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The Australian sea
The middle of Australia used to be an inland sea lets make it so again. | |
The middle of Australia is below sea level, I'm not exactly sure
how far but It used to be an inland sea. It would be great to
make it a sea again. Think of all the benifets, no more useless
desert, tourisim, fishing, it would make the air over central
Australia more humid totally changing
the climate and turn all
that barren wasteland into lush tropical rainforest. Instead of
being some hell hole that cars frequently decide to break
down in the middle of it would be pastures and forest.
Another benifet is that it would buy all those small island
nations worried about their countries dissapearing under the
ocean because of global warming some time by lowering the
sea level a little bit. The way this could be acchieved is a
massive canal built in from the Great Australian bight to where
the land reaches sea level again and from then it would be
like undamming a lagoon on the beach, all the water would
just cascade into the space and create a beautiful warm
shallow sea in the middle of the desert.
Red Sea | Dead Sea
http://www.mfa.gov....fa/go.asp?MFAH0mn70
[Shz, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 06 2004]
Lake Death Valley
http://www.halfbake...ke_20Death_20Valley
Smaller, with an in line gravity-powered desalinator. [bungston, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Diseases spread by dust storms from deserts
http://www.sciam.co...E1-A2D1809EC5880000
[DrCurry, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 06 2004]
(??) Kariba Dam
http://afronet.org....nitor127/report.htm
...turned a nasty, disease-ridden stretch of the Zambezi into a wide lake that has revitalized the whole blighted area. Positives and negatives noted in this overview. Of course, they started with a river, not available in most desert areas. [DrCurry, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Travel info
http://www.smh.com..../1085641702528.html
'Australian Sea' holiday for the adventurous [ConsulFlaminicus, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 06 2004]
The Salton Sea
http://www.saltonsea.ca.gov/environ.htm
Just some info [longshot9999, Nov 29 2004]
Salton Sea II
http://pennsguidese...ms.com/environ.html
Of course there's always the negative point of view [longshot9999, Nov 29 2004]
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And what, exactly, is Lake Eyre when it's full? The reason it doesn't stay full is the high evaporation rate in Central Australia. |
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Your plan sounds like a good way to import a bloody lot of salt to the centre of a country already plagued by dry land salinity problems. |
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I like this idea. I'm off to get some nice beach front acreage out near the Alice. Bun. |
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Hmmm... Conceptually baked. Will search for link. |
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At least with this plan we don't have to move icebergs, like in that Sahara Ocean idea a while back. |
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I'll give 'ya a croissant if you chain Kylie Minogue down first and then let the water flow. |
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C'mon! no offense, but this can't be an idea. It's a WIBNI. Still, if you chain both Kylie and Nicole to the bottom, I'll help you see how we can make this work. |
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Same idea as Lake Death Valley (link), except bigger, and not freshwater. |
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All the salt should solve the slug problem in central
Australia at least. |
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It urns out that creating inland seas is a good idea for more reasons than giving the locals a swimming hole: diseases are spread by dust storms arising in deserts. Alarmingly, the last foot and mouth outbreak in Britain (the one that shut down the countryside for many months) evidently came from the Sahara. |
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Wouldn't they tend to be more incubated in humid climates, though? |
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The Menzies government of the 1950s actually did a
feasibility study of this very idea. The proposal was to use
nuclear charges to dig a canal from Spencer Gulf near
