbia and Washington State—the first one found between the United States and Canada.

16 Authorities realized something was going on when they noticed large amounts of wood and iron disappearing into
the smugglers’ shed.

17 During the Vietnam War, Vietcong soldiers created an intricate, 150-mile-long network of tunnels northwest of Ho
Chi Minh City.

18 U.S. soldiers who braved the tunnels faced booby traps, including false floors above pits that had poisoned wood
stakes at the bottom.

19 During World War II, American POWs tunneled out of Stalag Luft III by excavating 200 tons of sand under the
noses of their captors.

20 The POWs put the sand into pouches made from old socks, then sprinkled the sand down their trouser legs as they
walked around.