Dam the Sea

What about the 70,000+ ships that pass through this strait annually ???

If you can calculate a fee we'll get away with, you are dead cert for 10 % .

We could hang some sort of big wire rope from Gib over to the other side. Couple of big pylons, even static ships, but where there's a will....

For those still reading, is it possible ? Maybe no dam, but a bridge or tunnel ? Yes, I know the history on this one. The cost would be insane, in financial terms....

Is this what you got in mind . This might just come in on budget, with some fishy engineers? looking after things.

Regards JD.

I want one ! Who cares if it makes sense, so long as it gets votes.

I've read a theory that many thousands of years ago a natural plugging event like that occurred causing the Mediterranean to dry up. (The water from the Atlantic flows into the Mediterranean; the Mediterranean evaporates a lot.) When the plug finally gave way, the flood that ocurred wiped out the civilizations that had formed on the dry lake bed. This led to the legends of the flood that occur in ancient texts such as the bible.

No I think that the area concerned was the Black Sea, flooded from the Mediterranean? I remember reading a long time ago that this was based on evidence that the river beds continue down to the bottom of the ocean? and they must have been established before the area flooded?

Regards JD.

Yes, you have the wrong idea. I have never heard of closing the Strait of Gibraltar, in modern or in ancient times, although there used to be a legend of a giant statue that stood over the Strait.

Now the Nazis would have liked to have closed the Strait for obvious reasons of control of the flow of oil to the UK during the conflicts. However, no Nazi evil bastage mastermind engineer could be found for such an undertaking. Everything else they tried as to blockade failed, and I suspect that any modern total blockade would also fail. Britannia rule the waves! America will just drill here, drill now.

Can't be done. Do you realize how many permits you would need?

This is not good peeps !

OK, it's me with a daft 'weekender'. There is much better stuff to read. Savvy has a most excellent blog entry on bird feeders, but that is in no way related. Somebody has to ask more practical questions.

It's the weekend, so why not indulge in some insane stuff. Anybody up for 'back of an envelope' calculations ? Volume, salinity, tidal flow. My first checks seem to suggest that the Med is too salty ().

Answers not expected. The only reason for posting this is to see if CR$ still has the humour we have all enjoyed in the past.

Insane as it seems, could some form of bridge work ? Forget construction aspects, maybe in a few hundred years..... If the thing existed, could there be any benefits?

First, you have a misunderstanding. The salt found in sea water does not come from the sea. The salt comes from the land via rain run off. The salt level then gets concentrated in the ocean and sea by water evaporating from the ocean leaving saltier water. Just look at the fresh waters of the Jordan river that ends in one of the saltiest but smallest downstream bodies of water, the Dead sea.

Second, there is a lot of power in the movement of tidal waters into and out of the Mediterranean but it is debatable how much of this power can be harvested. Then there is the uncertain but likely significant ecological impact that will happen by isolating the Mediterranean from the Atlantic.

I did some brief checks about salinity, but is was hard to get a decent picture when comparing tidal flows.

The joke is a bit upon myself - an 'idiot' question can lead to all sorts.

If this madness ever happened, there's no way we could turn the Med into a resevoir. Water input versus evaporation..nah.

Some sort of huge tidal turbine ? Erm, we struggle with a few hundred meters. Not going to happen anytime soon. Life would be bad if we all thought, 'not going to try it, my daddy said it couldn't be done.

The entire concept is nuts, but that happened to Orville and Wilbur.

Maybe do something with cape horn?

Del

Because of the difference in salt content the water through the strait is layered with the upper level from the Atlantic flowing east and the lower level flowing west....

So giant under water turbines that were half exposed to the upper current and half exposed to the lower current might be conceivable...

http://www.internalwaveatlas.com/Atlas_PDF/IWAtlas_Pg099_StraitGibraltar.PDF

http://formontana.net/uboats.html

Brilliant links ! There's a mass of info in all that .

I've been looking at the wall for a while, just pondering this, and have forgot who made which points (sorry, but it's much appreciated ). There is some theory about the Black Sea having been suddenly formed, a sort of chatastrophic event. As yet, my only knowledge of that is from H2 on the telly. Much as H2 rings alarm bells, it's not absurd. They tied it into Noah and various stuff, but in principle it's not that insane - parts of America were washed out by collapse of glacial dams. England was once linked to France. Take it back further and Scotland was part of America. First search that came up was this one, but I'm sure there is much more on the topic.

From Wiki...FYI

"In December 2003, Spain and Morocco agreed to explore the construction of an undersea rail tunnel to connect their rail systems across the Strait. The gauge of the rail would be 1,435 mm (4 ft 8.5 in) to match the proposed construction and conversion of significant parts of the existing broad gauge system to standard gauge.^[17] While the project remains in a planning phase, Spanish and Moroccan officials have met to discuss it as recently as 2012,^[18] and proposals predict it could be completed by 2025."

Polish up the giant mechanical worm thingy!!

