Over and under the sea.. Wee...~

Last night I got to watched something that amazed me in the discovery channel. It's a construction which is not that new yet it amazed me because of how it's constructed. It' the Oresund Link or Bridge.

On first glance it looks much alike our Penang Bridge but to me this bridge is more sophisticated. The Oresund Link has three main segments. On the Denmark side, the link begins with a 3,510-meter (2.2-mile) underwater tunnel. The tunnel emerges from the water onto a roadway on a 4,055-meter (2.5-mile) artificial island, Peberholm, which appears as a bright white shape to the south of the natural island in the scene. The cable-supported Oresund Bridge stretches 7,845 meters (4.9 miles) across the eastern part of the Strait toward Sweden, making a thin white line across the image.

Picture courtesy of; http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6325

 The underwater tunnel is call Dodgen Tunnel. The 4,050 m (13,287 ft) long tunnel comprises a 3,510 m (11,516 ft) undersea tube tunnel plus 270 m (886 ft) entry tunnels at each end. The tube tunnel is made from 20 prefabricated reinforced concrete segments – the most massive in the world at 55,000 tonnes each – interconnected in a trench dug in the seabed. Two tubes in the tunnel carry railway tracks; two more carry roads while a small fifth tube is provided for emergencies. The tubes are arranged side by side.

From the picture above you can see that the truck is traveling above on the bridge and right below the bridge you can see that there is a railway track. Below is the artificial island created by the engineer to allowed the underground tunnel to emerged above and connected to the bridge in front.

How amazing is that! You can have train and cars underwater and over the sea. I know that Japan have something like this as well, but this is interesting for the fact that there is train moving under the bridge. YES people, UNDER the long bridge. The one in Japan i believe is under the sea only, but this is UNDER and OVER. Very sophisticated but this is considered old because the construction of the bridge started on 1995 and finished in July 2000. So, technically the bridge is now 10 years old.