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The water wouldn't just disappear though, how much global sea level rise would this cause? The salt would not evaporate, how much would this affect the salinit
by tyho 7y ago
The water wouldn't just disappear though, how much global sea level rise would this cause?
The salt would not evaporate, how much would this affect the salinity of the Med? What would be the impact on wildlife?
Every costal city in the Med would no longer be a costal city. I wonder how the population would feel about that.
The dam across the Gibraltar strait would be the mother of all single points of failure and a breach, through human error, natural disaster, terrorism or war would presumably kill millions if not tens of millions. How would that risk be addressed?
This is just off the top of my head, has there been any serious analysis of these concerns? It would be interesting to read about how they would play out!
- jtms 7y agoI doubt it would hypothetically kill many at all. The refilling of a body of water that huge would take days even weeks given the size of the strait. Likely a child could crawl out of the danger zone faster than the water would rise.
- tyho 7y agoGood point! Sounds like it took months to fill originally. It would be no Mosul Dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
- vilhelm_s 7y agoXkcd made a comic/animation about this scenario! https://xkcd.com/1190/ https://xkcd.com/1190/
- hutzlibu 7y agoThat link alone only help insiders ... As it is a static image. There used to be a player to play it like a movie, I just found this: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/ http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoThe image is a link to that site.
- shpx 7y agoThere's a Wikipedia article about that comic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoLikely could, but the few that would be killed would more probably be those who refused to leave - ignoring the warnings and staying when their town and house on a hill became a house on an island, until eventually they are trapped on the roof. To their credit, though, if the dam failed and began flooding the many billions of dollars of infrastructure below, there would be tons of heavy construction equipment working around the clock to try to restore it. Just a betting game of how fast you think that equipment would get its job done.