The Diomede Islands
These are the Diomede Islands, two islands only 3km apart but one is in Russia, the other in the USA. These islands are right in the middle of the Bering Straights and the international dateline runs right in between them. Therefore, you can stand on the eastern island in Alaska and look into “tomorrow” in Russia, pretty trippy.
The Diomede Islands are often mentioned as likely intermediate stops for some kind of bridge or tunnel spanning the Bering Straits, which would be one big and expensive bridge!
Thanks: Adrian & Gut
ah.. i got a question in Trivial Pursuit recently - “which communist country is closest to the USA?”. i answered cuba - i figure it’s close enough to swim! very old version - and the Soviet Union was the answer - this must be why.
Michael Palin started and ended his “Full Circle” adventure here.
The Wikipedia page on the islands is worth a look.
Last month, a British explorer, Karl Bushby, and his companion walked across the Bering Strait as part of his attempt to walk around the world. Unfortunately they were detained by the Russians for not “landing” at a proper customs point, and now the future of the expedition is in doubt.
http://goliath.mail2web.com/
A big, expensive, and altogether completely unnecessary bridge indeed! Who on earth drives up there?! I’m pretty sure no big roads exist in that area, and anyway, wouldn’t any cars or trucks freeze if they attempted it during eight of the twelve months of the year?
Speaking of large, superflous, and wasteful bridges in Alaska, did you know that last fall, the two Alaska Senators in the US Congress tried to get a bridge built from this town:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
…to the island just south of it? 8,900 people live in Ketchikan and 50 people live on the other island. Americans, you guys may know it as the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Apparently plans haven’t been fully killed even yet.
I’ve read about that proposed bridge before, but I’m not sure where. Ketchikan International Airport is on the island, and they want it linked to the town.
Still, they’re going to try to channel $223 million of federal funds to the project, which I neglected to mention before, and that’s just wasteful.
There are no roads within hundreds of miles of the Bering Sea on the Alaska side, so any Alaska-Siberia bridge via the Diomedes would require an enormous amount of access-road construction. I rather doubt there are many roads on the Siberian side either.
I heard that there are a handful of Russian soldiers stationed on the Eastern Russian Island. Anyone out there that knows more about this?
What military instalations, past or present, have / had been established on either islands, and what did the respective gov’t’s claim to be their necessity?
I was a part of the 143rd AC&W squadron of Air National Guard men who helped build and operate the RADAR site at Wales Alaska during the cold war. The weather there is intolerable. The wind blows the very dirt off of the mountain leaving what looks like a Dinsours back with only boulders showing. It blows a hundred miles an hour anytime of the year. No man in his right mind would build a road across the Bering Straights. No man in his right mind would try to navigate the road if it WERE built. Trucks would be blown right into the straights. NOT ON YOU LIFE WOULD I DRIVE THAT ROAD. And, I have driven for sixteen years in Alaska as a cop and Federal Marshal at Kotsabue.
Regards,
Gerald Crisman (Read’TWO AND A HALF MISSIONS, MAX’)
haha, I’m a local from little diomede, i think i was just a baby when micheal palin started his circle, we’ve got pictures of him in a walrus “skin boat”. I lived there most of my life and i couldnt imagine living anywhere else, you see and live at the edge of another part of the world thats a day ahead, the weather there isnt always ” blowing” , summer and spring are the nicest. Our ways of getting in and out of there is with a helicopter, and boats during the summer, we make an ice run way when the ice freezes over between the two island. Yeah, it’s pretty extreme,
A bridge across the Diomedes Islands to Siberia would:
1. Also building a nice unterrupted highway from the USA to
Moscow. It could also carry a pipeline alongside operning the
vast Siberian oil fields (centuries of world supply there),
allowing the US to tell the mideastern camel jocks and Chavez
to stuff it.
2. Be vastly cheaper than Ted Kennedy’s “Big Dig”, which
was merely a diversion of huge amounts of taxpayer money to his
Mafia buddies for no good reason.
3. Open a land trade route to yhe entire Orient for North America.
Vehicles are commonly dtiven many hundreds of miles further
north than the latitude of the Diomedes Islands. Vehicles can be
safely and (reasonably) comfortably operated down to 80
below aero Farenheit (I did it for years in Fairbanks). Snow and ice
cease to be slick below 35 below or so, and get a granular sandy surface.
To be slick, a thin layer of melt water (from the pressure of boots,
tires, etc.) must form on ice; this does not happen in extreme cold.
Hi - Mainly a message for travis above……. I would love to be in touch with a local in The Diomedes with a view to visit the island and learn about culture etc. Regardless what some say, I think it sounds like a lovely place to visit. I hope you get in touch.
Message for Travis above. Hey I’m on the boat that just passed you this afternoon. Wish I had seen your post on this site before. Maybe we could have waved to each other and looked at one another through the binos. Maybe on the way back down. If you see this message: offshorebiologist at yah00
I think they should build the bridge. I would go across it to Russia. If the wind only blows around 100 miles per hour, I can get my corvette up to 130 easily. So I could outrun the wind with no problem!
Live Long and Prosper
Travis, I am intrigued, how do you get Internet access out there?
Ernie gave some very good reasons for building a bridge over the Bering Strait.