Port Augusta to Lake Eyre. |
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I have mixed feelings about this project. I have an
instinctive mistrust of enormous bioengineering projects,
because of the history of destruction other grand-scale
projects have left in their path. cf Aswan Dam, Three
Gorges Dam, Narmada Valley Dam. There would be
problems with salt and no doubt the extinction of many
delicately poised arid land ecosystems. |
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On the other hand, the creation of a permanent inland
sea would probably have many of the effects Gulherme
suggests, creating rainfall across the inland, and opening
many extremely arid areas to agriculture and tourism. |
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Forget about it being a solution to ocean rising from
global warming - the volume of water involved would be
miniscule compared to the total volume of the world's
oceans. |
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So neither bun nor bone from me... |
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Would it not be possible to create agricultural land by this means? Rice can grow with fairly salty water, and edible sea-weed... |
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First, this sort of massive geo-engineering is a great thing to contemplate. It may be decades away from implementation, but fun to consider. |
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Second, I think the canal idea won't work. The atlases I've checked seem to indicate that the length of the dig for the Lake Eyre canal would be over 100 miles (4 plus times that of Suez and Panama. Second, in considering the route of lowest elevation, I think there are heights of 200 feet plus that would have to be dug through. That's way more than in Panama and Suez. In other words, for each square foot of dirt moved for Suez, and maybe for each five in Panama, I think you would have to move something like 100 square feet of Aussie dirt. Not very practical with such modest economic benefits in the offing. |
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So, how about a pipeline? Somebody mentioned 6 meters as a diameter, but that seems excessive in both cost and need. How about somewhere between 1 and 2 meters in diameter? How would it work? Like a massive garden hose, one end several meters deep in the ocean, the midsection snaking over hill and dale, and t'other end several meters below sea level in southern Lake Eyre. You'd have to fill it with water to get the syphon action going, and that'd mean hundreds of truck loads trucked to a sealable opening at the highest point in the pipeline. Also, you'd have to have valves closed at both ends during the fill. Open the ocean end, then the lake end, and watch it gush forth. The lowest point in Lake Eyre seems to be some 31-32 feet below sea level, and conveniently located about as close to the ocean as you can get within the lake. If the pipeline's outlet were to be situated at this lowest point, (and assuming a current level of 10 feet) you'd have some 20 feet difference in elevation powering the syphon action. |
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To what end? I say who cares about the increase in salt? Why even think about desalination? I say the real benefit would be the massive increase in the lake's surface area bringing increased local evaporation which would bring more rainfall. Central Australia is severely parched, and even a modest increase in rainfall would bring major economic benefits. The current population of the entire Lake Eyre watershed (which looks to be the size of Texas) is an astonishingly small 50,000. And I assume that the population currently residing below sea level along the edges of the current salty lake is zero or nearly so. (The level of the lake rises and falls year by year, depending on rainfall. So there is no defined shore line on which to establish a baitshop/boat rental business.) And this brings up a minor benefit of the pipeline. By providing more siphoning draw during low rainfall periods, it would help to stabilize the shoreline, and thus promote such business-based settlement and accompanying tourism. |
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Re hydropower, forget it. You've got a fall of some 20 feet, and the drag of the pipeline to slow even that modest fall. After the lake level is only 10 feet below sealevel, then you've got a fall of ten feet.
