11 ms·

Dam the Bering Strait, use nuclear-powered propellers to melt poles (2020)

94 points by aww_dang 5y ago

vanusa 5y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
- rob74 5y ago
  Definitely more realistic than damming the Bering Strait. Of course, once the sea levels start rising, it would be worth doing it just to keep the level of the Mediterranean (and Black Sea) constant...
throw8932894 5y ago
We need something like this to stop global warming!
- WJW 5y ago
  Redistributing heat across an object does not make the object as a whole any cooler.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    No but if it affects albedo it has an effect on the incoming radiation. I.e more ice - higher albedo - radiation is not absorbed at the surface.
- gmuslera 5y ago
  It may slow down for a maybe short while the emission of greenhouse gases originated by permafrost thawing. But that won't solve that we keep adding big amounts of fossil carbon to the atmosphere, nor the amount of fossil carbon that we managed to add to the cycle so far that is what is driving climate change now. To stop global warming net zero plus massive carbon capture is needed, moving pieces in a mostly closed (or at least with stable enough inputs) system won't do the trick.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    Perhaps cultivation of reclaimed land could capture some carbon? And it says something about re-greening the Sahara too..
    - kibwen 5y ago
      Carbon capture from re-greening the Sahara would be countered by de-greening the Amazon, since the latter is fertilized by the former as winds blow dust over the Atlantic. These systems are complex, and just doing what intuitively feels right can just as easily be counterproductive.
      - Chris2048 5y ago
        Hmm, but why does the Amazon need to be constantly re-fertilised? Where does it lose that phosphorus? EDIT: ah, rain seems to leach it away from the amazon basin over time. Still wonder where it all goes though, into the sea?
        genewitch 5y ago
        Forest ecosystem soil is fragile, because the soil is very loose due to animals, vegetation, insects, mushrooms. A large, old forest only produces on the order of a foot of topsoil in 50 years. It is possible to produce more artificially with rainwater mitigation and drainage paths that are engineered rather than left to chaos. As a side effect, growing in the Sahara would also potentially drastically reduce Atlantic hurricanes. So we have to decide what's more important, trees (move them to Sahara! Or at least replant equal numbers in Sahara and elsewhere) or human lives and infra.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Is there any irony in observing the fickle preferences of man in regards to geoengineering? Perhaps our understanding is more limited than some are willing to admit. 63 years ago, there was a push to warm the arctic. In 1978, doomsayers predicted a new ice age. For all of the predictions of apocalypse, none have materialized. However, throughout history fear has been a powerful tool for motivating and manipulating the public. "Ice Age 1978 Leonard Nimoy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0 "List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
  - dTal 5y ago
    Of "man"? Your language is as outmoded as your disbelief in anthropogenic climate change.
    - hardlianotion 5y ago
      I don't think parent is blaming women
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/manipulated-time-cover-on-climate-recirculates/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/manipulated-time-cover-on-... > We’ll again refer to the 2008 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that found there was not a scientific consensus in the 1970s on the cooling idea. The authors, by surveying the peer-reviewed literature between 1965 and 1979, found quite the opposite.
    - aww_dang 5y ago
      Fact check sites like the one you listed will increase their stature when they acknowledge that science is not a process of consensus. I look forward to reading a "fact check" site which "debunks" this ridiculous turn of phrase. Even if we accepted this misnomer in your quote, we can easily observe that "scientific consensus" has shifted throughout history. >(00:12:30) The climatic record in these deep sea cores tells us that there have been eight ice ages in the last 700,000 years. It also tells us when they have occurred. This provides us with a test of various theories of the ice ages. We now have a theory that tells us that changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit act as a pacemaker for the ice age succession. Since this theory can precisely predict when ice ages occured in the past, it also can predict when ice ages will occur in the future. From this theory we can say with confidence that we are currently heading towards another ice age. Dr. James D. Hays https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%20et%2076%20Science%20194-1121.pdf https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%2...
- dathinab 5y ago
  no, that proposed project wasn't done with any environmental considerations at all and likely would have pretty devastating environmental effects through various effects. We need a huge collaboration of countries. We don't need a mega project which creation will cause tons of CO2 (building stuff produces CO2 equivalent emissions) have devastating environmental damage, and massive security risks. Assuming we can fix climate change by mega project is just the wrong approach. We need a very (very very) high number on mostly smaller changes (and probably some larger law changes). So that even if some of them fail it doesn't matter in the grater picture, and so that there is actually a realistic chance to pull it of (which for such a hypothetical mega construction is very small for various reasons).
