Sea level rise:a modest proposal

[nickbarnes]

Global sea-level is forecast to rise a metre or so over the next century. In the spirit of dumb-ass geo-engineering proposals to combat global warming, we should consider the most obvious geo-engineering approach to sea-level: pump sea-water into endorheic basins (that is, areas which don't drain into the global ocean), such as the basins of the

Comments

[yea_mon]

Just off the top of my head

[nickbarnes]

Salinity: endorheic basins are already really salty places. We're going to destroy their ecosystems because we're flooding them, not especially because we're flooding them with salt water

[yea_mon]

I got an area of 400,000 km2 for Tarim on Wiki, which is 400 billion square meters - so we're dealing with a factor of 3 difference.

On the subject of salinity - I was not aware of that fact. I wonder if pipe-leakage will result in salinity changes to the water tables in the areas around them?

As an aside - have you reached your 5-insurmountable items yet?

[nickbarnes]

Wiki can't decide on the area of the Tarim basin: it has two pages which disagree. Possibly the 1.2 Mkm^2 figure is the overall drainage basin, whereas the 400k figure is the central plain within the basin. I suppose we could follow the citation links, but nah

[jwburton]

We're going to destroy their ecosystems because we're flooding them, not especially because we're flooding them with salt water.

You'd think, but in the Dead Sea case, real hydraulic engineers have looked hard at the problem, and they are worried about salt-water intrusion into the Negev aquifers, triggered by adding dilute salt water to the most concentrated salt water in the world at the lowest spot in the world. Unfortunately, there isn't quite enough power in the 400m drop to desalinate it all.

[nickbarnes]

Since Israel does so much desalination anyway, can't it make lots of hypersaline water and use that?
I can't find any numbers about the endorheic basins in the Sahara, which is another obvious candidate for this mad scheme.

[jwburton]

My understanding is that the aquifer problem is osmotic, and that adding still more salt to the basin is always problematic, while adding water is harmless (and removing water is an air quality hazard but not an aquifer hazard). It's possible that I'm wrong; I know some of the right people at the Weizmann Institute to ask if you're seriously interested.

[nickbarnes]

if you're seriously interested
Heavens, no!

[jwburton]

If we buried the nuclear waste first, and then flooded Nevada, there might be substantial economic synergies despite the unfavorable kinetic energy balance. For one thing, you no longer need to worry about containment, but only about good mixing (which is surely an easier problem). The solution to pollution is dilution, as the engineers of a more audacious age used to say.