Hydro? Fugetaboutit! |
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Decreasing the worldwide sea levels? Again, forget it. I doubt the sea level would fall more than a fraction of an inch. The lake area and capacity, as envisioned, is miniscule compared to the world's oceans! |
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Re concerns over the salt and the great bugaboo "environmental degradation," look at the Caspian Sea. It's below sea level, has dropping levels and rising salt levels. But its problems are related to the massive population (and its unregulated pollution) that lives along its shores and inlet rivers. Even lightly populated Australia will evenually need increases in liveable land. I say it's time now, before you've got a million or so people mucking up the process, to re-engineer the arid interior. |
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It is illegal and immoral to destroy Aboriginal sacred sites, which this idea would certainly. |
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Especially as they tend to proliferate in the path of any intended development. |
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I like this idea, and also [ertdfgcvb]'s pipeline suggestion. I would never want it to get further than halfbaked though. |
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[ertdfgcvb] - // You'd have to fill it with water to get the syphon action going, and that'd mean hundreds of truck loads trucked to a sealable opening at the highest point in the pipeline // |
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Instead of the trucks, why not pump water in at the sea end? Put a temporary 20m high vertical pipe at the desert end until the pipeline's full. |
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This is a terrible idea. Not only will it bring more salt to the area (as UB mentioned) it will tottaly stuff around what is already a beautiful place. Why would you want a rainforest when you can have red kangaroos jumping around. You really are a moron gulherme. Why don't you get back to your france adventure instead of waisting your time here posting stupid ideas. |
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It is a great idea except for the unknown side effects. |
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With enough water in the red centre evaporation would lead to cloud formation which would lead to rain which would allow vegetation to florish. |
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Once vegetation got established the meteorlogical systems would change and maybe at some point the almost permanent high pressure area over Australia would weaken or even move, when that happened moist air would move in from the Indian ocean to fall as rain in the red centre. |
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Eventually an Amazonian climate would be established with a net flow of water out to sea. Before that would happen however a very large portion of central Australia would be under water for part of the year. Once established however the Amazonian climate pattern would flush all the salt back out to sea and all inland water would be fresh again. |
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Water from this system would also perculate down to replenish the continental aquifier. |
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Yes, I know the Amazonian climate is effected by the Andes of which there is no equivalent in Australia. Maybe the Australians could just build a big wall down the left hand side? They are pretty good at doing big job, worlds longest fences etc. |
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There are some serious side effects to consider not the least of which is what the country would be like for the 100 or so years that it would take the system to stabilise and the effect moving that permament high pressure area would have on the climate of both the rest of Australia and neighbouring countires. |
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Apart from the engineering, social and environmental issues the idea raises, one wold need to consider what would happen once it filled - Australia would fold up like a damp chapatti and sink below the southern ocean, would no longer impact on the roaring forties and South America would get blown across the Atlantic into Africa, the earth would develop a speed wobble and go really pearshaped adn gravity would be unreliable. I don't think it is a good idea really, on balance |
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//Australia would fold up like a damp chapatti and sink below the southern ocean//
Only in the dreams of the righteous, Okapi. |
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It's be better to desalinate water and do the sahara bit by bit if you want to do some reasonable terraforming (in a manner of speaking) all those nice plants absorbing CO2 ....anyway, if you want the global sea level to go down how about eating all the whales (idea stolen from Canadian comedian whose name I have forgotten, in all honesty) |
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I think that instead of a canal being excavated to the lake, it would be better to dig a tunnel from the deepest part of the lake to the continental shelf. This would allow the salt to be purged as soon as there is an inflow into the lake. It would also prevent sediment to choke the Spencer gulf by depositing it into deep water of off the coast. The syphon system would not work because the lake would fill with salt very quickly. I don't know how quickly the tunnel could be built, but modern TBM's such as those used on the channel tunnel could be used. The wetter climate would allow massive forests to be planted(carbon credits) and agriculture to be increased. This may have to be done to slow the greenhouse effect. |
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I don't want to have to use a hovercraft if I want to drive from here to the Eastern States. |
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remember the dams in china? I don't
remember the precise details, but
apparently a shift of that much water