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    > We need a huge collaboration of countries. Go ahead we are listening. Who would you go about coordinating and enforcing 'huge collaboration of countries'? All i remember is world leaders coming together, year after year - shake hands, thump their chest expressing how sorrowful they feel, give great speeches how everything will change - and then nothing changes.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      There being a need for something and it happening are two fundamental different thinks. Just because it doesn't happen doesn't mean there is not need for it. The Bering Strait Dam btw. would have required a higher degree of collaboration then is needed to limit climate change. Sure a few less countries would be involved be the involved countries still would need a much deeper level of collaboration which given that it's effect would have been rather negative for many of the cost countries it would have been rather hard to archive any agreement.
    - codingdave 5y ago
      Except that isn't how it has gone - we had 4 years where the US did not sit down and agree, and actually went backwards on climate agreements. This year, the world leadership has come back together for the first time in years. I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole here, but we should at least get the facts straight.
da39a3ee 5y ago
How was damming the Bering straights going to help Pacific water get into the Arctic Sea? It sounds like it would have the opposite effect, which fits with the Dutch guy's proposal.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  That's where the nuclear powered propellers/pumps come in they sit on the dam and force the water from the pacific into the Arctic Ocean. Then it can only really flow out through the Atlantic.
iSnow 5y ago
Makes me envious, it must have been great living at a time where progress was good and megalomanic projects were seriously discussed. Now, everyone is so cynical about everything.
- FpUser 5y ago
  Well, Google and Amazon are megalomaniac in progress. I doubt one has to be cynical to be disgusted by where all of this going. But yeah people had dreams and those were exciting at the time (when one did not know all the consequences of course).
- stinos 5y ago
  Cynical, or realistic because everyone has seen what the consequences of such projects can be? Progress can still be good, just like it never was if it also means there are severe downsides and they are just ignored for the sake of progress.
  - LiquidSky 5y ago
    Exactly. If anything, the opposite of what the parent says seems to be true: as each new shiny technology or development pops up (e.g., social media or the crypto space) there is an explosion of utopian idealism that is only later dampered when the reality of the downsides sink in. It would be a nice of change of pace if we actually seriously considered the potential downsides of the new cool thing (say, the privacy implications of the social media explosion before universal use).
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      Societies do that to a greater or lesser degree. The Amish are so famous for it that the neologism 'amistics' has been proposed to refer to a society's choices around adopting technology that is technically feasible. What I think many people are lamenting is that their own society is not optimistic enough about novel technology for their liking. Given that many of the people on Hacker News are near the vanguard for technological innovation by global standards it would seem there's a desire for more permissive amistics than currently exist. If anyone knows where those kinds of subcultures could be found I'd be interested in knowing about it.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a In the U.S., as a non-government organization, if you’d like to modify the weather you need to fill out the NOAA form 17-4(a). All weather modification projects that have been filed can be found here: https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections/Weather-Modification-Project-Reports https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections...
- techdragon 5y ago
  “Also expected[sic] from the requirement for reporting are religious activities or other ceremonies, rites and rituals intended to modify the weather.” This just puts such a smile on my face in the middle of reading such otherwise bland government prose.
  - rory 5y ago
    Well of course, you can't just have people doing unlicensed rain dances willy-nilly.
    - brazzy 5y ago
      Daniel Howling Coyote has entered the chat
    - bigdict 5y ago
      No no they meant "excepted", meaning the government isn't worried too much about your rain dances.
      - rory 5y ago
        Ah, well that's disappointing (but in as more real sense, reassuring).
        salawat 5y ago
        Keep in mind, that only holds as long as it's a religious practice, and it doesn't work. Start getting a greater than 50% success rate, and I'll bet you see changes real quick. The Supreme Court case will be amazing.
hardlianotion 5y ago
I have long wanted to dam up the Straits of Gibraltar and recover the initial conditions described in Julian May's Many Coloured^* Land. * Cultural baggage.
- teddyh 5y ago
  https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time
  - hardlianotion 5y ago
    That's amazing!
