Obviously this is a terrible idea, but I’m gonna answer it seriously for the sake of dunking on it.

1. The amount of work. I mean, just astronomical. That’s 1,650 miles of longitude this dude is talking about filling in; the largest earth-moving project ever was the Panama Canal, and it’s only about 50 miles long. Plus, by comparison, it’s essentially a one-dimensional line! This looks like it’s probably in the ballpark of 500-ish miles from the current shore to the new shore, and two-ish miles from the surface to the floor.

2. Where would we get the land from? It’s not like there’s a pile just sitting around. I guess we could dredge the Pacific and truck it across to pour into the Atlantic? Take down the Appalachians and the Rockies? Bring down an asteroid into the ocean? None of that would be enough. In fact, nothing I can think of that we have access to could even come close to providing enough dirt (remember, we need 1,650 x 500 x 2 cubic miles of it!), even if we could manage to do it without destroying ecosystems or killing billions of people.

3. The people who have spent a lot of money buying homes and businesses on the current Eastern seaboard of the United States would probably have something to say about this plan. (Something loud and something very angry.) Besides, it would completely upend the shipping industry, the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and more. This would legitimately destroy multiple national economies, and that’s before you even take into account the ecological disaster.

4. Sea level rise is already a major problem. So displacing a bunch of water in favor of dirt probably isn’t going to help that too terribly much.

5. …why? A lot of America is sitting unused or underused. If you were to clump all of the US’s land use into discrete blocks, it would look like this: The area labeled “LAND?” on the ocean in the OP map is, give or take, the size of the current amount of land owned by the 100 largest landowning families, private family timberland, golf, and fallow land (meaning land used for nothing). This means that the area that the person in question is asking about is already essentially or literally being used for nothing at all. Before we start undertaking an ecologically-disastrous and fundamentally impossible project, we’d probably figure out ways to use that other land.

But there’s more. The land that is being used is almost entirely being underused. For instance, take the “Cow pasture/range” section of the map; cattle account, by far, for the highest land use of any land use in the country. But the 28.2 million cows in America only need about an acre of land each; meaning that the 124.7 million acres of land they roam is about five times bigger than what they actually need. Most of the other production uses for land in the US (along with rural housing) are similarly sprawling because they can be; land is comparatively cheap, so there’s no real reason to consolidate. If that changes, land prices will rise, and the people and companies holding on to underused land will discover that it makes financial sense to sell and reconfigure their businesses to make more efficient use of the land.

So calm down, Lex Luthor. The problem isn’t that resources are actually scarce. It’s that people at the top have a financial interest in underusing their holdings so that they can keep prices artificially high.

Dutch be like “amateurs”

Team Magma is at it again.

Carefully timed explosives placed in the middle of the moon causing it to split in half, one half going away from Earth and the other half going right into the Atlantic coast. Problem solved.

There’s an episode of Star Trek TNG where the crew is briefly back on earth and capt Picard is enticed by the idea of taking a job where they do exactly this. They work on lifting a tectonic plate from the ocean floor to create a new continent.

The REAL problem is that it might throw off the balance of power in the Senate.

The netherlands entered the chat

Reminds me of that Atlantropa plan. The idea was to drain most of the Mediterranean sea to create new land between Europe and Africa. Some German guy came up with it in the 1920s and spent like 20 years trying to convince people it’s a great idea and totally doable. Unfortunately everyone was busy with other stuff back then…

Where would we get the land to fill it in? EASY! We’ll just pull up our old plan to blow up the moon and use the chunks to make more America!

There is a German novel where something like this happens over night for no reason. It’s called “Miami Punk” and worth a read but I’m afraid there are no translations. It’s written by an anthropologist and he investigates the question how people would react, including people out of work, conspiracy theories, scientists, …

It’s totally doable, you guys! Have you ever seen the amount of sand in the deserts? Just pour it all down on that water, it will totally work! Trust me, brah!

No one’s using the north half of Canada, let’s dig it up and do it!

Why bother filling it with land when you can just find some crusty old map with some dashes on it as evidence that it belongs to you

As if America needs to be any bigger

A guy tried that in, I think, 2006. Superman just threw his new landmass out into space.