It could be underwater by 2056.
The airport located in Osaka Bay is sinking into the ocean just 29 years after first opening.
Japan’s Kansai International Airport was constructed from two artificial islands and cost a whopping $20 billion to put together.
When it was built, it was predicted that the airport would sink by around 18.7 ft but within the first five years, it actually sank 27 ft.
Japan has been pumping money into the project to keep it above sea level, even spending over $148 million on raising the seawall to save it.
But it seems that it was only putting off the inevitable.
Since opening its doors and runways in September 1994, the airport has sunk more than 38 ft and some engineers believe that the island will sink another 13 ft by 2056, plummeting down to sea level.
Despite billions of dollars of investments, it continues to sink by 7 cm a year.
So it makes us wonder – why build an airport in the ocean in the first place?
A huge issue for Japan is space – the country is smaller than the state of California with triple the population, so building it on water instead of land freed up space for other buildings.
And building on water isn’t new for Japan, it’s a method they’ve been using for years, but it isn’t working in this case due to how big the airport is.
Kansai International Airport has the longest runway in the world that’s just over a mile long.
It has also been hit by several earthquakes and typhoons, which haven’t helped the situation.
In 2018, a deadly typhoon hit western Japan and caused major destruction. The runways were flooded and the bridge which connected the offshore airport to the mainland was destroyed when a tanker crashed into it during the storm.
Over 3,000 passengers were stranded at Kansai overnight with some recalling how there was ‘no power’ and ‘no air conditioning’.
The future for the airport is uncertain but right now, more than 20 million people pass through it each year and nearly a million tonnes of cargo is transported using the island.
While it’s still a huge hub for Japanese travel and is a piece of engineering genius – it looks like it might soon meet its match with Mother Nature.