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  If you've ever visited the Vasa [1] in Stockholm, you know that wooden ship was fairly well preserved after 300 years, because the Baltic is less salty than the ocean. Its connectivity with the North Sea is pretty limited, so over time that's what happened. So, we don't have to totally dry up the Med; just turn it into an almost-fresh-water lake! Randall, calculate how many thousands or millions of years that would take. [1] https://www.vasamuseet.se/en https://www.vasamuseet.se/en
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    I think the idea is that you let in water from rivers and possibly also from the Atlantic and possibly even the Red Sea, in a controlled manner, have it run via turbines and keep the actual water level low via evaporation to keep the whole scheme working. This will eventually result in salt and minerals from the water concentrating in whats left of Mediterranean - so basically the exact opposite effect.
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      I wasn't being serious, of course, but since you brought it up: why IS the Baltic less salty?
tjalfi 5y ago
If you enjoy reading about mega projects then I would recommend Engineers' Dreams by Willy Ley. It’s an older book on large scale civil engineering proposals such as draining the Mediterranean sea, creating an inland sea in the Sahara, and irrigating the Jordan valley.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  creating an inland sea in the Sahara Could this be part of an answer to massive sea level rise?
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    Wouldn't the water just continously evaporate only to, with high probability, precipitate back to the "global" ocena system or its tributaries? You could make the see less salty though, over a sufficiently long time and get a WHOLE LOT of rock salt.
  - addingnumbers 5y ago
    Napkin math says about 343km^3/year of water to contend with, and the Panama canal work took 35 years to move about 0.2km^3 of earth, about 0.006km^3/year. As a layperson it seems to me you'd need to channel a vast area already below sea level (3500km^2 at ~100m deep?) to put a dent in the rise. Again, napkin math. Reuters claims "75.6 trillion gallons of water added to the ocean each year" and a Panama canal history page says the French dug 30M cubic yards and the Americans dug 238M.
karmakaze 5y ago
Sounds like a jr/software engineer's proposal without considering 2nd order effects. These are not as uncommon as you would hope.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Even in a senior role I've learned enough to ask "tell my why this is a bad idea" to ensure I get suitable feedback without people just shrugging their shoulders and saying "well, if he insists..."
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    Agreed, same. (I actually had 'software' in parens and switched it for 'jr/')
- splitstud 5y ago
  Or 50-75% of the nonsense that comes out of the mouths of politicians. The solution to a knotted ball of string is not to yank the tag end you see, but it's so very tempting.
reddog 5y ago
Sure this makes complete sense and everyone I know is all for it, but shouldn't we be concentrating on blowing up the moon first? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA
- tzs 5y ago
  That's a link to a comedy show. Here's a link about someone who actually seriously wanted to blow up the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
  - JackFr 5y ago
    I remember the 'Weekly World News' writing about that under the headline 'Scientists Plan to Blow Up Moon', I remember it specifically because I worked with Alexander Abian's daughter at the time. We all found it amusing, but she was a little disappointed that after decades as a math professor his legacy was going to be that.
  - dennis_jeeves 5y ago
    >his claim that blowing up the Moon would solve virtually every problem of human existence. He made this claim in 1991 in a campus newspaper,[4] stating that a Moonless Earth wouldn't wobble, eliminating both the seasons and its associated events like heat waves, snowstorms and hurricanes. Nice...
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Let me guess... He wanted to get rid of lunacy?
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  Neal Stephenson wrote a book about that.. https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0062190377/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...
balaji1 5y ago
It would have been fun to see illustrations or artist renderings.
npunt 5y ago
Crazy fact: the Bering Strait is only 100 to 165 feet deep (~45m). 45m x 88km length = 4,000,000 m^2 times whatever thickness. Makes sense the strait is shallow given the whole prehistoric migration, but in my mind it was much deeper, probably because of its proximity to the Pacific (max 30k+ ft) and the Bering Sea (max 12k ft).
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Space mirrors would probably be more economical. I can imagine this being done by redirecting equatorial sunlight to the poles so the net power incidence remains constant.
varispeed 5y ago
If they believed that: > Proposed that the United States and Soviet Union build a gigantic dam across the Bering Strait and use nuclear power–driven propeller pumps to push the warm Pacific current into the Atlantic by way of the Arctic Sea. Arctic ice would melt, and the Siberian and North American frozen areas would become temperate and productive. was a sound idea, then why are we being so confident about current ideas that are being forced into adoption worldwide?

