# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged geoengineering

33

What does it take to reduce the salinity? The salinity of sea water is around 35 g/kg. There are around 1,350,000,000 km³ of water, so roughly 1.3x1021 kg of seawater (1 kg/l, which is a bit off for saltwater of course, probably by 35 g). Which contains about 4.7x1019 kg of salt. To reduce the salinity to just 34 g/kg, you need to extract 1.4x1018 kg of salt ...

19

The residue dry powder you refer to is salt. Salt is toxic to most plants. The United Nations claims the world is already losing 2000 hectares per day of farm land to salt-induced degradation. This is land that is used to feed people. In some situations, salt from affected lands can contaminate underground sources of drinking water, which will affect people, ...

17

The bad part about geo-engineering are the unknown unknowns, to paraphrase a certain US politician. Our climate models are wrong. All models are wrong, but some are useful.. Our models are useful, but not quite useful enough to trust them when they tell us massively spraying stuff into the stratosphere or the oceans is mostly harmless. Our models can't ...

13

This is an interesting question & I've been waiting to see what answers, if any, would be written. One affect of creating such a lake would be a localized increase in humidity in the vicinity of the new lake, but nothing that would significantly increase rainfall. By bringing in salty sea water there could be a risk of contaminating existing ...

10

A nuclear explosion in the subsurface will result in ground motion which in theory can trigger an earthquake (due to passage of dynamic waves) if a locked fault has already accumulated sufficient strain over the last few decades/centuries due to slow motion of plates. Having said that all the nuclear stockpile in the world is not enough to obliterate even a ...

10

Fundamentally your reasoning is flawed because the major composition of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen. "Pumping a few parts-per-million" of some other gas into the atmosphere won't do anything to the relative contribution of GHGs to global warming. GHG's contributions will still be felt the same, regardless of the presence of any other gas. The "...

9

The oceans are salty because the slightly acidic rainwater dissolves minerals from ores and rocks and runs into the sea. This is a continual process, a consequence of erosion. However, the salinity of the oceans has been stable for millions of years, indicating that there is an equilibrium between processes in both directions. Salt is removed from the oceans ...

9

Barring the technical feasibility of what you are proposing, there's a few points to consider which make your proposal problematic. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. If you increase evaporation, you increase GHGs in the atmosphere. The albedo of water is very low, so if you increase surface area of water on Earth, you decrease the albedo Clouds are ...

8

I think the introduction of the paper itself covers this adequately: … a growing number of studies have investigated regional SG application scenarios, which could prove preferential to a global application by restricting the geospatial magnitude of the climate response or by being used to target specific climate changes8,9,10,11. The cited references are: ...

