I’ve just read that early explorers believed that there was a sea in the middle of the Land Down Under.
A sea was never found there, but I wonder how difficult it would be to create one. Australia is the lowest continent in the world with an average elevation of only 330 metres. There is an area in the middle of the continent, where the land is below the sea level. It looks like if they put their mind to it, Australians could really create an inland sea and enjoy the benefits of a better climate.
Has this idea ever taken into consideration? How hard can it be?
Lake Eyre is (when full) the largest lake in Australia and at 9,500 km2 is about half the size of Lake Ontario.
It drains almost all of inland northern Australia west of the Great Dividing Range which separates the eastern seaboard from the inland.
Am not sure why you think a salt lake would improve the climate.
Don’t think Bonneville represents a convivial climate and and it’s pretty similar topography even to the extent of Don Campbell setting a world land speed record there.
It’s baking hot and very little fresh water. Barely habitable except for mining and rangeland agriculture.
A larger body of water would have a greater impact on the weather, in my opinion.
The lake can be enlarged into an inland sea by increasing its capacity.
To fill the inland sea, desalinated water can be used.
All the necessary technology is at hand.
There is an ecosystem where you’ll be flooding, and that will be destroyed. Let’s dispense with the required ecological assessments and charge straight into the hypothetical.
In short, you need to dig a trench at, say, 10 meters below sea level, connecting the nearest shore of your proposed lake to the ocean itself. If it’s through dirt, you’ll want to reinforce the sides (and top if it’s tunnelling), and if it’s through rock, you’ve got some serious digging ahead of you.
Very coarsely speaking, prices seem to be around $2000 for one meter of a 4.88 meter diameter tunnel. (Quick and dirty cite: https://vlhc.org/cna/hmm_appendix.pdf) Lake Eyre is roughly 500 kilometers (very roughly) from the nearest seashore. So that’s a price of roughly ten billion dollars.
I don’t think you’d find much appetite for that in Australia’s budget.
I agree that it would extremely expensive. But it would create jobs and give Australian people a vision and a new hope that their country could be turned into a promised land, just like the Dutch have shaped their own country. Have the Dutch affected the ecosystem? Definitely. No one is blaming them for it.
It gets all the water draining from an area larger than the US Mid West.
It still has spent 80% of living memory dry. Where are you going to get the water to fill it permanently?
The lake can be enlarged into an inland sea by increasing its capacity.
The capacity isn’t the issue. There is insufficient water to fill the shallow depression that’s there. Or does your Impossible scheme of grandeur include digging the salt lake to some greater depth?
To fill the inland sea, desalinated water can be used.
What the bloody hell do you think flows from the Channel Country thru the Warburton Creek into Lake Eyre now and for millenia before that?
All the necessary technology is at hand.
Neither the technology or funding on that scale is available
And it would be an exercise of galactic standard environmental vandalism on the driest continent on earth.
California did this by accident about a hundred years ago. It’s not a very nice body of water, and the climate around it is still miserably hot except the water means it’s occasionally hot and full of bugs.
Oh, and even though it was filled with fresh water, it’s now extremely salty, so don’t bother desalinating the water.
I agree that such a project should be carefully assessed and designed by scientists specializing in environment engineering. With proper methods, I believe parts of Australia could be turned into tropical or Mediterranean areas.
Even if this gigantic cesspit changed the climate beyond making it smell, Australia is already blessed with regions that have tropical and Mediterranean climates.
I think you underestimate how large Australia is. If you want to make a big enough difference to affect the climate of the whole country (positively, I assume, which is also absurdly presumptuous) it would have to be even larger than the whole Mediterranean. Something the size of Lake Superior would be nice to visit, but not really achieve much, you have to go large or go home.
The Great Lakes in North America have a great influence on the climate. Their surface area is 244,106 km².
Australia’s total area is 7.692 million km².
Without wishing to be too harsh, it appears to me you have nothing on which to base this belief other than your unsupported assertion. Don’t worry - science is littered with examples of nice ideas that will never actually work. Progress in science is almost always achieved by years of study to gain a deep understanding of a narrow field, followed by incremental progress at the margins. Not with grand ideas formulated after a few minutes of reading. So the best advice to you, if you are interested in this sort of thing, is to study something you love, and maybe one day you can make your own contribution to advance human understanding - if not, well it was still a worthwhile endeavour.
In short, I don’t think either of us is an expert in climate science, the difference between us is that I know I’m not.
Well, basically all of them, but the one I was picking out there was “I believe parts of Australia could be turned into tropical or Mediterranean areas.”. Why do you have this belief? Lord Feldon has pointed out the example of a large inland sea created in California that did not have this effect. I cannot see any reason to believe that the creation of a larger version in Australia would be possible (even disregarding cost) or have a different outcome.
Landscapes and watercourses have formed on Earth over periods of hundreds of millions of years, a bit of engineering isn’t going to change them. One thing the human race has never yet been able to effectively control is the climate.
I can’t argue here. But this is why I started this topic. I still hope somebody more knowledgeable may have information on this. I have researched the subject on the Internet and I couldn’t find anything.
To fill the inland sea, desalinated water can be used.
Desal water is liquid electricity. It’s only economic as source of last resort for human consumption.
Unless you are thinking of solar powered evaporation off a free water surface, which for about 1 year in 10 is precisely what Lake Eyre is. But recovering the water vapour is a a technical issue you have offered no solution.
