Seaflooding

This feels like an over-simplification of the benefits. I have yet to be convinced that filling an area with salted water, which by evaporating will only increase the salt concentration, can host a thriving ecosystem.<p>I&#x27;m also having trouble buying the argument that to lower the salt concentration we can extract it and sell the salt. Sure we can, but are talking about the same scale here?<p>Moreover, it may look like a hostile place, but I&#x27;m sure that in all the examples given there are populations there, maybe nomadic, and there are organisms that live there.<p>Finally, I find it interesting than when illustrating the Quattara seat, the author has added green around it, but I see no reason for that greening to be there at all when a few hundred kilometres north on the border of the current Mediterranean sea there&#x27;s nothing. After all, same region, roughly same altitude, same water, but even higher salt concentration.<p>So yeah, I love the futurism aspect of the article, it makes me dream of a techno-solution, but I remain unconvinced though I&#x27;d love to be wrong.

The story seems so nice, but maths and observations on Quattara basin don&#x27;t add up.<p>First of all, climate around seas in deserted areas isn&#x27;t much better than further in land. See the shores in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Iran.<p>But let&#x27;s suppose someone decides to build the pipe and extract energy. It means one has to build a 58 km pipe under the ground (which is doable, like Gothard base tunner in Switzerland).<p>Then, 4 issues remain:<p>1) you must treat the water coming in the pipes, because it&#x27;s possible to clog the pipe, the turbine, etc.<p>2) what inclination do you need to get a reasonable discharge of water?<p>3) how much power one can extract from the flow? Rough estimates give me several megawatts per 10 m of elevation per 1 pipe of 10 m in diameter (this is the kind of size in new large-diameter tunnels). Seems like a lot of piping for not much power.<p>4) Erosion of the shores that may fill the basin up. This is what happens to natural lakes on plains.<p>And key issue here: the more you discharge through the pipe, the higher the level of water in the lake, the less energy you can extract.

I used to dream of large scale solar and nuclear-powered desalination plants lining the mediterranean, solely for the purpose of pumping inland to create fresh water lakes to cool the local environment and perhaps stymie the increasing desertification of thre Iberian peninsula further north.<p>Then I grew up a bit and realised how mind-bogglingly massive such a scheme would have to be :)<p>These seems like a far more likely possibility, given the scale.<p>Given we might be in part historically responsible for a lot of the desertification around the periphery of the Med, I don&#x27;t personally have major qualms about geo-engineering &#x27;mostly useless&#x27; spaces back into something a little more fertile and a little cooler.

&gt; So why not play a Zanclean and flood it with water from the sea?<p>Why not? Because we&#x27;re _really bad_ at modelling all possible outcomes, especially when it comes to large scale engineering projects.

The idea of the Qattara sea is fascinating. On paper, it sounds so easy: dig a long trench and let nature run its course.<p>There&#x27;s so little life in the Sahara and there&#x27;s so much Sahara around the theoretical sea that the ecological impact would be quite small for such a huge undertaking. With global temperatures continuing to rise and humanity preferring short-term profit over long-time survival, cooling even just a little bit of the Sahara could significantly extend the time people can live in northern Africa. I doubt we&#x27;ll see the resurgence of the Green Sahara any time soon (the last period that kickstarted humanity in northern Africa was during an ice age, we&#x27;re in the exact opposite situation of that) but even just a little bit of green and cool land in the desert could help a lot of people.<p>Salinity would need to be kept in check, of course, but with a corridor big enough for tides to flow between the Mediterranean and the new sea there should be a quite manageable maximum salinity. Until that happens, we could harvest osmotic power (&quot;blue energy&quot;) from the water stream, as fresher water will rush into the salt water reservoirs if we do not allow the minerals to flow back.<p>Furthermore, with the new agricultural opportunities there need to be strict (and well-enforced) laws regarding pesticides and other types of contaminants to prevent another Lake Salton. With the current lack of agricultural possibilities in the area, this may actually be achievable if the government can see the long term benefits.<p>It all sounds so incredibly doable. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll ever happen because of politics and economics, and even if the project does get started I doubt it&#x27;ll be long until the various terrorist groups active in northern Africa will find a new location to make the world a worse place, but I&#x27;m still very curious about what kind of world such projects could create.

Or make Czech reservoir: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prehrada.hrach.eu&#x2F;en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prehrada.hrach.eu&#x2F;en.html</a>

The article seems to presuppose that being near a big amount of salt water will cause frequent rain, but the coastline of most of North Africa and the Arabian peninsula suggests otherwise.

This reminds me of the Salton Sea, a man-made lake in California which used to be promoted as a tourist destination and now continues to be an ecological disaster.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Salton_Sea" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Salton_Sea</a>

Very interesting article. I like the idea of re-filling old dried out seas. Not much can go wrong (on first look), its doable and the benefits can be huge.

I’ve often wondered why we havent attempted something similar before. After all we have successfully drained the fens (in the 1600s, took only 7 years), constructed the hoover dam (1931, took 5 years), plus a dozen other significant geoengineering projects. There seems now to be a prevailing sentiment that geoengineering=bad among the general population.

I feel like the general mood is too risk averse for big projects like this at the moment. I hope I&#x27;m proved wrong though. I miss an age of optimism.

We are just about to force future generations to (quite likely not) live through the unintended consequences of current and past generations ignorantly and recklessly engineering their environment out of a misguided desire “[grow] the economy, and [make] money along the way”, and in response the author seems to suggest we use more ignorance and recklessness to drive even more unintended consequences?<p>We don’t want to lose deserts and more than we wanted to lose forests and wetlands (and are now desperately trying to save them)… just because humans are too stupid to see the complex reasons why specific ecosystems exist doesn’t mean they should KEEP acting on that stupidity.