was gonna throw off tthe balance of the
earth's orbit. I don't know if it did, will,
or isn't gonna, but I'm pretty sure that if
there is an effect, moving a small sea
inland would have one even more
drastic. I could be wrong. neutral |
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Oh, come on. Throw off the Earth's orbit? |
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Hey I just said I wasn't sure. But it does
kinda make sense. Spin a top. now,
sever a side of it and glue it back on a
milimetre or so away. it's not gonna
spin the same way. |
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Earth's mass, say 6 x 10 to power 24 kg. |
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If inland sea covered say 2 million square kilometers with an average depth of 50 metres, mass of water would be 1 x 10 to power 17 kg approx. |
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So, 0.0000016% (1/60,000,000) |
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Analogy: If you weigh 100kg, would a 1.6 milligram speck of dust cause you to wobble as you walked down the street? |
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What about the chaos theory? An
autralian sea could cause me to burn
my toast |
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The reason this idea is considered halfbaked is because only half the idea has been discussed. |
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Some new points to consider: |
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1. The MAIN effect of an inland sea is evaporation that will cool central Australia a fraction more than it is now. There will be no rainforests, no substantial agriculture, no fishing and little local rainfall. It is just too hot in central Australia for these to occur and most evaporation will rise rapidly and disperse without causing rain. The cooling is he KEY to real benefits. Much of the rainfall in the eastern states comes from rain bearing fronts that move in an easterly direction across Australia from the Bight and the west coast. These occur infrequently due to the intense heat in central Australia which quickly vaporises any precipitation. Most of these fronts are thus forced along the south coast of Australia and into the Tasman sea. A slight change in this current dynamic by flooding Lake Eyre, will increase the frequency of precipitation entering the continent and crossing the gauntlet to the eastern states. Based on agricultural improvements when the lake is flooded every seven years or so and on declines in agri output during severe drought, I estimate that on average, a Lake Eyre inland sea will add $3 billion per annum to the agri economies in the eastern states. It will also subsequently save additional millions by reducing drought associated bushfire events. |
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2. The least expensive method of creating a canal from Spencer's Gulf is to use the Suez DREDGE canal technique, with some piping at intractable zones at the top end of the Flinder's range. This will work well because there is an existing silted channel from when the lake was last connected to the ocean. I estimate that Dredging for most of the 300 Km required will cost around $1 million per Km. The overall cost would be about $800 million comprising $300m for dredging, $100m for necessary piping, $200m for a control dam at the head of the Gulf, $100m for treatment and monitoring works at the lake entrance and $100m for crucial vegetation around the entire shorline. |
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3. The shorline revegetation is crucial to the sustainability of the lake. It would be no more than a Km wide with a 4 tier structure: salt marshes, wattle foragers, casuarinas/river oaks, eucalypts and salt bush. The vegetation will add to the inland cooling effect, absorb some salt from the lake, create habitat for wildlife and create a pleasant vista for tourism. |
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4. The project will add about 8 inches of salt per annum to the lake. This gives the project a 50 year lifespan or $150 billion dollar revenues before it becomes non viable. Within 30 years of project commencement, some of the $benefits would have to be chanelled into research and development of salt removal technology. Some possibilities are: selection of aggressive halophytes (salt plants), A brine return channel to the Gulf, optimisation of saltwater inflows to maximise rainfall, development of the Cooper river inflow catchment from Queensland to flush the lake more regularly with fresh water, taking advantage of increased natural fresh water inflows when available, salt processing industries and researching the use of salt as a slurry for manufacturing building materials for local use. |
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5. Before committing to the project, research its economic and ecological effects by developing inflow catchments like the Cooper, so that the Lake will flood more predictably and regularly. This will involve some sacrifices in Queensland for some time while the project is assessed. As a national strategy and for confirming future benefits to Queensland from the project, this should be agreeable to all stakeholders. |
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There are several more important considerations. It is best at this point however to get some feedback before continuing. |
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Some additional information on Lake Eyre: |
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1. The following link is an Austarlian Government site detailing current Lake Eyre issues. |
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http://www.deh.gov.au/water/basins/lake-eyre/ |
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2. The concern about percolation of salt into the water table is unfounded for 2 reasons. |
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A) As a lake bed that is many 10's of thousands of years old, Lake Eyre has built up layers of very fine silts and clays which block any percolation of salt water into the water table.
