The longest bridge in the world opened in China ( photo )

China has unveiled the longest sea bridge in the world – the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, which has a record length of 42.5 km.

The record bridge, supported by more than 5,000 pillars, connects the eastern Chinese port city of Qingdao and the offshore island of Huangdao.



The width of the highway bridge, which took 4 years to build and cost 1.5 billion dollars, is also impressive at 34 meters.

Chinese news agencies reported that on Monday the enormous bridge, which the whole world has already recognized as a true engineering feat, passed all necessary tests and inspections, and is now open for public use along with the underwater tunnel.



The current bridge surpassed the previous record holder – the Causeway Bridge on Lake Pontchartrain in the American state of Louisiana – by almost 5 kilometers.

The structure of the entire bridge consists of two bridges that run side by side for about 43 kilometers, which seem to merge into one.



For comparison: the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge with three lanes for cars is 174 times longer than the famous Tower Bridge in London, so it turns out that the Chinese can not only produce excellent technology and copies of Swiss watches, but have long been renowned for building super-fast and high-quality houses, bridges, and roads.



Two separate groups of workers have been building the new Chinese bridge from opposite ends of the entire structure since 2006, and the engineers were very concerned about perfectly connecting the bridge, ensuring that there were not even minimal discrepancies, which they managed to achieve excellently.



It is worth noting that the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge will briefly be the longest sea bridge in the world, as the Chinese plan to complete the construction of an even longer bridge by 2016, which will connect the southern province of Guangdong with Hong Kong and Macau.

The length of this bridge will be about 48 kilometers. It will be designed to withstand earthquakes of up to 8.0 magnitude, strong typhoons, and even collisions with 300,000-ton vessels using the latest technologies.

Meanwhile, the longest bridge in the world remains another Chinese achievement – the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, which is 164 kilometers long.