Well, that helps illustrate my point. Even right now, Venice can have some pretty bad flooding. Not being completely submerged doesn't mean things are going great.
Antarctic Ice Sheet Falling Apart
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Well, that helps illustrate my point. Even right now, Venice can have some pretty bad flooding. Not being completely submerged doesn't mean things are going great.
Well, seeing as sea level rise is a very gradual process, land in flood-prone/submerged areas will gradually depreciate over a course of decades until it's no longer land per se but foundations for houses on sticks, or just part of the Bay. Whereas a humungous dam, in a spot that isn't the easiest to reach (if you're working around commuters) and subject to tremendously strong ocean currents would cost a gargantuan fortune at any point in time.
It's all a moot point; of course, Bay Areans wouldn't stand for it if space aliens arrived and offered to install it for free.
Tremendously strong ocean currents sounds like a great way to produce clean energy.
We're going to see more stuff like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project.
And just think of the Netherlands. Flood protection and just generally keeping the water away from the land is an art form there.
We're surely going to have major issues and as a Venetian myself I'm not sure how long my city is going to exist but I'm more worried about poor countries.
I'd be remiss to point out that controlling the sea level is a trivial engineering problem, since it just requires adjusting either the size of the basin or the volume of water in the basin.
My cost estimate for dropping the sea level by four inches a century is about $20 billion a year (which is about $3 per person per year) using coal powered pumps to move ocean water inland into Antarctica, Greenland, or northern Canada and Siberia, where it would remain frozen until the next interglacial. Nuclear power for the pumps would of course be cleaner but the upfront costs are significantly higher.
The other option is to use regular dredging and construction equipment to move dirt and rock from under the water to above ground, and it doesn't matter where. The sediment that runs off the continents takes up basin volume, raising the sea level, so just reverse the mass transport. That method would typically rely more on diesel powered machines, so the costs would likely be much higher than simply pumping sea water, or even desalinating it prior to pumping.
My cost estimate for dropping the sea level by four inches a century is about $20 billion a year (which is about $3 per person per year) using coal powered pumps to move ocean water inland into Antarctica, Greenland, or northern Canada and Siberia, where it would remain frozen until the next interglacial. Nuclear power for the pumps would of course be cleaner but the upfront costs are significantly higher.
The other option is to use regular dredging and construction equipment to move dirt and rock from under the water to above ground, and it doesn't matter where. The sediment that runs off the continents takes up basin volume, raising the sea level, so just reverse the mass transport. That method would typically rely more on diesel powered machines, so the costs would likely be much higher than simply pumping sea water, or even desalinating it prior to pumping.
What actually is your job, Barney?
You do realize that even if you do make the single most inaccurate statement of the decade right here in this thread - and the above is an excellent contender - the prize committee won't notice, and will give the award to some celebrity/well-known public figure regardless, yes?
Designing control systems, sometimes for large power stations.
The calclations are pretty straightforward. The area of the Earth's oceans are 361 million square kilometers, or 3.61e14 square meters, so the volume of a one meter increase in sea level is 3.61e14 cubic meters, with a freshwater mass of 3.61e17 kg.
You're going to move this mass inland with a centrifugal pump that has a peak efficiency of about 85 percent, and if the water's flow velocity is small (the pipe diameter is large), then almost all of the required energy goes toward unrecoverable head pressure (moving the water uphill and leaving it there). So you're increasing the potential energy of the water according to PE=mgh.
Suppose your pumping it very far inland so you don't have to deal with the returning ice flow for 10,000 or so years, and that you've picked a geological area where this requires 200 meters in elevation change (about 650 feet above sea level). With 85 percent efficiency, this requires 8.33e20 Joules of energy per meter of sea level change.
To pump that volume in a century (86400 seconds per day. 3.15576e9 seconds per century) would require a power output of 26,400 megawatts. That's only 2.5 percent of the current installed capacity of US power plants, which is 1,063,000 megawatts.
So you run 26,400 megawatts for a century, which is 26.4e6 kilowatts for 876,600 hours, which comes to 2.31e13 kilowatt hours. At ten cents a kilowatt hour that would cost $2.314 trillion dollars, which is $23.14 billion a year.
The maximum rate of sea level rise we've seen thus far is 3.3mm per year, which is only a third of a meter per century, and you might find an area where you only have to pump the water 100 meters instead of 200, so the cost to stay even could be a sixth as much as the figure I gave.
Any college freshman in physics or engineering could do the calculations on the back of a napkin - instead of going to rallies where they're told all our cities are going to drown.
When they fill the areas behind a hydro-electric dam it creates earthquakes as the ground compresses under the mass of water.
I would imagine what you're proposing would create some huge ones.
If you were to combine your pumps with desalination facilities and then pump inland to various parts of the Earth, this could solve two problems at the same time. Certainly would help parts of the Brazilian interior.
I would imagine what you're proposing would create some huge ones.
If you were to combine your pumps with desalination facilities and then pump inland to various parts of the Earth, this could solve two problems at the same time. Certainly would help parts of the Brazilian interior.
