The two ends of the Channel Tunnel were connected beneath the sea
On this day · 1 December 1990
Two tunneling crews, one digging from England and one from France, met under the seabed and reconnected an island to a continent.
On December 1, 1990, deep under the English Channel, a British and a French tunneling crew finally met. Working from Folkestone and Calais, the two teams had spent years boring toward each other through chalk marl beneath the seabed. That day, the last wall of rock came down in the service tunnel and they shook hands through the gap.
The engineering tolerance was startling: after roughly 38 kilometers of digging, the two halves were misaligned by only centimeters.
For the first time since the last Ice Age, Britain was physically joined to mainland Europe.
Workers traded national flags through the breach and toasted with champagne. The full Channel Tunnel — three parallel tubes carrying trains at depths of about 75 meters below the seabed — opened to passenger service in 1994. The undersea link remains one of the longest of its kind ever built.
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