On Sunday, March 26, 2000 9:38 AM CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
> > On the practical side, what do you [anyone] think about the impact of
this
> > poor man's macroengineering project? Would it be a net gain or loss
for
> > people living there and in adjoining regions? What would its impact be
in
> > global climate and ecology?
>
> For the local humans, generally good: they'd get ocean access, a milder
> climate, and more rain. Some farmland and such gets flooded at the
bottom,
> but it's probably replaceable. Be a real headache keeping the pollution
down,
> though.
I'm not sure how much farmland is there... I've also heard the local
economy partly depends on mining salts from the evaporites of what little
water does trickle through.
> For the local ecology or paleontology, it's a catastrophe. Desert
critters do
> very poorly in shallow seas and anything interesting gets covered up or
eaten
> :-/
Whatever project gets done is, sadly, probably going to involve some
destruction of fossils.
On the ecology side, there's the exploitation of an inland sea by Red Sea
lifeforms.
> The rift valley isn't large enough to affect the whole world's climate or
> ecology directly.
No? I see it extending from Ethiopia to the great lakes of Africa
(Victoria, etc.). That's a rather large area.
> >Michael S. Lorrey retroman@turbont.net wrote:
>
> >> The only thing separating the Rift Valley from being flooded is about
> >> 100 meters
> >> of rock on the shore of the Red Sea. I could fix that situation with a
> >> couple dozen pounds of C4.
>
> I'm not convinced that blowing a (relatively) small hole in the rock
barrier
> will
> suffice to flood the valley. The flow rate would have to exceed
evaporation
> from the entire flooded valley, and that's a lot. There are several
places
> where large river flows still don't suffice to raise a sea even close to
sea
> level
> (e.g., the Caspian Sea)
But the case with the Caspian Sea is a bit different right now. The problem
seems to be not inflow or evaporation but outflow into irrigation and other
water use projects. This is akin to what's happened to the Colorado River.
It no longer reaches the Gulf of California because of overuse and the dam.
> Flooding the rift valley is at most a mesoscale
> project,
> but I think you'd need more than a few dozen pounds of conventional
explosive.
One way to find out.:) Of course, if we talk about it too much, someone
might place guards there to prevent it from happening. Anyone here familiar
with demolitions enough to make estimates on what would be needed to
accomplish this goal?
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
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