94 points by aww_dang 5y ago

vanusa 5y ago

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

rob74 5y ago
Definitely more realistic than damming the Bering Strait. Of course, once the sea levels start rising, it would be worth doing it just to keep the level of the Mediterranean (and Black Sea) constant...

throw8932894 5y ago

We need something like this to stop global warming!

WJW 5y ago
Redistributing heat across an object does not make the object as a whole any cooler.
- fsloth 5y ago
  No but if it affects albedo it has an effect on the incoming radiation. I.e more ice - higher albedo - radiation is not absorbed at the surface.
gmuslera 5y ago
It may slow down for a maybe short while the emission of greenhouse gases originated by permafrost thawing. But that won't solve that we keep adding big amounts of fossil carbon to the atmosphere, nor the amount of fossil carbon that we managed to add to the cycle so far that is what is driving climate change now. To stop global warming net zero plus massive carbon capture is needed, moving pieces in a mostly closed (or at least with stable enough inputs) system won't do the trick.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  Perhaps cultivation of reclaimed land could capture some carbon? And it says something about re-greening the Sahara too..
  - kibwen 5y ago
    Carbon capture from re-greening the Sahara would be countered by de-greening the Amazon, since the latter is fertilized by the former as winds blow dust over the Atlantic. These systems are complex, and just doing what intuitively feels right can just as easily be counterproductive.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      Hmm, but why does the Amazon need to be constantly re-fertilised? Where does it lose that phosphorus? EDIT: ah, rain seems to leach it away from the amazon basin over time. Still wonder where it all goes though, into the sea?
      - genewitch 5y ago
        Forest ecosystem soil is fragile, because the soil is very loose due to animals, vegetation, insects, mushrooms. A large, old forest only produces on the order of a foot of topsoil in 50 years. It is possible to produce more artificially with rainwater mitigation and drainage paths that are engineered rather than left to chaos. As a side effect, growing in the Sahara would also potentially drastically reduce Atlantic hurricanes. So we have to decide what's more important, trees (move them to Sahara! Or at least replant equal numbers in Sahara and elsewhere) or human lives and infra.
aww_dang 5y ago
Is there any irony in observing the fickle preferences of man in regards to geoengineering? Perhaps our understanding is more limited than some are willing to admit. 63 years ago, there was a push to warm the arctic. In 1978, doomsayers predicted a new ice age. For all of the predictions of apocalypse, none have materialized. However, throughout history fear has been a powerful tool for motivating and manipulating the public. "Ice Age 1978 Leonard Nimoy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0 "List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
- dTal 5y ago
  Of "man"? Your language is as outmoded as your disbelief in anthropogenic climate change.
  - hardlianotion 5y ago
    I don't think parent is blaming women
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/manipulated-time-cover-on-climate-recirculates/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/manipulated-time-cover-on-... > We’ll again refer to the 2008 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that found there was not a scientific consensus in the 1970s on the cooling idea. The authors, by surveying the peer-reviewed literature between 1965 and 1979, found quite the opposite.
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    Fact check sites like the one you listed will increase their stature when they acknowledge that science is not a process of consensus. I look forward to reading a "fact check" site which "debunks" this ridiculous turn of phrase. Even if we accepted this misnomer in your quote, we can easily observe that "scientific consensus" has shifted throughout history. >(00:12:30) The climatic record in these deep sea cores tells us that there have been eight ice ages in the last 700,000 years. It also tells us when they have occurred. This provides us with a test of various theories of the ice ages. We now have a theory that tells us that changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit act as a pacemaker for the ice age succession. Since this theory can precisely predict when ice ages occured in the past, it also can predict when ice ages will occur in the future. From this theory we can say with confidence that we are currently heading towards another ice age. Dr. James D. Hays https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%20et%2076%20Science%20194-1121.pdf https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%2...
dathinab 5y ago
no, that proposed project wasn't done with any environmental considerations at all and likely would have pretty devastating environmental effects through various effects. We need a huge collaboration of countries. We don't need a mega project which creation will cause tons of CO2 (building stuff produces CO2 equivalent emissions) have devastating environmental damage, and massive security risks. Assuming we can fix climate change by mega project is just the wrong approach. We need a very (very very) high number on mostly smaller changes (and probably some larger law changes). So that even if some of them fail it doesn't matter in the grater picture, and so that there is actually a realistic chance to pull it of (which for such a hypothetical mega construction is very small for various reasons).
- me_me_me 5y ago
  > We need a huge collaboration of countries. Go ahead we are listening. Who would you go about coordinating and enforcing 'huge collaboration of countries'? All i remember is world leaders coming together, year after year - shake hands, thump their chest expressing how sorrowful they feel, give great speeches how everything will change - and then nothing changes.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    There being a need for something and it happening are two fundamental different thinks. Just because it doesn't happen doesn't mean there is not need for it. The Bering Strait Dam btw. would have required a higher degree of collaboration then is needed to limit climate change. Sure a few less countries would be involved be the involved countries still would need a much deeper level of collaboration which given that it's effect would have been rather negative for many of the cost countries it would have been rather hard to archive any agreement.
  - codingdave 5y ago
    Except that isn't how it has gone - we had 4 years where the US did not sit down and agree, and actually went backwards on climate agreements. This year, the world leadership has come back together for the first time in years. I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole here, but we should at least get the facts straight.

