Massive Undersea Walls Could Stop Glaciers From Melting, Scientists Say (cnn.com) 142
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Building walls on the seafloor could prevent glaciers from melting and sea levels rising due to global warming, scientists say. Barriers of sand and rock positioned at the base of glaciers would stop ice sheets sliding and collapsing, and prevent warm water from eroding the ice from beneath, according to research published this week in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union. The audacious idea centers on the construction of "extremely simple structures, merely piles of aggregate on the ocean floor, although more advanced structures could certainly be explored in the future," said the report's authors, Michael Wolovick, a researcher at the department of geosciences at Princeton University, and John Moore, professor of climate change at the University of Lapland in Finland.
Using computer models to gauge the probable impact of walls on erosion of the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, one of the world's largest, Wolovick and Moore hoped to test the efficiency of "a locally targeted intervention." They claimed the simplest designs would allow direct comparison with existing engineering projects. "The easiest design that we considered would be comparable to the largest civil engineering projects that humanity has ever attempted," they said. "An ice sheet intervention today would be at the edge of human capabilities." For example, building four isolated walls would require between 0.1 and 1.5 cubic km of material. "That is comparable to the 0.1 km3 that was used to create Palm Jumeirah in Dubai ($12 billion)...(and) the 0.3 km3 that was used to create Hong Kong International Airport ($20 billion)," the report said. The authors say there's only a 30% probability of success due to the harsh environment, but did mention that the scientific community could work on a plan that was both achievable and had a high probability of success.
Using computer models to gauge the probable impact of walls on erosion of the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, one of the world's largest, Wolovick and Moore hoped to test the efficiency of "a locally targeted intervention." They claimed the simplest designs would allow direct comparison with existing engineering projects. "The easiest design that we considered would be comparable to the largest civil engineering projects that humanity has ever attempted," they said. "An ice sheet intervention today would be at the edge of human capabilities." For example, building four isolated walls would require between 0.1 and 1.5 cubic km of material. "That is comparable to the 0.1 km3 that was used to create Palm Jumeirah in Dubai ($12 billion)...(and) the 0.3 km3 that was used to create Hong Kong International Airport ($20 billion)," the report said. The authors say there's only a 30% probability of success due to the harsh environment, but did mention that the scientific community could work on a plan that was both achievable and had a high probability of success.
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The penguins will pay for it, of course.
Idea is to reduce warm water flow under the ice (Score:1)
Maybe you missed this part in the summary, but the idea is to reduce the flow of warm water erode the ice from underneath. Nobody wants to stop the ice from getting bigger.
You spent a lot more time talking than you spent understanding, didn't you.
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How many tens of thousands of acres can we log in a year?
How many hundreds of millions of acres burn every year?
We're gonna build us a wall the size of Texas and at best, it will slow down melting by a decade.
Antartica will pay for it (Score:1)
Perhaps Trump could take all the illegal border crossers and force them to build the antartica wall. Solve two problems at the same time.
The glaciers are a buffer (Score:4, Insightful)
The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt. If you stop them from melting then they stop absorbing heat and it would likely just cause the earth to heat up faster.
Not necessarily a bad thing though as a faster rise in temperature would hopefully make more people take global warming seriously and you still would have the buffer available if things got really bad.
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+1, Insightful.
Not really (Score:1)
The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt.
Very marginally, from the ocean itself, not the atmosphere... and transfer of temperature changes from deep water is incredibly slow. This small and very localized loss would have pretty much zero impact on global warming as a whole, compared to how much the water would rise if the land-locked glaciers were allowed to go free.
Not necessarily a bad thing though as a faster rise in temperature would hopefully make more people take global warming se
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I want to know if those scientists took the Antarctic magma plume recently discovered to be causing antarctic ice melting into account, and if they've checked under the Arctic for a similar magma plume. It would make sense if there were matching magma plumes at both poles.
How would undersea walls stop magma plumes? (not that anybody has the money for such a gigantic planet-wide engineering operation)
Humans need to concentrate more on adaptation rat
Re: Hillary actually DID win the popular vote, Iv (Score:2)
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
I want to know if those scientists took the Antarctic magma plume recently discovered to be causing antarctic ice melting into account
Probably not. Why don't you call them up to let them know ? Go ahead and say that you represent the Slashdot community of armchair experts if they give you a bad time.
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I want to know if those scientists took the Antarctic magma plume recently discovered to be causing antarctic ice melting into account
Probably not. Why don't you call them up to let them know ? Go ahead and say that you represent the Slashdot community of armchair experts if they give you a bad time.
Nah, I think I'll just go with ignoring their ridiculous and impractical (not to mention obscenely expensive) proposals.
