Rising sea levels

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Týr
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Rising sea levels

Post by Týr »

I note that a rise in sea level is considered inevitable, according to scientific consensus. I cite as an example:Key glaciers in West Antarctica are in an irreversible retreat, a study team led by the US space agency (Nasa) says. It analysed 40 years of observations of six big ice streams draining into the Amundsen Bay and concluded that nothing now can stop them melting away.

Although these are abrupt changes, the timescales involved are likely measured in centuries, the researchers add. If the glaciers really do disappear, they would add roughly 1.2m to global sea level rise.

BBC News - 'Nothing can stop retreat' of West Antarctic glaciers



We at ForumGarden should feel compelled to avert this projected rise, particularly since I'm about to move to within half a mile of the coast.

There would appear to be two reasons for the rise in sea level. Extra water is being added to the sea, and seawater is expanding because it - the water - is getting warmer.

I can offer no way of reducing the sea's increasing temperature. Nor of reducing the amount of additional water being added to the sea by way of those melting icecaps and glaciers currently situated on land.

A fruitful approach would seem to be sequestering an appropriate offset amount of water from the oceans and putting it where it makes no further contribution to sea level. We could thereby maintain sea level at its current height indefinitely. No coastal region will flood, the Somerset Levels will be endangered solely by rain and inappropriate development as in the past, the Maldives will continue to exist and the world will have one (admittedly minor) global warming problem off its hands.

If we build a large retaining wall around, for example, the Gobi Desert or the Sahara, and pump seawater uphill into the reservoir thus created, it might accommodate enough to counterbalance the expansion and the added melt water. The Sahara's the better bet, it's not so far uphill. If we're lucky the resultant saltwater lake might generate more rainfall in Australia as a byproduct.

That's only a first suggestion but I can't see any immediate flaw.
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Rising sea levels

Post by Bruv »

What about the displaced camels ?
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Post by theia »

Good point, Bruv
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Post by Týr »

There are dunes atop which a camel might stand.
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Post by Bruv »

Týr;1453933 wrote: There are dunes atop which a camel might stand.


Best you re-calculate the volume of water, or are you assuming the water will just soak away like on the beach, because I don't think those dunes are high enough.
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Post by Týr »

I fear you may have formed a mental image of a garden wall surrounding several million square miles of paddling pool. Those dunes are a half mile higher than the bits round the edges.

The walls of the reservoir, at around a thousand feet high, are necessarily thick enough to contain corridors and rooms with outward-facing windows. My intention is to house the entire Palestinian population in comfort, with spectacular views across all the touristy parts of Chad and Morocco and suchlike places, after which ForumGarden may well be in line for a Nobel Peace Prize.

I would point out that the Sahara is predominantly comprised of sand which as every fule kno is the main ingredient of concrete. The wall to all intents and purposes already exists in situ, it just needs lifting into place with sufficient cement and seawater to set. Bob, as they say, is your uncle.
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Post by Wandrin »

Since drought is a current and projected problem, why not build large scale desalination plants and pump the water to the areas with the problem? That would increase the food supply and greenery and help mitigate some of the problems. Use wave power generators for the desalination and pumping power needs.

It should take years for the water to make its way back to the oceans.
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Post by Bruv »

Have you started laying out the foundations yet....................time is of the essence, I suggest quite deep, we don't want any problems later.
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Post by fuzzywuzzy »

Wandrin;1453945 wrote: Since drought is a current and projected problem, why not build large scale desalination plants and pump the water to the areas with the problem? That would increase the food supply and greenery and help mitigate some of the problems. Use wave power generators for the desalination and pumping power needs.

It should take years for the water to make its way back to the oceans.


Bah ha ha hahah ha aha ha ha ah aha ha ha aha!!!!!!!..........breathe...........BWAHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHahahahahahaha.!!!!!!!