da39a3ee 5y ago

How was damming the Bering straights going to help Pacific water get into the Arctic Sea? It sounds like it would have the opposite effect, which fits with the Dutch guy's proposal.

rtkwe 5y ago
That's where the nuclear powered propellers/pumps come in they sit on the dam and force the water from the pacific into the Arctic Ocean. Then it can only really flow out through the Atlantic.

iSnow 5y ago

Makes me envious, it must have been great living at a time where progress was good and megalomanic projects were seriously discussed. Now, everyone is so cynical about everything.

FpUser 5y ago
Well, Google and Amazon are megalomaniac in progress. I doubt one has to be cynical to be disgusted by where all of this going. But yeah people had dreams and those were exciting at the time (when one did not know all the consequences of course).
stinos 5y ago
Cynical, or realistic because everyone has seen what the consequences of such projects can be? Progress can still be good, just like it never was if it also means there are severe downsides and they are just ignored for the sake of progress.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  Exactly. If anything, the opposite of what the parent says seems to be true: as each new shiny technology or development pops up (e.g., social media or the crypto space) there is an explosion of utopian idealism that is only later dampered when the reality of the downsides sink in. It would be a nice of change of pace if we actually seriously considered the potential downsides of the new cool thing (say, the privacy implications of the social media explosion before universal use).
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Societies do that to a greater or lesser degree. The Amish are so famous for it that the neologism 'amistics' has been proposed to refer to a society's choices around adopting technology that is technically feasible. What I think many people are lamenting is that their own society is not optimistic enough about novel technology for their liking. Given that many of the people on Hacker News are near the vanguard for technological innovation by global standards it would seem there's a desire for more permissive amistics than currently exist. If anyone knows where those kinds of subcultures could be found I'd be interested in knowing about it.

r3trohack3r 5y ago

See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a In the U.S., as a non-government organization, if you’d like to modify the weather you need to fill out the NOAA form 17-4(a). All weather modification projects that have been filed can be found here: https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections/Weather-Modification-Project-Reports https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections...

techdragon 5y ago
“Also expected[sic] from the requirement for reporting are religious activities or other ceremonies, rites and rituals intended to modify the weather.” This just puts such a smile on my face in the middle of reading such otherwise bland government prose.
- rory 5y ago
  Well of course, you can't just have people doing unlicensed rain dances willy-nilly.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    Daniel Howling Coyote has entered the chat
  - bigdict 5y ago
    No no they meant "excepted", meaning the government isn't worried too much about your rain dances.
    - rory 5y ago
      Ah, well that's disappointing (but in as more real sense, reassuring).
      - salawat 5y ago
        Keep in mind, that only holds as long as it's a religious practice, and it doesn't work. Start getting a greater than 50% success rate, and I'll bet you see changes real quick. The Supreme Court case will be amazing.

hardlianotion 5y ago

I have long wanted to dam up the Straits of Gibraltar and recover the initial conditions described in Julian May's Many Coloured^* Land. * Cultural baggage.

