A floating golf course? It could be coming soon to the Maldives

When you’re playing the new course planned for the Maldives in a few years, beware of the water on 1 … and 2 … and 3 … and 4 …

Golf course designers are a borderline crazy breed to begin with, but even by their standards, this is off the wall: plans for an entire floating golf course in the Maldives. The creation of the Maldivian government, Troon Golf and Waterstudio, a Dutch architecture firm, the $ 520 million course is designed to combat a problem that the rest of us don’t yet have. In short: the Maldives are about to sink below the ocean.

The Maldives, a collection of almost 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, have an average elevation of just five feet above sea level. And whether or not YOU believe in climate change, the folks there do, and they’ve got a lot more reason to take it seriously than the rest of us do. Accordingly, they’ve begun plans to create a series of floating islands to stave off imminent apocalypse. (A golf course wouldn’t be high on our priority list in such a scenario, but hey.)

[Teeing Off: Wrapping up the 2012 PGA Championship]

The course will be made up of a series of islands with multiple holes on each island. Ah, but how do you get between holes? Glad you asked. The answer, of course, is UNDERWATER TUNNELS:

How awesome is that? We’re sold. And it couldn’t be any tougher to get to than the PGA Championship on Kiawah Island this past weekend.

As the Daily Mail notes, the individual golf course islands will be built elsewhere, perhaps in the Middle East or in India, then towed to the Maldives. The islands will then be anchored to the seabed with cables so that, say, Hole 15 won’t go floating off in the direction of Australia while you’re walking up the fairway.

The entire project will be carbon neutral, developers claim. Construction will begin later this year, with the course ready by the end of 2013 and the entire complex ready by 2015. Start saving now.

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Devil Ball Golf – Golf – Yahoo! Sports