The Bering Strait Project

"The project that could change the world - forever." - James A. Oliver, Editor "The Bering Strait Project: Symposium" is a world-exclusive overview of proposals for an inter-continental crossing between North America and the Asia-Europe landmass. The scheme for a Bering Strait crossing was first proposed in the mid-19th Century, and seriously considered in 1904 and again 1942. Since the end of the Cold War, the project has attracted renewed interest. In the 21st Century, an East-West link-up on the scale envisaged would be among the greatest projects in history, with profound implications for the global economy.

The Bering Strait Project: Symposium 2006, 2nd Edition (1st Edition was 2004) provides a tantalizing set of perspectives on an endeavor that represents one of greatest challenges of the post-Cold War era: uniting the continents across the Bering Strait.

The Bering Strait Crossing is the epic story of the Intercontinental Divide. This is where the 53-mile wide strait, named for Danish explorer Vitus Bering (1681-1741), separates four continents across the Europe-Asia landmass and the Americas.

A groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology since the dawn of the industrial age. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

Data of geology, oceanography, paleontology, plant geography, and anthropology focus on problems and lessons of Beringia. Includes papers presented at Symposium held at VII Congress of International Association for Quaternary Research, Boulder, Colorado, 1965.

Chronicles the work of geologist Dave Hopkins, whose research solved the mystery of the existence of Beringia, the Bering Land Bridge.