B) The lake is built on dense salt formations which dissolve when the lake is flooded every 7 years or so. There is no pecolation of salt into the water table during these events. |
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Add to your equations the cost of the largest geological survey ever undertaken - you'll need that to be sure there are no physical containment problems with the new sea (many parts of Central and Southern Australia have extensive cave and sinkhole structures) - and the cost of purchasing extensive tracts of private land. |
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If we accept your figure of //eight inches of salt per annum// and thus a //50 year life span// for the 'project', why the hell would we want to do it if the duration of the climatic benefit is so short term? After 50 years, what's the situation? 800 gazillion tonnes of salt sitting in the middle of Oz, causing who knows what climate effects through reflection, and periodically getting flushed down into the Southern Ocean in a great mass of poisonous alkalinity. |
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Once the Lake Eyre basin is filled
to the brim with salt, where will
the semi-annual floodwaters go? |
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A tunnel which sloped towards the
ocean rather than towards the lake
should pretty effectively flush the
salt content. The extra expense
would pay off in the permanence
of the result, as opposed to the
projected 50 year life span of the
cheaper options. Unless of course
the tunnel starts to plaque up like
a sclerotic artery. |
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I'm not sure the objection about
caves and sinkholes is much of a
worry - there's plenty of water in
the Southen Ocean to fill them up.
With luck, surveying would reveal
some existing voids which could
be exploited as part of the tunnel. |
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"Keep your filthy hands off my beautiful desert" Mucking about with Mother, on this scale, has always turned out to be a bad idea; usually for reasons that were not imagined in advance. It is dry and it should stay that way. Bone. |
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How about a sea-level barge canal from Port Augusta through Lake Torrens to Lake Eyre? This would in effect create a shallow "Eyre Bay", which would moderate the harsh climate of South Australia and end the dust storms of the dry lakebeds. However, it would not create "an Amazonian climate" in the area as someone else suggested -- the area below sea level is too small and too shallow for that. |
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Salt Buildup? A sea level canal would mean saline levels would equalize more or less, with periodic heavy rains flushing out excess salt to the Indian Ocean. |
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Cost? As others have pointed out, a deep water ship channel would be prohibitive, given the distance. However, a shallow barge canal would not. For a good idea of what it might cost, see the American Tennessee-Tombigbee ("Tenn-Tom") barge canal project, which also is about 200 miles:
www.tenntom.org
More digging would be required for an Eyre Bay canal, but no ship locks would be required, unlike Tenn-Tom. |
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Such a canal would be a boon to the mining and freight hauling industries, and would bring life to an economically deprived backwater (no pun intended), just as Tenn-Tom brought economic life to the backwoods of Tennessee and Alabama in the USA. The Port of Adelaide could act as the Port of Mobile does for Tenn-Tom, a place where the goods move from barge to deep water ship. A barge port for Oodnadatta, anyone? |
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Of course, now that Lake Eyre is a National Park, the whole thing may be moot. But I'm just a bloody Yank (or Johnny Reb, as the Tenn-Tom case may be), so it's up to you fine people. |
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The Salton Sea in California is an artificial body of water created in the desert, sharing some similarity with the idea presented here. I'm providing a link so the pros and cons of an actual implementation can be seen before placing our bets. |
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I read this idea to one of my students and he replied: 'what if the whole thing sinks. where are England gonna poach cricketers from then?' hee hee. |
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[NickB] Some quick calculations. |
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Volume of lake Eyre when full is 34cubic km, or 34 million megaliters. |
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Evaporation in the area approximates 1.5m per year - over the approx 10,000km square surface area of the lake, that's about 15 million megaliters. |
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Assume your 'barge canal' is about 50 metres wide and 4 metres deep - gives cross section area of 200 square meters. |
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A quite rapid flow rate, from the sea ,through the canal, of 2.88 kilometers per hour, or 0.8 meters per second would thus take 100 years to fill the Lake Eyre basin (ignoring evaporation) |
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To fill the basin over ten years, while compensating for evaporation, would take 184 million megaliters of flow - that means the water in your canal travelling at 156 kph, or 43 meters per second, or 260558.339298 furlongs per fortnight.... |
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...and don't get me started on the salt loads again.... |
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...can't....help....myself.... uunnngggh.... |
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Sea water has about 35 grams of salt per liter. |
