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I'm dumb when it comes to science. But if the worst case scenario happens, couldn't we build facilities to 'dispose' of the melted ice in any way, instead of le
by mombul 11y ago
I'm dumb when it comes to science. But if the worst case scenario happens, couldn't we build facilities to 'dispose' of the melted ice in any way, instead of letting the sea level rise?
- orf 11y agoThe volume of water is staggering, and what exactly would you do with it?
- jordanb 11y agoMaybe tow it beyond the environment.
- historian1066 11y agoFrom Clarke and Dawe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- yk 11y agoThe problem is, dumping large volumes of melting water anywhere technically creates an ocean.
- craigyk 11y agoBy my quick calculation, one meter of sea rise would be ~100,000 cubic miles of water. The great lakes hold ~5,500. So no, probably not.
- mrfusion 11y agoThat's a really good question. Maybe we could pump it to a colder area of Antarctica? Or pump a corresponding amount of ocean water to a cold area of Antarctica.
- craigyk 11y agopumping melted, probably saline water over ice doesn't seem like a great way to refreeze the water, more like a good way to melt more ice.
- collyw 11y agoI would have thought that the thermodynamics (if that is the right word?) were neutral.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoIdea not that weird: http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/7/203/2016/ http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/7/203/2016/ It would require a lot of energy, but all remedies to climate change require that.
- jussij 11y agoAnd now that cold area of Antarctica starts to warm up and the problem just got worse.
- jussij 11y agoBased on the down votes I have to assume some people think you can move a warm body mass to a colder region and that will have no effect on the temperature of that colder region. Where does all the energy go if it does not go into raising the temperature? The Gulf Stream does exactly what is suggestion, moving massive amounts of warm water north and it's effect on winter temperatures in Western Europe is massive.
- satellitec4t 11y agoI read an article about this a few weeks ago. Basically it's not possible because of the amount of energy required to pump the water. It's a HUUUUGE amount of water. Sea levels are rising 3mm/year, which is ... hmm Surface area of Earth = 510 million km^2 = 5.10e14 m^2. ~70% is water, so 3.57e14 m^2. Multiply that by 3mm (3e-3 m) = 1.07e12 m^3. 1.07 trillion tonnes of water. Per year. Or 33,907 tonnes per second!
- cozzyd 11y agoWAIS is 530,000 cubic miles of ice. This comes out to 2x10^18 kilograms of ice (assuming it's all at glacial ice density; in reality the upper few hundred meters are less dense) which will correspond to 2x10^18 liters of water to dispose of. This is 100 times the volume of lake Baikal or the Great Lakes (and only ten times smaller than the Arctic Ocean), if I did all my math right...
- jqm 11y agoBuilding those facilities would probably be very expensive. Maybe we should start by renting mini storage units:)
- themgt 11y agoPossibly a better idea, but still stretching the limits of human engineering, would be to try to structurally reinforce the weakest points of Greenland/Antartica, e.g. Jakobshavn, Thwaites, etc. It's important to understand these aren't just homogenous sheets of ice, due to geology/ocean currents/etc there's specific weak points that are collapsing far more rapidly, and as they do it will be like popping the cork off a bottle. If we could find a way to buttress the corks, it could help slow the melt-out. That said, any time you consider any geoengineering idea, you have to make the argument that the $1 trillion or whatever you'd spend on solar radiation management or ice shelf preservation or whatever, would not be money better spent on just transitioning away from fossil fuel use.