if pumping water would not be the issue, is there an obvious reason not to pump a lot of ocean water to salt plains (that used to be lakes/seas) or other zero/low risk areas to lower sea levels?

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if pumping water would not be the issue, is there an obvious reason not to pump a lot of ocean water to salt plains (that used to be lakes/seas) or other zero/low risk areas to lower sea levels?

In: Earth Science

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It would never work. You could never store all that water anywhere. And if you did put it in salt plains, the water would eventually find its way back to the ocean.

The ocean is approx 2/3 of the planet. That means for each inch we want to lower the ocean, EVERY country on the planet has to store 2 inches of water on each inch of land. Which of course we wouldn’t do, so if we were to try to put it in tanks or storage areas, it will just get higher and higher.

To give you an idea. If the city you live in has a area of 1 square mile. You would need to cover the equivalent of that 1 square mile with 2 inches of water. But obviously you don’t want that water everywhere, so you build a tank. That tank would need to store 34,757,485 gallons of water.

Now, imagine having to do that for the whole country. Every mile, 35 million gallons of water stored.

It’s just not possible.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The ocean is insanely large, like bigger than you can effectively fathom but not quite astronomically large

The oceans and seas cover 362 million km^2

Lets say you want to lower the sea level by a single millimeter and you’ll store all that water in Nevada, its a big empty government owned desert after all, how deep would the water cover Nevada?

The entire state of Nevada would be under **1.25 meters of sea water**. That would make commuting quite problematic and will only have reduced sea level by a single millimeter but projects are that it will rise by over 300 millimeters by 2050 soooo you’re going to need to drown a lot more than Nevada

If you want to deal with those 300 millimeters of ocean you’d need to cover all of Russia in over **16 meters of water**, aka restore the massive glaciers to the pole.

Its wayyyy easier to keep the water as an ice cap/glacier than to try to deal with a hundred trillion tons of water

Anonymous 0 Comments

Aside from various reasons to preserve the relatively unique ecosystems and geographical features of salt pans, along with logistical issues surrounding the amount of water you’d need to pump…

Salt pans tend to be in hot areas that get little rainfall and have dry air. This means water very promptly evaporates and would quickly get cycled back into the oceans through rainfall once the air over the salt pans blows somewhere that has conditions that cause rainfall.

A while back (2010) there were some enormous floods in Australia, where the center is actually a giant basin. So much water got trapped there that sea levels fell by about 7mm (1/4”) but a lot of it made it’s way back into the water cycle soon enough.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I imagine it would disturb the ecosystem. Salt flats still contain plant and animal life that would not know what to do with all that water. Other than that…. I dont think the world’s salt flats could contain enough water to make a difference in ocean levels.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Oceans cover about 70% of the Earth. If you’re trying to contain that level of sea rise by pumping it into salt plains, you’d be making an entirely new, massive inland sea.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you wanted to flood the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern US. The desert covers about 260,000 square kilometers, whereas the oceans cover about 360,000,000 square kilometers. For every inch you want to drop the ocean, you’d be flooding the desert to about 1,384 inches, or 115 feet. Whether you can physically pump the water is not the question; we don’t have the space to physically store the water, even if it were possible.

Anonymous 0 Comments

That is a clever idea but it wouldn’t work. There is just not enough room to store water in such areas. We could fill them up and the difference in sea levels would barely be noticable, the oceans are just too big. There could also be negative effects from saturating areas like that with that much salt water in that it could seep into ground water or aquifers or change weather patterns in unexpected ways.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is probably a really dumb thing to say but, could we shoot water into space at all?

Anonymous 0 Comments

I have often thought…..why not just freeze the salt water and sit it on top of existing glaciers? But….that would take a lot of effort and I am not sure if there’s enough room or how impactful that would be.

And I was wondering if adding that much excess weight at the poles might throw off earth’s axis a bit?? I’m not sure but maybe. (If it were truly enough ice to impact sea level world wide that would be some really really heavy ice)