teddyh 5y ago
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time
- hardlianotion 5y ago
  That's amazing!
AlbertCory 5y ago
If you've ever visited the Vasa [1] in Stockholm, you know that wooden ship was fairly well preserved after 300 years, because the Baltic is less salty than the ocean. Its connectivity with the North Sea is pretty limited, so over time that's what happened. So, we don't have to totally dry up the Med; just turn it into an almost-fresh-water lake! Randall, calculate how many thousands or millions of years that would take. [1] https://www.vasamuseet.se/en https://www.vasamuseet.se/en
- m4rtink 5y ago
  I think the idea is that you let in water from rivers and possibly also from the Atlantic and possibly even the Red Sea, in a controlled manner, have it run via turbines and keep the actual water level low via evaporation to keep the whole scheme working. This will eventually result in salt and minerals from the water concentrating in whats left of Mediterranean - so basically the exact opposite effect.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I wasn't being serious, of course, but since you brought it up: why IS the Baltic less salty?

tjalfi 5y ago

If you enjoy reading about mega projects then I would recommend Engineers' Dreams by Willy Ley. It’s an older book on large scale civil engineering proposals such as draining the Mediterranean sea, creating an inland sea in the Sahara, and irrigating the Jordan valley.

nitrogen 5y ago
creating an inland sea in the Sahara Could this be part of an answer to massive sea level rise?
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Wouldn't the water just continously evaporate only to, with high probability, precipitate back to the "global" ocena system or its tributaries? You could make the see less salty though, over a sufficiently long time and get a WHOLE LOT of rock salt.
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  Napkin math says about 343km^3/year of water to contend with, and the Panama canal work took 35 years to move about 0.2km^3 of earth, about 0.006km^3/year. As a layperson it seems to me you'd need to channel a vast area already below sea level (3500km^2 at ~100m deep?) to put a dent in the rise. Again, napkin math. Reuters claims "75.6 trillion gallons of water added to the ocean each year" and a Panama canal history page says the French dug 30M cubic yards and the Americans dug 238M.

karmakaze 5y ago

Sounds like a jr/software engineer's proposal without considering 2nd order effects. These are not as uncommon as you would hope.

ineedasername 5y ago
Even in a senior role I've learned enough to ask "tell my why this is a bad idea" to ensure I get suitable feedback without people just shrugging their shoulders and saying "well, if he insists..."
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Agreed, same. (I actually had 'software' in parens and switched it for 'jr/')
splitstud 5y ago
Or 50-75% of the nonsense that comes out of the mouths of politicians. The solution to a knotted ball of string is not to yank the tag end you see, but it's so very tempting.

reddog 5y ago

Sure this makes complete sense and everyone I know is all for it, but shouldn't we be concentrating on blowing up the moon first? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA

tzs 5y ago
That's a link to a comedy show. Here's a link about someone who actually seriously wanted to blow up the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
- JackFr 5y ago
  I remember the 'Weekly World News' writing about that under the headline 'Scientists Plan to Blow Up Moon', I remember it specifically because I worked with Alexander Abian's daughter at the time. We all found it amusing, but she was a little disappointed that after decades as a math professor his legacy was going to be that.
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  >his claim that blowing up the Moon would solve virtually every problem of human existence. He made this claim in 1991 in a campus newspaper,[4] stating that a Moonless Earth wouldn't wobble, eliminating both the seasons and its associated events like heat waves, snowstorms and hurricanes. Nice...
- jtbayly 5y ago
  Let me guess... He wanted to get rid of lunacy?
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
Neal Stephenson wrote a book about that.. https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0062190377/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...

balaji1 5y ago

It would have been fun to see illustrations or artist renderings.

npunt 5y ago

Crazy fact: the Bering Strait is only 100 to 165 feet deep (~45m). 45m x 88km length = 4,000,000 m^2 times whatever thickness. Makes sense the strait is shallow given the whole prehistoric migration, but in my mind it was much deeper, probably because of its proximity to the Pacific (max 30k+ ft) and the Bering Sea (max 12k ft).

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Space mirrors would probably be more economical. I can imagine this being done by redirecting equatorial sunlight to the poles so the net power incidence remains constant.

varispeed 5y ago

If they believed that: > Proposed that the United States and Soviet Union build a gigantic dam across the Bering Strait and use nuclear power–driven propeller pumps to push the warm Pacific current into the Atlantic by way of the Arctic Sea. Arctic ice would melt, and the Siberian and North American frozen areas would become temperate and productive. was a sound idea, then why are we being so confident about current ideas that are being forced into adoption worldwide?