Three minutes to talk about popular science
Have you heard of the United Arab Emirates?Why does the UAE, which made its fortune on oil resources, always like to build some strange buildings?Do you dare to imagine that they are already rich enough to reclaim the sea and build islands?
It is the world's largest reclamation project, equivalent to 12 times the size of China's Ocean Flower Island, with a total investment of up to 14 billion US dollars, but it has not yet been completed. The UAE's original plan was to build three giant artificial islands off the coast of the capital, Dubai, but unfortunately the 2008 financial crisis halted the plan, and only one island in the middle was developed, leaving the rest unfinished.
It's no secret that the UAE's main source of revenue is oil, but they realise that underground oil resources are not sustainable, so Dubai has spent the last 20 years working to make the city a world-class tourist destination. So in 2001, Dubai's first super artificial island, Palm Jumeirah, was born, which resembles a palm tree with 17 leaves in the middle, and 4,000 super sea view villas built on it, with a total area equivalent to 600 football fields.
More than 1,000 units launched at the opening of the island** were sold out in 3 days, and the villas here are backed by soft sandy beaches, which is an excellent place to enjoy the sunrise and sunset over the sea, but judging from the clothes drying and the vehicles parked next to the houses, the occupancy rate is less than 20%.
At present, the price of villas on Jumeirah Island is about 80 million dynam, equivalent to 23 million US dollars, and the price per square meter is as high as 150,000 yuan. Some owners expressed their displeasure on online forums, saying that the mansions bought for millions of dollars resemble refugee camps in Africa, with barely a single tree in sight around them. With summer temperatures as high as 48 and a monthly air conditioning cost of $800, some people jokingly call it the world's "eighth worst mistake".
Of course, this still did not change the determination of the wealthy to buy property here, and the success of Palm Jumeirah gave Dubai more confidence to build a larger island 20 kilometres away, covering an area of about 50 square kilometres. Dubai was originally planned to build thousands of villas and a super water theme park, but the global financial crisis in 2007 put all work on hold, and it remains a sandbar today.
The last artificial island to be built is World Island, located 12 kilometres northeast of Jumeirah and built in 2003. The island is laid out according to a world map and includes more than 300 small islands, each symbolizing a country or region. But their geography is somewhat unsatisfactory, and the layout of this map is relatively vague, with the largest plates in the middle being Asia and Europe, which are almost connected to Australia.
Originally built to attract global home buyers, the island turned out to be infamous as the "unfinished island". At the time of its launch, it sold well, selling two-thirds of the islands, and there were even Chinese real estate companies that signed an agreement with it to buy Shanghai Island, one of the world's islands, and invest 1.5 billion yuan in development at a later stage. However, by October 2008, about 60% of Dubai's real estate was ***, causing many projects on the island to stall, and many buyers applied for refunds due to the possibility of the island sinking, but they were all denied.
In the following two years, researchers pointed out that the islands were sinking at a rate of 5 millimeters per year, and that rising sea levels due to global warming put the islands at risk of being swallowed by the sea, leaving many investors afraid to build new projects on the island.
As of 2014, the last unfinished project on the World Island was purchased by an Austrian buyer who had planned to turn it into a European-style resort center, but for some reason only half of it was built and has been abandoned.
Perhaps inspired by these islands, Dubai began construction of the world's tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, in 2004. However, these buildings, in addition to being striking, seem to be out of place with a normal way of life. Do you like this kind of architecture?