A Sahara Project?

Sihouette

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A friend of mine and I were talking just the other day about another whacky but??? idea of flooding the Sahara Desert with seawater, creating an inland sea that would change the climate of the Sahara to one of more moisture. Evaporation from that sea would undoubtedly change the weather patterns over the Sahara. One could predict an increase in rainfall in certain areas. One could plant those areas with heat/drought tolerant trees and begin to re-establish the micro-climates of those areas to even potentially sustain agriculture. Take the water from that saline inland sea and desalinate it using solar power readily availible in the region, and use it to begin irrigating these marginal areas. Energy might even be made from thermal saline ponds like the one in Israel.

Don't laugh. It could work. And it would take a tiny dent out of sea levels rising. It might even encourage a restablizing of the ice caps since the Sahara is as big as the whole of the United States and thensome as memory [and atlas] serve. As areas begin to re-green we could expand them inwards until they met. This would be a project for many decades but oh what a worthwhile one?

This idea isn't even quite as farfetched as some proposed by scientists today to affect global warming. It would be a simple affair to pump the water into the Sahara, the real challenge would be the geologists determining where the boundaries of that sea could be. It might not even have to be that big in order to affect the climate there just enough to spark the change.

In addition, a vast area reclaimed like the Sahara and re-greened would have to have a dent in the CO2 problem in the atmosphere. After all, plants drink in C02 and breathe out oxygen..

I'm thinking this climate-conditioner could buffer quite a bit of human industrialized activities. Once the region is stabilized and temperatures are tolerable, sand dunes stop drifting etc., there may even be great potential for oil exploration there, and so on. Again, this place is bigger than the continental US, just one big sandbox waiting to be converted. Right in front of our faces every time we look at a map..
 
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara

The climate of the Sahara has undergone enormous variation between wet and dry over the last few hundred thousand years.[12] During the last glacial period, the Sahara was even bigger than it is today, extending south beyond its current boundaries.[13] The end of the glacial period brought more rain to the Sahara, from about 8000 BC to 6000 BC, perhaps due to low pressure areas over the collapsing ice sheets to the north.[14]

Ok here's a question &/or a concern...say this works {hypothetically} wouldn't that alter/change the regional monsoons and wetland areas that are currently moderately considered non-arid - grasslands? I don't know...I'm just wondering about the other areas that haven't seen the arid impact and if the global impact is already in process would this make the once arid regions lush green pastures again? And our intervention would just make it worse for those areas? Interesting theory and a huge 'WHY NOT' factor!

They did build a bubble/dome complex somewhere during the 50's-60's so that they could study the control oxygen/PH balance/green house affect/human health in a controlled container somewhere in America...SO AGAIN, I SAY "WHY NOT".
 
The average hight of the Sahara desert is 500ft above sea level so any flooding would be limited to the depression areas that are below sea level. The Qattar Depression, in Egypt, is the largest such depression spanning 7,000 sq miles at roughly 440 ft below sea level. If you have the math skills and the time, figure out how much water it would take to fill in such an area.
 
Well...that's a good place to flood then, and the other shallow depressions. And yes, this would affect the entire world in one way or another..just like global warming will if we do nothing. The idea is to exert, or at least attempt to exert some measure of control over what happens.

We may not have ample time to study the impacts on neighboring climates. If we start out the project gradually, we can see if there is an increase in rainfall over the Sahara. The main thing is not to reduce sea levels...totally silly really..the main objective is to create a saline body of water in the Sahara large enough to evaporate and shift weather patterns if even subtley. In fact, subtley might be best.

If you can increase the vegetation in the Sahara, you can not only feed more people but also create more wildlife habitat and create greening that will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere...which currently has too much to keep the ice caps in place.
 
Well...that's a good place to flood then, and the other shallow depressions. And yes, this would affect the entire world in one way or another..just like global warming will if we do nothing. The idea is to exert, or at least attempt to exert some measure of control over what happens.

We may not have ample time to study the impacts on neighboring climates. If we start out the project gradually, we can see if there is an increase in rainfall over the Sahara. The main thing is not to reduce sea levels...totally silly really..the main objective is to create a saline body of water in the Sahara large enough to evaporate and shift weather patterns if even subtley. In fact, subtley might be best.

If you can increase the vegetation in the Sahara, you can not only feed more people but also create more wildlife habitat and create greening that will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere...which currently has too much to keep the ice caps in place.

Man, oh-man...but what to do with all of that SAND...shove it out toward the coast to change the coast line and enlarge the arid area...load it up on barges for those budget strapped places that can't purchase anymore salt & sand for winter preparedness for highways...all that excess and no usage for the abundance!

It would be interesting to see just how long it would take the PH to balance it's self and become 'life friendly' once that area was filled with ocean water!
 
