Idea for rising sea level

[Ernie Rogers]

The story about melting of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf is terrifying.  Surely this is the kind of challenge we mean by the term "geoengineering."

       It seems there may be too solutions: hold the water (ice) right where it is, or--find someplace to put it.  I would like to talk about the second route.  There are rather large areas of the earth that are very dry and below sea level.

https://geology.com/below-sea-level/

Why not put the water there?  The Caspian depression is about 90 feet deep and covers about 200,000 square miles.  The Dead Sea depression is very deep and fairly large.  I haven't checked, could filling these depressions give a significant reprieve from rising seas?

       I believe there are economic benefits of a sea level canal to the Caspian that could make it a profitable venture.  I think China would be willing to pay for it--it could give them a shorter shipping route to Europe.  I'm not an expert--what do you think?  Is someone working on this?

[Russell Seitz]

 " I haven't checked, could filling these depressions give a significant reprieve from rising seas?"

No. Less than a centimeter of sea level rise would fill them all to the brim, including elevated basins like Turfan.

[David Sevier]

I believe that it would be possible to stop/ slow down the increased flow of the Western Antarctica ice sheet by the use of CO2 clathrates. Twenty years ago I was writing a paper with Klaus Lackner’s help on storing CO2 in stable Glaciers like the Eastern Antarctica ice sheet. A lot of CO2 could be stored this way. In my conversations to develop this idea, I talked to a glaciologist who made comments that have stayed with me. He said that if large masses of C02 clathrates were created, they would sink steadily within the glacier because they are heavier than ice and fall to the bottom of the glacier. There they would not melt like normal ice under pressure as they are stable up to 8 Celsius. Instead he thought they would act like glue to stick the glacier to the bedrock. He mused that it would be real neat to study the effect of this ...... never did publish the paper as other stuff got in the way. I had worked out how to store a lot of CO2 this way and how to do it. The idea was to use air based CO2 capture and put this in the glacier as clathrates.

Perhaps this should be looked as away to slow the glacier collapse? Would not be that hard to do (but will still cost quite a lot of money as this will be an expensive environment to do work in) and would give a much needed application for air based CO2 capture.

Dave

Sent from my iPad

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/489b0926-144d-4de9-8346-a3c021ae1ac9%40googlegroups.com.

[Andrew Lockley]

It's possible that only a few small patches are needed to jam glaciers

Andrew 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/300EF465-C997-4394-BD41-98AFF57E6536%40carbon-cycle.co.uk.