8

Nevada is 286,367 km² in area. With a conservative average evaporation of 2500 mm/yr in your desert, a lake of that size would evaporate 22686 m3/s. That is a flow larger than the average river discharge of the Nile. As you can see in the plot, the best price for pumping water to an elevation of only 50 m above the sea level is 0.131 \$/3.78 m3, so to pump ... 8 Seconding eveything that @gerrit mentioned. Additionally, another major problem with geo-engineering is that once we've started these processes and essentially borrowed time to offset mitigation measures, we'll have put ourselves in a situation where these measures will need to be continued almost indefinitely, regardless of the risks of negative side ... 8 If this would work, would$O_3$free-floating in very loose clouds in space help deflect solar radiation at all? No, for many reasons: Your cloud will disperse. That's what gases do in vacuum. And then the dispersed cloud will get swept away by radiation pressure and the solar wind. So you'll have to be constantly replenishing your loose cloud. There are 3 ... 7 There are several journal articles on this topic, for example Optimal Sunshade Configurations for Space-Based Geoengineering near the Sun-Earth L1 Point. Being truly at the L1 point is unsuitable because the radiation pressure of the photons acting on the shade (like solar sail) would disrupt the equilibrium, so the equilibrium point is shifted toward the ... 7 There have been a range of studies on the issue published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and other scientific journals. The short answer is "yes." The longer answer is "yes, but...." In Climatic impacts of stratospheric geoengineering with sulfate, black carbon and titania injection, Jones, et. al. (2016) note: In this paper, we examine the ... 7 I see three issues to be considered and will address them in what I think is reverse order of importance: 3) Cost: you have considered this with solar power and by trying to use mud to reduce infiltration through the lake bed. Fair enough, for now let's assume the scheme could be cost effective. 2) Negative impacts on the environment. You will get ... 7 First things first, the value of 100 for the greenhousivity of standard air is an average for a mixture of gases, this necessarily implies the existence of gases with a value less than 100. This isn't a good way to look at the greenhouse effect. I mean no offense, but it's simply not accurate. To get a more realistic understanding, you have to ... 7 Instead of using sodium bicarbonate why not use limestone instead? Limestone is already used on an industrial scale to neutralise acids and acidic solutions. Also, sodium bicarbonate needs to be manufactured, whereas limestone just needs to be dug up. The manufacturing of sodium bicarbonate would unnecessarily use energy and potentially create more carbon ... 7 No, you can't stop an earthquake with a nuclear weapon. You can't even start one. You asked if you could "obliterate a plate" with a nuclear explosion. Definitely not. Plates are between about 10 and 100 km thick, and as you can see from this map, the earth's 15 large plates are very large indeed: As you can see at the pockmarked Nevada Test Site, nuclear ... 6 Is it possible to create clouds by pumping water into volcanoes? Maybe, but it's a really bad idea. Here's why: Volcanoes are unexpected and change with time. You can waste two years building a facility that does it, only for the volcano to cease being active and become dormant. Alternatively, the volcano might blow up and destroy your infrastructure. You ... 6 The question is slightly confused, because reducing the temperature of the oceans, in a direct sense, doesn't require energy - it releases it. The amount that is released is simply related to the mass and specific heat capacity of seawater, as you suggest. The missing question, though, is why the ocean is cooling. For it to happen naturally and simply ... 6 How exactly are you planning to mine the lunar regolith for oxygen? The oxygen is chemically bonded to metallic cations and it is very energy intensive to extract as molecular oxygen. You might as well not block the sunlight and use solar panels as an energy source for the separation of oxygen. Mining in itself is a very dusty endeavour, and given that the ... 5 The first thing to do is to stop putting pollution in the air, particularly very small particulate matter that are produced by combustion. For the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008, the Chinese government forced the polluting plants and factories in the vicinity of Beijing and nearby areas to stop operating for weeks prior to the games and during the games to ... 5 Water has a large thermal capacity. which is why the temperature change between seasons is gradual rather than sudden, especially near the oceans. For water to lose heat time is required. By changing the albedo of the ocean just prior to a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon passing over a section of water will not give the water enough time to cool down to have ... 5 Coring is an important method to get detailed information about the formations, however, it's very time-consuming and costive, so it's only applied when geologists and reservoir engineers need high-resolution data. It is more common in ore prospecting and mining, mapping for infrastructure and basic geological understanding of the 3-dimentional structures. ... 5 The arrival of plants can only reduce the total CO2 levels because they metabolize carbon and oxygen. Plants don't make CO2 appear which wasn't there, they only absorb and release ambient CO2. Two ways that the ocean can absorb more CO2 through a higher atmosphere concentration, and through acidification of limestone which can dissolve the limestone. If an ... 4 I will answer the question with some simplifying assumptions that might then provide a coarse guess of the area needed. First lets assume that temperatures have risen$1^{o}C\$ and that the cooling film acts as increasing surface albedo effectively reflecting that an additional fraction of sunlight (93/1366) from earth. By following the footsteps of the ...

4

What is the best way to actually make the Earth lose heat? TL;DR: Stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The easiest approach in terms of human effort would be to let the Earth warm up a tiny bit. Thanks to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, a tiny increase in the Earth's effective temperature will easily rectify the ~0.6 watts/meter2 imbalance in ...

4

It depends on which pole. The south pole is in the middle of Antarctica, with mean temperatures of -57°C, liquid water doesn't exist there and the air is extremely dry. Therefore, I would say that it is not possible to create more ice due to the lack of liquid water. And if there were any liquid water it would freeze naturally. This will make sense if we ...

4

First things first: This is an extremely, massively bad idea because except for a few places, there are intervening countries between India and the Tibetan Plateau. Those other countries are not going to like it when India blasts a valley through the Himalaya. More importantly, this an extremely bad idea because it will have exactly the opposite of the ...

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