Oh Christ .sorry that's funny .

yeah why not take a leaf out of our governments book ...lets put a desal plant along a pristine coastline........ Where there is massive flooding and rainfall............. a place that sits on a gigantic water table that takes up half the state.....but a damn is out of the question because greenies don't want isolated areas of our state underwater ..........even when it's cheaper and we need that rainwater that flows off into the sea!!!!!...........but that's okay the Desal plant is there to desalinate it back onto land again......Ummm is that bloody plant operating yet? .........NO!!!!! Because it doesn't work and it's too expensive to operate!!!!!



AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! And the taxpayer funded it!!!!! You see? this is exactly what makes people go postal!!!!
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Post by Týr »

Wandrin;1453945 wrote: Since drought is a current and projected problem, why not build large scale desalination plants and pump the water to the areas with the problem? That would increase the food supply and greenery and help mitigate some of the problems. Use wave power generators for the desalination and pumping power needs.

It should take years for the water to make its way back to the oceans.


Some numbers might help at this stage...

328 km3 of seawater is equivalent to a 0.9mm sea level change... see http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_06/

... so to sequester, say, 2m of sea level rise,

328 *2000 /0.9 = 700,000 km3 seawater needs to be held in a land reservoir.

The Sahara covers 9,400,000 km2... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara

... so the sequestered seawater would lie 77m deep across the Sahara, or 250 feet deep in Imperial terms, at which point sea level would have dropped by two metres worldwide (which is then available for a two metre rise in sea level to get it back to today's height).

World desalination capacity is projected to be 120 million m3 per day by 2020... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination

... at which rate the land reservoir could be desalinated over a period of 16,000 years. The trouble with drinking it or using it for agriculture is that it then, as you point out, gets back into the sea, so the land reservoir will need to be kept filled and merely used as a saltwater supply for desalination in that geographic region along with any other convenient bit of coast.
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Post by Týr »

fuzzywuzzy;1453961 wrote: Ummm is that bloody plant operating yet? .........NO!!!!! Because it doesn't work and it's too expensive to operate!!!!!


On a point of information, while you may be accurately describing the state of affairs in Australia, Desalination by the Numbers | IDA has credible figures for current world desalination statistics. I particularly note
  • 66.5 million cubic meters per day: The total global capacity of all desalination plants online as of June 30, 2011300 million: The number of people around the world who rely on desalinated water for some or all their daily needsIt does, at least elsewhere, work very effectively.
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Post by Bruv »

Make sure those footings go deep then.........................that's a hell of a lot of water.
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Post by LarsMac »

Hmm, interesting idea.

If you look at the North American West, there is a large area between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Range, where once was a vast inland see. Much of it drained away through what is now the Colorado River basin. Perhaps we could dam up the drainage and refill that see. Boise Idaho, and Carson City, Nevada could become the next Great Beach Resorts.

The Sahara region might work as well, but from what I can see, it would require a much larger containment project.
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Post by Bruv »

LarsMac;1453982 wrote:

The Sahara region might work as well, but from what I can see, it would require a much larger containment project.


Thanks......I keep on telling him that.
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Post by Wandrin »

Oh, the politics that would be involved in the Sahara project! How many countries, factions, tribal lands, etc. would be be involved in one way or another? How many times have they all agreed upon anything? How stable are their governments? Over the course of the lengthy construction and filling project, how many times will those governments change?
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Post by Týr »

Bruv;1453981 wrote: Make sure those footings go deep then.........................that's a hell of a lot of water.


The thing is, it's approximately how much water you need to remove from the world's oceans in order to compensate for a 2 metre rise in sea level. That's the object of the exercise. If you take a smaller footprint to store the water then you have to accept a greater depth in your container, which implies stronger higher walls.

In view of LarsMac's startlingly kind offer of the now-dry lakebed of the Western Interior Seaway I think we can avoid the now-foreseeable political minefield, brought to light by Wandrin's latest post, which is inherent in the Saharan location. Wikipedia informs us that "At its largest, it was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long" which is a volume of 2,340,000 km3, which will hold our 700,000 km3 of seawater comfortably. We need only fill the American footprint to an average depth of 230 metres (or 740 Imperial feet) which, while deeper than the Saharan projection (because the footprint's smaller), is well within the original lake's capacity.