Out of curiosity, I checked what the air pressure would be in a drained Mediterranean, since the article claimed it would be oppressively high. The average depth of the Mediterranean is 1.5km [1] which is less than 2.0km which would be a pressure of 130.069kPa vs 101.312kPa at sea level [2]. This seems fine?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mediterranean_Sea" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mediterranean_Sea</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.physicsforums.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;air-pressure-below-sea-level.640478&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.physicsforums.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;air-pressure-below-sea...</a>

Not a fan of geo-engeering when it&#x27;s the &quot;sulfur dioxide sunscreen&quot; trick, or iron fertiliser in the sea. This one I&#x27;m sure has side effects, but seems marginally more plausible.

If the climate-change induced sea level rise needs 1-2 metres of mitigation, and you have 100-200 metre deep depressions, you need to cover 1% of the Earth&#x27;s surface (total, not just land) with these seafloods. Doesn&#x27;t seem like a plausible mitigation, I&#x27;m puzzled why the article proposed it.<p>The other benefits might be interesting locally some places.

For a more nuanced view on the Egypt project in particular check the wiki page [0]<p>Short version is it sounds uneconomical for power generation. Hard to believe but reading between the lines it feels like despite all the “free” hydroelectric you’re looking at immense construction difficulties<p>You know your projects heading for the drawer when you propose using 100 atomic bombs to dig the tunnel<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qattara_Depression_Project" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qattara_Depression_Project</a><p>PS I’d love for this project to work. The main thing I could not really find supporting evidence for is “water will fill with life”. Just like… you could be constantly desalinating (and now have a brine problem) and still not really have a great ecosystem form I feel like? But I don’t understand this.

People usually mentions sea rise as the worst outcome of global warming, but extreme weather may be more pervasive, and that may be experienced far earlier than the sea level rise.<p>In any case, this is at best a mitigation, not a solution. It sounds like a simple enough idea, and may not have as a disruptive impact as other geoengineering proposals that may end having unexpected consequences. Some of the proposed flooded areas could have unique ecosystems that may be negatively impacted, but anyway all ecosystems are being negatively impacted right now, so a delay in the very bad trends we might be in could be positive overall.

The article complains that places under the sea level have higher pressure and are &quot;hell on Earth&quot; because of that. Dead sea coast(currently lowest on-land point on Earth) has a higher pressure because of that, and it&#x27;s beneficial for human health, it&#x27;s a health resort.<p>The article seems to contradict itself (like the proposal to add water to salt so that we can evaporate the water and sell the salt :) ), and seems to be highly subjective and dishonest.

Ideally a sea level canal situation would allow for tidal forces to regulate salinity. The added bonus would be in shipping.<p>I&#x27;m not a civil engineer, but the idea that you can constantly generate hydroelectric power while desalinating with the derived electricity seems problematic.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energycentral.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;pip&#x2F;great-mexicali-energy-and-shipping-canal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energycentral.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;pip&#x2F;great-mexicali-energy-and-sh...</a>

What are the 2nd and 3rd order effects that we&#x27;re missing?<p>Qattara depression lies in the Horse Latitudes that is full of arid deserts. So there&#x27;s a high chance that flooding it might not make it turn into a lush wonderland. It could even end up being another dead sea.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oceanservice.noaa.gov&#x2F;facts&#x2F;horse-latitudes.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oceanservice.noaa.gov&#x2F;facts&#x2F;horse-latitudes.html</a>

Did anyone else notice the beautiful photography contained in this post? Unfortunately, after a quick scan, I could not find any attributions to the photos.

Drying the Mediterranean Sea is surely a bad idea, but I wonder why nobody ever built hydroelectric generators into the Strait of Gibraltar. There is a huge steady flow of surface water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean (1 million cubic meters per second), and almost as much flows back into the Atlantic in deeper layers. Why not tap into these streams to generate electricity?

&gt; This would reduce global warming<p>No, water albedo is lower than Sahara desert, so it would capture more of the Sun&#x27;s energy, and warm the planet.

Dress up the Dead Sea project to attract tourism, and Israeli&#x2F;Jordanian co-operation will find a way.

Any talks of flooding anywhere with water&#x2F;sea just remind me of the &quot;Flood Ohio&quot; meme, both in terms of practicality &amp; humour:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=O4BPxKhRJRo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=O4BPxKhRJRo</a>

One major consequence of flooding Saharan basins could be the death of the Amazonas rain forest, as it depends on Saharan dust.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ygulQJoIe2Y">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ygulQJoIe2Y</a>

I&#x27;d wager that &quot;Seaflooding&quot; will just happen somewhere anyway, likely some where we ain&#x27;t really looking.<p>And it will be fine. Mankind has seemingly surpassed weather patterns, and it now the 21st century.

Just reading this title made me suddenly think of wanting to live under the ocean&#x2F;sea(closer to land albeit) like Sandy from SpongeBob. Affordable housing for all I guess.

at glance, if i divide the area of those deserts to the surrounding larger seas ... the ratio looks very small, maybe &lt; .1% or much less (don&#x27;t have numbers)<p>a drop in the ocean

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Salton_Sea" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Salton_Sea</a>

Very interesting article and the whole idea of controlled sea flooding is well founded, but international geopolitics for sure is a major obstacle.