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The amount of salt left behind in the Lake Eyre basin every year, if Lake Eyre was to be filled with sea water and based on the evaporation data above, would be about 525 million tons. |
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If there was no flushing event for 30 years (which seems to have happened frequently in the past few centuries), there would be no room left for any water, and 15.7 billion tons of salt baking in the sun. |
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if there was a flushing event after several years of escalating salt concentration, the ecological disaster in the Spencer Gulf would be severe. |
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So, anyone want to buy a central Australian salt mine? Seems to be the one thing we're certain to produce... |
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This idea is feasible, but just because it can be done doesn't mean that it should be. It would have too great an impact on, well, central Australia, and would leave our descendants cursing us for centuries. |
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Actually, all that salt could be useful. The Dead Sea is mined for salt - Australia could do the same. |
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Can I still dig for opals, and hang out at the Pink Roadhouse in Oodnadatta? |
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I think that this idea is definitely worth carrying through; particularly with the begining of global warming and Australia's worsening drought conditions. |
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Re; environmental issues, the 'delicately poised' eco-systems are just that because they are in a perilous environment with little of anything left to sustain it! |
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Why care if an inland sea is more salty? It already is DRY and salty out there. It may turn out to be only fractionally saltier depending on the volume of water that could be contained there. A channel or tunnel could take advantage of high ocean tides and close during low tides. |
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Spreading the water surface on the earth could aid, in some small way, cooling of the earth's temperatures. As mentioned by other contributors here, precipitation will produce rain, which will deposit fresh water in other areas and increase vegetation and animal life. Maybe one day we might see large green areas on satelight maps where there had been desert for the last 50,000 years. |
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Now think about this, and this is why I'm boning it: There's a lot of wildlife in that "useless" desert. Kangaroos, more reptiles than I can count, and lots of plantlife (hardy, scraggly, unappealing plantlife, but life just the same). All those animals and plants are adapted to life in such an environment. How is this drastic change to the environment going to affect the ecology? ------- |
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Flaminicus, can you help me with the following thought experiment? |
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I'm imagining the canal getting blocked by salt as the sun evaporates the 'water' part of salt water.
I'm imagining following the canal from the ocean end until the blockage is reached.
Now I'm trying to imagine what is happening in that last little bit of salt water as it laps against the accumulated salt sludge. |
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This last little bit of water surely has a very high salt content, higher than the water in the ocean. Won't there be a tendency for that dissolved salt to move down the concentration gradient into the ocean? <tries to remember about osmosis from many years ago> |
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Then, won't the salt sludge tend to be eroded over time, and the blockage cleared? |
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The answer to the salt problem is to incorporate the Bradfield Scheme in conjunction with the canal/pipeline project. (Google this). A continuous body of water from the Upper Herbert river in North Queensland to the Spencer Gulf. A delta could be created in the Cooper Basin. |
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I don't think that filling up the Lake Eyre with salt water is a good solution because it will add salt to the entire area. However, thanks to its below sea level elevation, The Lake Eyre basin would be an ideal place to transfer desalinated seawater from the Great Australian bight (via a pipeline) without the need of additional pumping power. When you think that Spain and Israel are curently using desalinated seawater to irrigate their semi-desertic land, one can presume that there is an economical interest to do so! (cost of desalinated water is the double compared to traditional water sources). However, new irrigation technologies are very efficient and they can grow almost anything using a fraction of the water that would be required with traditional techniques. Desalination should only use clean and renewable energies like the new desalination plant in Perth. Priority should be given to grow (fruit) trees, which have multiple benefits, capture Co2, absorb the heat, protection against sand storms, and production of nice oranges! |
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i think it'd be a waste of energy and money to desalinate the interior of australia, why not pipe desalinated water from the coast to municipal water supply lines and use waste heat recovery water from air - renewable free desalinated pre-filtered freshwater. then from there you just fill up the reserves and tanks and build out pipelines in series and parallel as inland as you need. 80% cost savings on current state of the art desalination. |
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