The Scotland Ireland Sea Bridge

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced that research was being done to test the possibility of a bridge connecting Scotland and the island of Ireland. The idea of connecting the neighbouring islands of Ireland and Great Britain by road has long been a popular one, but it has always been dismissed as impossible. In this most recent reincarnation of the idea, the locations for each entry to the bridge are the Scottish coastal town of Portpatrick and Larne on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. If completed, this bridge would reach 40 kilometers in length, making it the world’s longest bridge built over open sea. That title is currently held by the Hangzhou Bay Bridge in China, while spans 36 kilometers across the Qiantang River Delta.

The bridge poses a number of significant challenges though, not only regarding its length. The Irish Sea reaches depths of up to three hundred meters, and the sea bed would have to be dug into to lay the foundations for the bridges support structure. As well as this, it would have to be built very high to allow ships to pass under safely, as the Irish Sea is an exceedingly busy body of water for commercial ships.

Ian Firth of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering suggests that there are alternative solutions though. “We could use floating foundations; the Norwegians have already done this for their own sea bridges.” In theory, this would entail a pontoon floating on the surface, which is tethered to the seabed to prevent it from floating very far. This would allow engineers to build the structure of the bridge on these floating platforms, rather than having to build hundreds of metres down through the sea. However, questions have been asked of the practicality of such a bridge. Northern Ireland and Scotland experience frequent inclement weather such as heavy rain, dense fog and gale force winds. Thus, cynics claim that while the bridge would cost an enormous sum of money, it would spend a great deal of its time closed to the public.