The great state of Australia
So earlier today I was looking at a bunch of articles about global warming and climate change, and it mentioned how Australia (which is basically almost all desert now anyway) will continue to be very much a desert if climate change becomes law. Except for the north. For whatever reason.
Anyway, for some reason, I got the random thought in my head about how coasts are nice and people love to live on coasts because they're nice, and so I thought... What would happen if you dug a REALLY wide canal right up the the middle of Australia? Like, say, from like, Ceduna in the south to just west of Karumba in the north... That's roughly 1,070 miles... What would happen to the "coasts" of the canal? What kind of effect would such a body of water have on the Australian desert? How wide would it have to be to make a difference?
The answer is, damned if I know. Maybe I should become a scientist. What I can say is that obviously if it connected all the way from ocean to ocean, then it wouldn't be useful for irrigation, since it would be salt water. Also, I'm guessing it would cost trillions of dollars to do. And there are probably more cost-effective ways to change the climate of a desert... For example, the UAE plans to use hydrophobic sand below ordinary soil to maintain a water table and allow farming where it was difficult or impossible before. Very interesting.
I'm so pedestrian.
Anyway, for some reason, I got the random thought in my head about how coasts are nice and people love to live on coasts because they're nice, and so I thought... What would happen if you dug a REALLY wide canal right up the the middle of Australia? Like, say, from like, Ceduna in the south to just west of Karumba in the north... That's roughly 1,070 miles... What would happen to the "coasts" of the canal? What kind of effect would such a body of water have on the Australian desert? How wide would it have to be to make a difference?
The answer is, damned if I know. Maybe I should become a scientist. What I can say is that obviously if it connected all the way from ocean to ocean, then it wouldn't be useful for irrigation, since it would be salt water. Also, I'm guessing it would cost trillions of dollars to do. And there are probably more cost-effective ways to change the climate of a desert... For example, the UAE plans to use hydrophobic sand below ordinary soil to maintain a water table and allow farming where it was difficult or impossible before. Very interesting.
I'm so pedestrian.