Kansai - an amazing airport in the middle of the sea

Airports are objects that take up quite a lot of space. People do not always have the luxury of allocating vast areas of suitable land for an air port. Therefore, there are airports in the world located in the mountains, jungles, close to megacities and even on islands, including artificial ones. Japan's Kansai Airport was built in the sea on two land masses. Thus, they solved the current problem of land shortage for the Land of the Rising Sun.

The construction of the unique airport took 7 years and 10 thousand people took part in it. The main work was carried out from 1987 to 1994, but the entire facility was completed only in 2007, when the second runway was completed. The project cost a huge amount of $15 billion and continues to require financial investments.

The fact is that Kansai was built on two completely artificial islands. The distance from the airport to the nearest land is 3.5 km. The air port is connected to it by a bridge. This is a real engineering miracle, because the length of its largest runway is 4000 meters, which is longer than most airports built on land.

Kansai is the third largest airport in Japan, serving three cities: Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto. Previously, residents of these megacities used Narito Airport, which did not cope well with the ever-increasing loads. Kansai is used mainly for foreign flights and through it the bulk of tourists enter Japan.

The airport's history has been fraught with difficulties from the very beginning. It was built in areas that were previously peasant communities in Chiba Prefecture. Local residents were against the construction and constantly staged protests. Due to strikes, the start of work was constantly postponed and began in 1987, when local authorities managed to resolve all issues with residents of the region.

To implement such an ambitious project, a huge amount of preparatory work had to be completed. First, thousands of cubic meters of water were pumped out of a 20-meter layer of clay. Then a dam was built to separate the resulting pit from the sea. The drained space was filled with stones, which were delivered by 80 barges.

A layer of soil of 40 meters was laid on top of the stones and as a result we got two islands rising 18 meters above the sea. After that, a $1 billion bridge was built connecting sections of artificial land with the island of Honshu. Today it is difficult to believe that the Kansai Islands rose above the water like a 6-story building. This is because the land was constantly subsiding and had already become 10 meters lower.

Immediately after the opening of the airport, the two islands subsided at a rate of 50 cm per year. Now the speed has decreased to 7 cm. This process continues, so work is constantly underway to strengthen the land. Unfortunately, the process cannot be stopped. Engineers have already calculated that unless a radical solution to the problem is found, by 2056 Kansai's runways will be level with the sea.

Just a year after the airport opened, on January 17, 1995, a devastating earthquake struck Japan. Its magnitude was 7.0. The cataclysm caused serious destruction and the death of 6.5 thousand people. But Kansai survived this test and its buildings and runways were not damaged. In 1998, a typhoon swept over it. The wind speed reached 200 km/h, but the airport survived again.