The ForumGarden Sea-Level Stabilization Plan will need detail adding but it is, to all intents and purposes, a good working model. Once it's typed up I'll get it to the United Nations for consideration by the General Assembly later this year, with the suggestion that they annexe the required territory and get started on construction while there is yet time.
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Post by LarsMac »

Wandrin;1453986 wrote: Oh, the politics that would be involved in the Sahara project! How many countries, factions, tribal lands, etc. would be be involved in one way or another? How many times have they all agreed upon anything? How stable are their governments? Over the course of the lengthy construction and filling project, how many times will those governments change?


You could almost say the same for my proposal, I reckon, even though, for the most part those people all speak the same language.
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Post by Týr »

LarsMac;1453990 wrote: You could almost say the same for my proposal, I reckon, even though, for the most part those people all speak the same language.


Given that the territory in question was unilaterally annexed by force once before, not all that long ago, I'm sure it will be handed over with scarcely a murmur of protest.
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Post by LarsMac »

of course, we are talking about trying to store some 723480000000 cubic meters of water. I think we would need a similar project on each continent.

The weight of such an amount of water being re-distributed must be taken into consideration, as well. It could have some rather interesting affects on some of the tectonic plates.

There has also been talk about the antarctic continent rising as the weight of it ice cap shrinks, changing the distribution of water in the seas which it borders.

And even the Greenland land mass could, theoretically, affect the North Atlantic.

We may be better off simply moving inland a few miles and be done with it.
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Post by Bruv »

LarsMac;1453993 wrote:

We may be better off simply moving inland a few miles and be done with it.


Far too late the removal van has been arranged. (Post One?)
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Post by Bruv »

Plan number two....... is this just another thing we will have to be eternally grateful to the Americans for?

Will all the work be done by the US?

Because any out sourced components might not fit, they have their own archaic measuring system.
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Post by Wandrin »

Oh, the politics in filling the Great Basin! Let's see... Native American lands and treaties, sacred sites, mining operations, drilling operations, agricultural land, national monuments and preserves, state forests and preserves, indigenous species, rail lines, and large groups of Mormons. I'm sure that they would all understand the importance of the project. The environmental study should only take a decade or two. It would be interesting to watch the fireworks.

As LarsMac mentioned, the area is seismically active, which could produce some challenges.
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Post by Bruv »

See Tyr (With an accent) they have started whinging already.....not in our backyard.
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Post by Týr »

Bruv;1454023 wrote: See Tyr (With an accent) they have started whinging already.....not in our backyard.


He did leave out the bit about "how many times will those governments change" though. One, presumably, being so much like another that it makes little odds.

He didn't say "oh it'll salinate the aquifers" - I was waiting to mention the plastic tarpaulin liner on the reservoir bottom but I was deprived of the chance.
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Post by Bruv »

Back to plan A then, those Ay-rabs are so much easier to deal with.
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Post by Týr »

And besides, the Americans as a whole really really wouldn't have tolerated the entirety of the Palestinian nation taking up residence in their reservoir wall either.
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Post by Wandrin »

Týr;1454024 wrote: He did leave out the bit about "how many times will those governments change" though. One, presumably, being so much like another that it makes little odds.

He didn't mention "oh it'll salinate the aquifers" - I was waiting to mention the plastic tarpaulin liner on the reservoir bottom but I was deprived of the chance.


It would be interesting to see what would happen if the aquifer was suddenly under the additional pressure from all that water. As a little side note, back when Silicon Valley was all orchards they watered using artesian wells. They pumped so much water from those wells that the ground fell - up to 8 feet in some places. Now they are trying to refill the aquifer using percolation ponds to stabilize the land. I don't know of any study that would indicate what would happen if the aquifers were filled under pressure. Natural fracking?
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Post by Týr »

It would certainly get very wet down there. If the plastic tarpaulin liner on the reservoir bottom was a permeable osmotic membrane then the entire aquifer would fill with desalinated clean water under about 20 atmospheres pressure and you can bet it would move out sideways a long way. You'd get natural springs for hundreds of miles beyond the reservoir boundary. Would it fracture oil-bearing rocks? I'm not sure it would, I think you need dynamite to have that effect.
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