You're welcome to waste *your* money on it if you like wasting your money. I'll not be wasting any of mine on it however, thanks all the same.
Strat
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I agree that the proposal is ridiculous and impractical. But the melting has nothing to do with the magma plume, since the melting only started a few years ago, and the magma plume has been sitting there for millions of years.
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But the melting has nothing to do with the magma plume, since the melting only started a few years ago, and the magma plume has been sitting there for millions of years.
Maybe you missed this:
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
"Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago."
You're welcome.
Strat
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
No I did not miss this. You missed my point.
The plume has been there forever. The melting accelerated recently. The EXTRA melting was therefore not caused by the plume, even if it affects total melting.
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The plume has been there forever. The melting accelerated recently.
So the scientists in the quoted story have it wrong and YOU know better?
LOL!
Thanks for the laugh, have a nice day.
Strat
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So the scientists in the quoted story have it wrong and YOU know better?
No, I'm in full agreement with the scientists. You're the only one who doesn't understand.
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Global warming is a gift given to or by humanity to avert the only actual danger, the return of the next ice age
Like you, I also like to set my house on fire to keep warm in the winter.
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Here is some math:
https://www.skepticalscience.c... [skepticalscience.com]
The amount of surplus energy going into the ice is tiny.
WE MUST SAVE BEACHFRONT VILLAS! (Score:1)
Despite the questionable logic of building on the beachfront, we must all -- as a species -- invest massive amounts of capital and energy to save those who did.
We are *all* owners of beach front real estate. This is a human problem. If you built your house on high ground, you didn't build that. You were lucky. If you chose to live somewhere sane, then you basically won the lottery. People who chose to invest in land that has never once in the history of the world been a good place to stake a claim are victi
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This is a human problem. If you built your house on high ground, you didn't build that. You were lucky. If you chose to live somewhere sane, then you basically won the lottery. People who chose to invest in land that has never once in the history of the world been a good place to stake a claim are victims
Matthew 7:24-27 English Standard Version (ESV)
Build Your House on the Rock
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods
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The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt. If you stop them from melting then they stop absorbing heat and it would likely just cause the earth to heat up faster.
Planet earth heating up faster means the planet is absorbing more heat energy than it radiates outward. The glaciers are part of planet earth. If they absorb heat energy, then this is contributing to the earth heating faster, not preventing it. It's also one of the worst places on the globe for the heat to go because a rise in sea level would be expensive if it got out of hand.
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For one gram of ice to melt into water at 0C it requires 334 Joules of energy. Note that the temperature doesn't change when the melting occurs. That is because the ice is changing to the liquid phase, and the energy goes into the motion of the water molecules, not into its temperature rise. When all the ice has melted addition energy of 4.18 Joules per gram of water will raise the temperature of that gram of water 1C. Ergo, it will take 418 joules of energy to raise one gram of water at 0C to 1 gram o
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To the extent that this is true, you are talking about the distribution of global warming, not the level of global warming.
OTOH, glaciers reflect a lot more light than does dirt, so the existence of glaciers *does* retard global warming. That's one reason the melting of Arctic sea ice is such a problem. (Ocean is darker than ice.)
However, what I'm really wondering is what other effects building those "massive sea walls" would have. The antarctic is one of the major sources of food for the southern oceans
The glaciers are a buffer - not how it works (Score:2)
Losing the glaciers does however decrease the Earth's albedo and that also will increase the Earth's
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A one time removal of energy to melt all the worlds glaciers has no effect on the equilibrium temperature.
It has no effect on the total energy in the system but it does have an effect on the perceived temperature and where the concentration of temperature is. For instance, air and ocean currents passing near glaciers lose some of their heat to the glaciers and that lower temperature air/water is carried elsewhere on earth which affects both our measurements of air/water temperatures and the weather patterns themselves. If the glaciers disappeared tomorrow (or if you walled off/buried them) then they could no
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No money (Score:2)
There's no money for this while we rebuild North Carolina which is now in the path of a new hurricane zone, which happens to be a Republican stronghold. Sorry.
Re:No money (Score:5, Funny)
Wall-la! (Score:1)
Make Trump pay for it, as punishment for denying climate change.
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Why are we rebuilding this when we didn't rebuild Puerto Rico?
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They vote republican.
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Given this administration, the rebuilding will be minimal while the construction companies will make out like bandits....part of Make America Red Again.
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Well, rebuild, yes, but clean up as well. Between the pig farm waste and the coal ash draining into the surrounding environment, it will cost billions to clean up.
Maybe not though. The alleged administration could always recharacterize coal ash as containing essential minerals for healthy people and pig waste as merely fertilizer to replenish the land.
What about the sea life there? (Score:3, Insightful)
Although it sounds like maybe this could work, what about the sea life of Antartica that might rely on that particular niche to live?