We might have a buyer....

I believe that this would have a short life span in geologic terms. The Med. is slowly pinching closed under plate movement. Of course by throwing enough money at the problem a dam, bridge or tunnel or even a combination of the these would be feasible.

In geologic terms all of humanity is but a brief interlude.

The Dutch did it. Why not one from Gibraltar to Morocco?

Good Luck, Old Salt

Elon Musk could do it.

The Dutch only had one country to play with - a country that would have been at risk had the work not taken place. Nothing to do with power generation or salinity - just everything to do with protecting a nations' people and their property, which is a different game from the one proposed by the Original Poster.

You wont say that when global sea levels rise. The dam could keep things at a nice level for all the Med countries.

I suppose I should scurry off to check a few things. Inflow rates from rivers to the Med. Evaporation rates. Volume of material needed to form a dam. Those are the essential. A few canal docks could be made to keep ships happy. Movement of migrating sea creatures is a problem, as is the lack of tidal action on coasts. If the Severn Barrage ever happens, it will give some indication of the problems and solutions.

Just an incidental, but it was Dutch experts who helped 'reclaim' the Romney Marshes. I may have dropped Norway, but am getting an itch to fly the flag for them .

Flying to ther moon (anywhere, come to think of it) seemed mad at one time.

You appear to think that the Thames Barrage is never used, quite the opposite in fact, here is a news item from 2014:-

SINCE it was built in 1982, the Thames Barrier has been raised 150 times in order to prevent flooding in central London. This year's wet winter has required it to be closed 28 times since December 6, accounting for 18.7 per cent of the total closures in its 32-year history. 12 Feb 2014

It has been a useful tool in keeping the Londoners feet dry!!

They are now considering a newer, higher, longer version may need to be built.....

I know full well, but the question is, did they build it big enough. On top of that, a big tidal search might regard it as the Germsns did the Maginot line and just go around it.

One thing I've not yet read is what would have happened if the Thames Barrier not been there to raise on those occassions. I may be wrong, but I don't think London was flooded by the sea prior to it's construction. Plenty of problems with excessive rainfall, but that's a different issue to the Thames Barrier. It's a tad cynical of me, but they have to raise it a few times to justify it's construction. It seems a bit odd that they've never published a map showing what area would have been flooded if the barrier were not in place.

Global sea levels are not going to rise, in fact due to present trend of global cooling, I suspect that they will decrease. Whatever mental "beverage" you have been handed is laced with poison, so you should put that down, and honestly ask yourself if you want to know the real truth, and then go and find it!

The '' icon means 'tongue in cheek'.

Nope, couldn't find any info to support the notion of falling sea levels.

Well damming the sea is one thing but its sort of absurd because generally we dam water resources so that its helpful for us in power generation, industries, irrigation etc..all using fresh water. So there is no meaning in damming sea water which is saline..It may even cause very serious imbalances too, even done..

There's no major problem with using salty water - a quick search will reveal many projects that do exactly that. That said, I've never looked into the issue of how corosive salinity is handled.

The question is a bit mad, but sometimes throwing such stuff in the air can lead to a huge arrray of unrelated, but interesting, info. The people who run this place give us a little leeway at weeklends. Welcome to the madness .

I don't know if this link has already been posted, but I found it very informative about how the Mediterranean was formed.....I would have loved to have been a time traveller and watched it happen!!!

Though millions of very early people/forerunners (very ape-like I would guess!) and other animals were probably drowned.......I hven'tt bothered to research that.....

mediterranean-formation-deluge

Have fun!

Please do not play with nature. It will rebound on you.

A: is it possible engineeringwise?

B: is it affordable moneywise

C: is it acceptable socialwise.

A,B and C would have to be yes to even start the project.

If so, then the fun starts. Take electricity say, who owns the power? Who owns the cables? etc, etc,

All a bit iffy, I guess.

A project this scale should add to this list of questions or be asked within step A ."What happens when it fails?" Repeatedly this question seems to not be asked when it comes to building a dam. Then there are the tragic times when an engineers design gets corrupted to the point of bypassing their safety concerns.

To Redfred #25

Yes! failure mode is important. It is a basic question I put to suppliers when discussing reliability, warranties and after-sales service. "...what do you do when your products go wrong?..." usually gets some good answers.

Only the Chineses could do it...they wouid possibly name it the two-oceans dam.

I live in a Mediterranean country and I cannot imagine the contamination level it could reach!!!

If it were to change the level of the Med, then the changes could cause colossal environmental and political problems by either covering or exposing more land. Some of that area has political problems already. Are we in non-starter territory here?

If one could dam the sea, he would be a mighty curser!

If the Mediterranean Sea were closed at the west, someone could just open the Suez Canal and keep the "bathtub" full. If it were totally blocked, evaporation might just make this sea more saline than the oceans it interconnects with. I see no advantage, just a lot of ticked off ship commanders who have deadlines to meet!