You would have to reclaim the sands by slowly planting sand-tolerant introductory species, xerophiles, allow the detritus associated with those dead plants begin to stabilize the sand and create a shallow topsoil. From there you might be able to plant legumes, in deeper and deeper rooting varieties until the dead root systems would build the soil deeper. This project would go on and on for about 100 years before we could say "hurray!" but each decade would be better than the one before. The polar opposite of what we are dealing with now.

Reclaming wasted land isn't easy, but it also isn't impossible either. It sure beats frying like ants under the CO2 maginfying glass we're under. My major was in environmental biology and I spent most of my youth growing up in a desert of the SW. I looked around and saw a few things, noticed things while the adults were yapping about the latest football game scores..
 
I understand the 'fauna' aspect of planting...but the constant wind blowing/drifts/sand storms would make the removal of a mass amount of those dunes necessary prior to planting anything that might survive the first 30 days...that's the direction that I was focusing on.

How to make that affordable and a worth while endeavor so that the area that the water was going to be pumped into would: 1. be contained, 2. be manage able for cultivation! Would the shipping of large amounts of sand bags be a plausible option for freighters on out bound ships if enough offset credits were awarded for the sand...if that makes any sense?
 
You really like to focus on the sand thing huh? Yes, winds blow sand around and dunes are hard to stabilize, and yet with more rainfall this task will be not so daunting. If you visit beaches in places like Oregon where the wind blows every day yet there is also much rainfall, you find that things take root in the sand dunes there. Small forests pop up in swales between the dunes and creep their way to the tops. The sand-tolerant trees break up the wind, their leaf litter creates a topsoil that strawberries and other sand-loving plants and shrubs can grow in.

Once colonized the region begins to resist the winds. Also if the rainfall increases we can expect temperatures to decrease. I'm not a climatologist but from what I do know, heat over deserts contributes to the winds there.

Also, I'm not proposing that we move in over night with a billion bulldozers and flatten the sand dunes into submission! :eek: This area is larger than the whole United States! I'm proposing flooding lowlands between the dune features, allowing that evaporation alone to alter the climate there, then identify areas that are suitable to begin reclaiming and work our way inwards towards the dunes in a series of green islands ever-expanding. Like I said we should devote the next 100 years or so to this project. It's like another frontier.
 
Here's one map for fun. I'll try to find a topo one too with elevations.

sahara.jpg
 
You really like to focus on the sand thing huh?

:cool: MAP...right in that area {great sand sea} looks to be the optimum place, no humanity to relocate!

but I'm not fixated on it or anything {this is just a really off the wall topic anyway} and it's the most obvious part of the First phase {the 800# gorilla in the room} you can't over look it, it's quite obvious {at least to me} that some of that 'DUNE PILE' will have to GO SOME WHERE ELSE :p
 
Yeah, that's why I said "at least 100 years" to get some really good green islands merging amidst the sand. :)
 
I was watching a show on poor old disappearing Venice Italy last night. It's not like we don't have the saltwater to spare for the project. This was one of dozens of threads bumped by thread-spamming that I wanted to recall for discussion.
 
I was watching a show on poor old disappearing Venice Italy last night. It's not like we don't have the saltwater to spare for the project. This was one of dozens of threads bumped by thread-spamming that I wanted to recall for discussion.

Hey, I almost forgot about a use for all of that sand...since New Orleans sits below sea level and will be flooded many times over with the global warming issue...if there was ever a place to apply all of that sand, mix it with some serious clay product and 'MUD JACK' that area up above the point that they would need any more of those worthless dikes...I wouldn't know just where it would be.

Now that would be a futuristic project that I would love to see a feasibility study done on...to hell with digging a huge tunnel under some stupid sea bed for traffic...lets keep the French Quarter high & dry :cool:

Practice on New Orleans and then take the project to Venice :)
 
Removing some of the sand from the Sahara and replacing it with sea water does seem like a pretty far out project on the face of it, but it may not be.

We quarry sand all over the world for use in concrete, mortar, highways, etc. Often, there is a greater demand than supply for sand. You might think transportation would be an issue, but consider this: We are currently remodeling the kitchen. When we went to pick out granite for the counter tops, we found that granite can be quarried in Brazil, finished in China, and then sent back to California for less than the cost of quarrying and finishing granite right here!

Why that is, I don't know, and neither did the granite broker.

There are some questions that need to be answered still:

Who would be the one to carry out this project?

When someone is affected negatively in one way or another, who would compensate them, and how?

What unintended consequences might there be from a project this big?
 
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Who would be the one to carry out this project?

Flooding of the Qattara Depression would be a project for the Lybians and Egyptians to work out since the project would affect both considerably. As for flooding the depression, the norther most edge of the depression is at El Alamein which is very close to the sea. Cutting a trench from the sea to the depression would take relatively little effort. Its all quite acedemic but certainly an interesting topic.
 
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