What if Tuvalu just built a giant concrete slab over its entire economic zone?
I was looking at a map of Tuvalu’s Exclusive Economic Zone and noticed how absurdly huge it is compared to the actual land area. The country itself is tiny, but its EEZ is around 750,000 square kilometers. That got me down a weird late-night rabbit hole. What if humanity threw all logic out the window and filled in that whole orange boundary line with a massive concrete mega-slab to stop sea level rise once and for all?
I know the engineering and economics are completely impossible. You’d need an unimaginable amount of concrete, it would displace enough ocean water to submerge half the world's coastal cities, and you'd have to pipe the displaced water somewhere absurd like the Sahara just to keep the tides from rising. But conceptually, the idea of a giant geometric concrete continent in the middle of the Pacific with the original tropical islands sitting in sunken green cutouts on top of it is fascinating. It would be the ultimate brutalist dystopia.
Would anyone actually live on a scorching hot, featureless concrete desert just to keep their national borders intact?
Posted Jul 25, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC