The Next Continent Read Free Page B

issued a call for competitive submissions from urban planners and civil engineers around the world. Proposals ranged from amusement parks and resorts to a peace memorial, a network of enormous spans to link the islands, and even an eight-hundred-meter observation tower looking out over mostly empty ocean. The winning proposal was Dragon Palace, Gotoba Engineering’s vision of a multipurpose undersea city.
    Officially, there were two reasons for choosing Gotoba. Because of the islands’ stunning coral atolls, many of the proposals related to tourism. But the Gotoba plan was unique in combining surface recreation with an undersea leisure facility. As Gotoba’s planning division put it: “Close by the shallow waters surrounding the islands, the continental shelf drops off to a depth of two thousand meters. Along with the coral and aquatic life of the atolls, these deeper waters contain rarely seen abyssal fauna. Research into these little-known life-forms can only be carried out here.”
    The second reason was that the undersea facility could be useful for surveying the sea bottom. In addition to the three passenger shuttles, Gotoba’s plans for Dragon Palace included a long-range commercial exploration sub. The combination of undersea base and exploration sub would allow detailed exploration of seabed resources, an endeavor difficult to coordinate from the surface.
    There was also a hidden agenda behind the Spratly Islands Development Consortium’s selection of Gotoba’s proposal: the desire to exclude Western companies, which submitted more than half of the proposals, from any involvement. Even if they could no longer rely on military power to help enforce the spread of globalization, the West was still wedded to the old economic strategy: seize any opportunity to tie national markets into a global network for the ultimate benefit of a small number of investors. To combat this, Japan was the perfect partner—a diplomatic superpower that had abandoned its experiment with militarism, had preserved its constitutional commitment to peace, and was strictly neutral. Construction had begun in 2021. The project had three main components. The first, subject to careful environmental assessment, was expansion of the diving resort on Swallow Reef to accommodate more tourists and researchers. The second component was mooring facilities for the shuttle subs, complete with a floating dry dock. Finally, the undersea city: seven thirty-meter domes, two kilometers down on the seabed and five kilometers off Swallow Reef.
    Once construction began, another reason for choosing Gotoba Engineering became clear to the consortium: no other company could have handled the job.
    Drawing on the expertise of engineers who had precisely positioned the anchorages for the world’s longest suspension bridge in the fast-flowing currents of Japan’s Inland Sea, Gotoba’s engineers placed the six-hundred-ton footing blocks for the domes on the seabed without breaking a single stalk of coral. In a mere six months, they completed the floating dry dock for maintenance and repair of Leviathan and her sisters with components and materials sourced exclusively from the consortium partners, accommodating their different languages and commercial customs in the process. To oversee this task, Gotoba tapped a maritime logistics expert who, during the Persian Gulf War, had managed the routing of tankers from the North Sea and the Gulf to Japan without delaying a single liter of oil.
    But the real tour de force was the placement of the seven domes on the seabed. The domes were built in Japan, sealed, and towed all the way to the Spratlys. The sight of these enormous concrete structures moving through the ocean like icebergs was unforgettable. But when Gotoba’s handpicked team deployed a five-thousand-ton sea crane to place the domes on their footings with an accuracy of fifty centimeters—controlling everything from the end