Russia Plans World’s Longest Tunnel, a Link to Alaska 

Russia recently released plans to build the world’s longest tunnel.  The proposed tunnel would be dug beneathe the bering straight, linking Siberia to Alaska, and would contain a railway, highway, pipelines, power, and fiber-optic cables.  The tunnel would be more than twice as long as the channel tunnel that connects The U.K. and France and may seem quite obsurd considering that it would connect two fairly remote and unpopulated areas.

This is an interesting development from a networks perspective as it will join the two disconnected giant components of many different networks.  If we consider that in all likelyhood, the ralroad, highway, power, etc… networks are essentially connected within the americas and within the rest of the world, this link is a huge development as it will cause the two giant components to merge into one.  If this project is actually completed, it will be interesting to see what changes will occur on these various networks on a global scale.

One thing that comes to mind is Braess’ Paradox which demonstrates that sometimes the addition of links in a network can cause unexpected changes even in far away (but connected) parts of a network.  In class, we also talked about how fairly minimal failures in power networks have been known to cause power outages on a huge scale, another example of how small changes can have unexpected effects on a very large scale.  This suggests that it might be unwise to connect the two giant components since minor problems would then be able to cause problems in much of the world as opposed to only about half without this network link.

Another connection to class was the discussion of what happens when two disconnected giant components connect to each other.  This was related to when the Americas were connected to the rest of the world by trans-atlantic travel and the explosive effects that happened as a result.

Will the addition of network edges connecting many of the currently disconnected physical networks cause explosive changes?  It is difficult to predict but nonetheless, it is certainly something that should be considered before completing a project of this magnitude in order to understand what may happen besides the immediate changes caused by the project.