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Share for free for two months by being one of the 1st 500 people to sign up using the link below North America and Asia seemed pretty far away.

They're separated by the biggest ocean on the planet, and the time difference between San Francisco and Tokyo is 16 hours, but they're not really as far away as it may seem at first.

As recently as 11,000 years ago, the two continents were actually connected by a landmass known as verrengia.

At the time, Europe, Africa, Asia, North America and South America were all technically connected with one another by land, meaning that it was possible to walk between any of them.

And it's believed that's exactly what happened at Verrengia, which the ancient ancestors of modern day native Americans used as a migration route from Asia into the previously uninhabited Western Hemisphere about 15,000 years ago.

But throughout didn't last forever.

Rising sea level swallowed up verrengia about 11,000 years ago, which severed the connection between the Old World and the new, a connection that was lost so badly that it wouldn't be reconnected again until nearly 10,000 years later, when the north and later the Spanish rediscovered it, along with the new societies that had developed there in total isolation from the rest of outside civilization.

The flooding of Baranja all that time ago created a new geographic feature that we still live with today.

The Bering Strait, a shallow and sometimes narrow body of water that serves as the boundary between the two once connected continents.

Despite this during winter in modern times, when the straight freezes, people have journeyed across it with dog sleds, skis, some even by foot.

And in 2008, a team even drove across the strait in a modified Land Rover defender.

Some people have even swam across the strait during the summer.

But could the continent's actually be connected again for everyday people like you or me to travel across, even in our lifetimes?

With sea levels continuing to rise around the planet, it's doubtful that nature will cause it to happen anytime soon.

But what if we built something ourselves at its narrowest point?

The Bering Strait is on Lee, 51 miles across, but geography has given a small blessing.

Two islands exist roughly in the middle of the straight, called the Dia Meade's.

If we built a bridge or a tunnel, there would only need to be to connections roughly 25 miles long each and a third smaller one connecting the islands.

The depth of the water here is pretty shallow to just 55 m deep at the deepest point, which means that both tunnels or bridges could be feasible.

Longer connections between two points over an open ocean have already been built, like the recently completed Hong Kong Zhuhai Macau bridge that extends for 34 miles out over the sea.

The length and the sea depth of a bearing straight connection do not pose significant challenges to modern construction.

So why hasn't it been built yet?

The bridge would open up the possibility for some truly outrageous road trips.

After all, you could drive between Washington, D.

C.

And Moscow or New York City to Paris or on the very extreme and Miami to Cape Town.

But would driving even be worth it if it was built?

Let's think about it right now.

For example, it's entirely possible for you to drive from New York City to Fairbanks, Alaska.

It's a 4240 mile journey.

The Google estimates will take you 71 hours of nonstop driving to complete.

Realistically, that's probably in reality, a week long journey.

One way and round trip will put close to 9000 miles of wear and tear on to your car.

Nobody does that.

Especially not while you could just get a flight from Alaska Airlines in Newark to Fairbanks that Onley cost $357 round trip and on Lee takes a journey of nine hours and 40 minutes.

If a bridge was built over the Bering Strait that you could drive over, the chances are that basically nobody would actually bother to drive across it.

And it's not like you'd really be able to, even if you wanted Teoh.

This is the rial in the biggest challenge to overcome with building a bearing straight bridge.

It's literally in the middle of nowhere.

This is what the highway system in modern day Alaska looks like.

And as you can see, no roads connect the Bering Strait to the rest of the state, meaning that currently it's impossible to drive to the Bering Strait in Alaska, pretty much nobody lives around the area of the straight.

The biggest city is a town here called Gnome, which doesn't even have 4000 people living in it.

The Gnome Census area, the territory immediately surrounding the Bering Strait, is roughly the same size as Albania, but on Lee has 9.5 1000 people living there.

There simply hasn't ever been much of a demand to build a highway out here so far in the middle of nowhere.

And this creates two problems for the Bering Strait Bridge.

In order for trains, trucks and cars to drive across the bridge or a tunnel, they need Thio actually be able to reach the straight.

And as for the thousands of workers and the massive amounts of supplies required to build that bridge or tunnel, they also need a way to reach the straight.

And since the nearest major port is an Anchorage on the other side of the state, the road network would have to be built first before the bridge for the supplies.

To be able to get there, at least 520 miles of new highway or railroad would need to be constructed just to connect Nome to Fairbanks, the northernmost point of the existing Alaskan highway system, and at an estimated cost of $5 million per mile.

Just building this part would cost an eye watering $2.6 billion to finish, and the situation on the Russian side is even worse.

The entire western side of the strait belongs to the true coca autonomous accrued on area that's roughly the same size as Turkey.

But home toe on Lee, 50,000 or so people.

There are literally neighborhoods in New York City with more people than this entire massive province, and as a consequence, the road situation here is pretty dire.

There isn't a single existing railroad in over 2000 miles in any direction from the straight.

The nearest major highway is the legendary M 56 Colima highway, which isn't even paved, and it's still located 1200 miles away from the straight.

Also known as the Road of Bones, the highway was built under Stalin with gulags labor, where untold numbers of workers died while constructing it in the wilderness, and we're simply buried beneath it just to give you a picture of how hard it is to build roads out here when factored in with the Alaskan side, Thousands of miles of new roads and railroads would need to be constructed to connect a hypothetical bridge toe anywhere notable in the outside world or at the least, to transport workers and supplies to the bridge.

The straight is located just south of the Arctic Circle, meaning that the construction site will have extremely dark and cold winters, with temperatures plummeting to negative 50 degrees Celsius.

Therefore, it's likely that construction would have to be restricted to just five months of the year between May and September for the safety of the construction crew.

So who knows how many years the project could end up taking?

It's not really a technological challenge to build the Bering Strait bridge.

That is totally doable, but it is in extreme logistical challenge, and that's not so doable.

Many studies have been made to estimate how much a project like this would cost to construct, with one estimate from the Discovery Channel claiming a price tag of $105 billion or about five times the price of the Channel tunnel between England and France and all for a bridge between basically to uninhabited wilderness is but with an ever warming Arctic and with the potential of building a pipeline across the bridge that could transport untold billions worth of gas and oil between the continents, the project could become more lucrative in the future than it is now.

Making videos like this one are challenging, but also a lot of fun.

If you want to learn how to make something similar for your own YouTube channel, there's a few things that you'll have to learn.

First, you'll need to learn how to write creative nonfiction, which skill share has a class for.

You'll need to learn how to record good audio, which skill share has a class for.

You'll need to learn how to edit that audio.

After recording which skill share has yet another class for and especially important, you'll need to learn how to animate which skill share also has a class for taught by my friends at Kurtz's act.

If there's something that you're wanting to learn, the odds are pretty good.

That skill share has a class for whatever it is you're curious about.

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