Besides the ice shelves holding back the glaciers are not melting underneath like scientists thought they would [nationalgeographic.com], so I think we need to understand better what is really going on before we fuck up the last mostly pure continent.
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As I have pointed out many times I am one of the few actual environmentalists here - that means truly thinking long term instead of doing crazy things that sounds good on a very short term but actually hurt the environment.
I have personally done more for the environment already with my bare hands than you will do in a lifetime by any means.
vs. Trump's wall (Score:1)
So, this is well within an order of magnitude of the cost estimate for Trump's wall between Mexico and the United States: https://www.brookings.edu/essa... [brookings.edu]
Global cost / benefit, anyone?
This suggestion is just as stupid as ... (Score:3, Insightful)
the one made in the 1970s to stop global cooling: spread coal dust on the arctic and antarctic ice sheets. It's on par with importing cane toads into Australia. Or, their rabbit plagues. Or, the Red Fox they introduced to control the rabbits they introduced.
They had it wrong back in 1970 and they have it wrong now. Why did they have it wrong in 1970? Because they tried to tie global cooling into Marxist wealth redistribution, just like they did with "climate change".
Science is never settled. If AGW is "settled" then it is not science.
Re:This suggestion is just as stupid as ... (Score:4)
Also if round Earth is "settled" then it is not science.
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Perfect example. It was settled that the Earth was flat up until relatively recently in humanity's history. Anyone that suggested otherwise was a crackpot.
Climate science is not easy. Our best models can't predict more than a few days into the future with any reliability. If you think you can prove what the Earth's conditions are going to be like in 30 years then you must be an absolute master of Chaos Theory.
For everyone who truly believes in human induced global warming...what is stopping you from uniting
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For everyone who truly believes in human induced global warming...what is stopping you from uniting and working together to solve the problem?
I don't think we can stop it, and I'll be dead before the worse hits us, so I don't really give a hoot either way. I just love making fun of scientific illiterates.
Re: This suggestion is just as stupid as ... (Score:3)
What could possibly go wrong?
Probably a lot of unexpected side effects.
Re:This suggestion is just as stupid as ... (Score:5, Informative)
Scientific consensus in the 1970's was that the earth was warming. Whatever pop science mag said otherwise was crap, and is over exaggerated by modern deniers (the famous Time cover, for example, is a hoax.)
You either were lied to, or are a liar.
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Hmmm....so the law of gravity is not settled either. Hey, maybe you could go outside and jump up and down a lot? Sooner or later you might fly off to the moon. Quantum mechanics isn't settled either, what were we thinking building all those damn processors using it. Evolution is not settled, Kansas hasn't evolved in the last 300 years...definitely a point disproving its settled nature.
Re: This suggestion is just as stupid as ... (Score:2)
Canada Didn't Stop the Melting (Score:5, Funny)
The real question is... (Score:3)
can they also stop Kaijus?
... and the penguins will pay for it (Score:3)
Because as long as we're fantasizing, why not?
Underwater walls (Score:2)
What would these walls on the sea floor do to existing currents flowing there? How would they affect the movement of bottom-dwelling creatures. Always unseen/unthought of unintended results.
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Someone tell Trump! (Score:2)
Please, someone tell Trump, finally a wall he can build that might actually help! =P
Mobil-ize the stones. (Score:2)
To be fair, they give estimates on the amount of material needed and compare it to existing building projects. But all I can think is "Lets use lots of fossil fuel energy rearranging rocks."
Well... (Score:2)
Christ, are we really that stupid or what?!?
you know (Score:2)
Not Going to Happen (Score:2)
A big, beautiful wall (Score:2)
Wall to protect the wall (Score:2)
Rephrased ... (Score:2)
These are not sicientits (Score:1)
Seriously,
Are these self-called "scientists" the same ones that suggested to build an umbrella to stop Gobal Warming?
This new "idea" is OH SO TERRIBLE in OH SO MANY WAYS that it's OH SO DAMM STUPID that we even need (if they have any) to revoke their PhD for the sake of humanity.
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Where is that wall, by the way? It's been nearly two years. Time to get a fucking move on, Donnie. Where's the check from Mexico?
Better hurry, because Bob Mueller (living proof that not ALL republicans are disgusting traitors, just most) is on the way. Get out and vote in November bud, because a blue house is going to turn out badly for your treasonous buddies.
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Actually, glaciers are often stopped by boundaries. But the boundaries need to be *REALLY* sturdy. A mountain range will usually work.
OTOH, if all you want to do is slow down the melting, then redirecting warm ocean currents might suffice. And that seems to be what they're talking about. This doesn't mean it's sensible or practical, but it's not quite as foolish as you're assuming.