Bering Bridge

If you could design a bridge across the Bering Strait, connecting the U.S. to Russia, what would it look like? Come up with something good and you could win as much as $80,000 ($20,000, if you’re a student).
From the competition website:

This project is a dream project attempting to connect two continents. In a wide sense, it includes building a tunnel or a bridge at both ends of the strait, extending [the] existing railways of the United States and Russia, and laying a world highway around the coasts of the world, which require a massive amount of construction.

Your only two requirements are to design “a peace park with a bridging structure using the two islands, Big Diomede and Little Diomede at the Bering Strait,” and a “proposal of how to connect two continents.”
Of course, Russian engineers have already been considering digging a tunnel between the two continents, and the Discovery Channel has chimed in about how a bridge might actually be built across that “iceberg-swirled ocean near the Arctic Circle.”
But neither of those plans came with a total of $200,000 in prize money…
There’s a confusing clock ticking away on the competition website, but you appear to have until March 24, 2009, to register.

Oceanic

[Image: A spectator gazes out at the wave that will destroy him; via LiveScience].

This picture has been haunting me ever since I first saw it back in June: it depicts what appears to be a man, standing on the coast of Hawaii in 1946, watching a tsunami rush to shore, bringing a wall of debris down upon him – a literal and terrifying experience of the oceanic.
Caused by a massive earthquake – or catastrophic landslide – off the coast of the Aleutian Islands, the tsunami made it all the way to Hawaii and beyond. I say earthquake or landslide because there is still some controversy over what exactly caused the wave in the first place.
The Pacific Tsunami Museum, meanwhile, with an oddly titled series called the “Tsunami Survivor Video of the Month,” has more general information about tidal waves in the Pacific.