Building Islands

Dredge up sand and other materials from around the atoll and pile it up on the atoll until land stays above the high tide mark. I'm sure there's more to it but that's the fundamental idea.

TThey throw down big chunks of stuff, rocks, concrete do dads and fill in the spaces withstand and dirt.

As redfred stated, dredge and fill.

The atoll is a ring of coral reef or a volcanic crater (caldera). They are simply filled in to form an island.

The same way we replenish the sand on our beaches here....the problem is it needs to be built up again every now and then due to erosion....with no structure to hold the sand in place, plant roots, coral formations, infrastructure, it just migrates back to where it was..

http://www.beachapedia.org/Shoreline_Structures

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/look-how-quickly-china-is-building-its-island-bases-out-1691571576

either by dredging or super dredging.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQP_7bT4u30

You have to be careful with displacement or you can cause Global Dynamic Balance Upset!

Yeah, it might accidently extend your national boarder into the South China Sea. Thank goodness the Global Community would react promptly and decisively if a nation ever tried to do that way before the new land mass ever became useable... right? Wouldn't they? Oh... never mind.

Silly man, that is why we have Global Harmonic Balancing on each pole (the earth is a two pole system). I ain't talking barber pole either. Foget about it!

In addition, keep rebuilding them as they erode away. Yes, that point doesn't get mentioned much, constant maintenance is required even when sea wall and other barriers are used, wave erosion still occurs.

For example

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/8271643/The-World-is-sinking-Dubai-islands-falling-into-the-sea.html

Doing it near the shore won't be difficult but building in deepsea in midocean is worthwhile as a platform in an emergency if a novel method(floating island) can be found.

It is playing with nature. Water displaced will show up somewhere else and cause floods. Better to avoid such creation of land island.

If they're dredging next to the 'new landmass,' won't the 'displaced water' just fall into the trench made by the 'displaced seafloor,' or does displacement not work that way?

It is better that people learn to love water, to embrace water, to live in water and learn to hold our breath longer and longer until we can breath water. And then we can laugh at the Dutch!

We do it on the West Coast of Florida all the time...same place every year! We have a tourist tax to pay for it to the tune of about $5 Million for a mile of 'Beach Renourshment' in front of the 40-50 beachfront bars.

It all eventually ends up in the next navigatable pass immediately to the South connecting the Gulf to the Intercoastal Waterway so then the Army Corps of Engineers comes in and dredges out the pass. They, of course, do the work for 'free'. ;-)

Repeat annually as needed..

Wait a minute. If the Army Corps of Engineers do this for free then where does the tourist tax money go?

Towards sand pounding and sand castle lessons.

Tax money puts the new sand on the beach...6 months later the Corps pumps it out of the channels.

Precisely. ACE do not do it for free. It is a part of the tax money coming back to the region for beach goers and boaters using the dredged channels.

You can check out a program in the Impossible Engineering series on how the airport island in Osaka Bay was constructed using 'sand tubes' to dewater the underlying material, and creating a lagoon which was then filled in using material from a couple of handy mountains. (Kansai I think)

When landowners with lakefront property are faced with stinky beach sand, they hire companies that haul in and deposit clean sand with special hopper trucks equipped with eductors that get the required water from submersible pumps placed in the lake. This way, the flip flops, pop cans, dirty pampers and ciggy butts are covered.

They must have eaves-dropped when I told a friend my idea: Get a ship and fill it with dirt from texas, then haul it to Japan to make more land there where the price is very high.

Get a ship and fill it with dirt from Texas, then haul it to Japan to make more land there where the price is very high.

Interesting idea. But we should be careful.

If we (the people of this planet) continue to smooth out the high spots by taking dirt above sea level and putting it below sea level in an effort to increase land area of other countries (or even of our own countries) the surface of the Earth will eventually be covered with water. Or so I was told by a physicist many years ago.

I've not validated his statement on my own, so my warning may be un-needed. Regardless, just because Texas (or some other place) doesn't need the dirt right now, doesn't mean it won't be useful to have sometime in the future.

Don't worry. There will always be a human desire (and therefore a profit motive) to hurtle down a snow covered mountain on tires and/or skis.

So true.

That reminds me, maybe I should start planning my next winter vacation....hmmm Steamboat Springs?

And a desire, by snow, to hurtle down on humans.

According to this site:
Ongoing erosion will wear down the world's highest mountains in just a few hundred million years, which is just a fraction of the Earth's age of 4.6 billion years. If the planet was a perfectly smooth sphere, the oceans would cover the entire globe to a depth of 2.8 thousand meters. So, we can tell right away that high, dry land must be continuously recreated and pushed up out of the water.

Yes, and plate tectonic movement will continue to make new mountains at the same time that erosion will be making them smaller. Folding, volcanoes and fault line (block) mountains will continue to be produced long after humanity forgets how to ski.

plate tectonic movement will continue to make new mountains

One of the special things about this great planet.

Once upon a time in Texas, there were several engineering students competing for a prize on fence building. (We require many fences).

The Texas Tech guys dug some clean holes, placed the posts, and packed the dirt piles around each post neatly, and stretched their wire bull stout.

The Texas Longhorn gents were clever and used an electronic fence with collars on the steers, that keep them on campus.

The Texas A&M Aggies started off great! The dug the required number of holes for the posts, placed the posts in the holes (which were exceedingly precise and accurate in depth, and the fence post alignment was in the usual military precision. The Aggies engineers then had a quandry! What to do with the left-over dirt....so they dug another hole, but the dirt would not fit, so they dug another and still the dirt would not fit, and so on and so on.... at last count they were seen still digging holes off somewhere near Nacogdoches.

You leave our Texas dirt alone you nasty Coloradian! At least you are not a Colodegree, or a Colosteradian.

Fischer-Price or Playskool could be contracted to collect all the plastic swirling around in the ocean and convert it into an Island. It could be called Plasticenia.

Careful....then boys would become infertile. See here.

Amazing.

Plastic water piping has turned the population into rabbits here.

Good choice.

http://www.app.com/article/A4/20090608/GREEN/107130005

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pus_ngzWu2c

http://www.beach-bulletin.com/page/content.detail/id/522618/Marine-consultant-offers-advice----.html