# Creating a sea in Australia **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 14, 2020, 8:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059 "2020-08-14T08:42:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/81 "2025-01-07T22:14:39Z")
Perhaps a chance. If you added some treadmills ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/82 "2025-01-07T22:26:30Z")
There’s a dyke about 8 miles long to try to bring the north back part of the Aral Sea. There’a a country - Netherlands - where they’v created whole areas of land and turned a bay into a freshwater lake… Egypt has being trying to create an alternate to the Nile, flooding the Toshka lakes off of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam. Slow going, but current satellite images suggest some progress, now that Sudan isn’t hogging all the water. I’m trying to think where a water creation project has been a negative, except when it involves damming a river. Usually it’s the other way around, draining an area causes problems. (I’ll make an exception for the Salton Sea, but IIRC that was mostly an accident.) ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/83 "2025-01-07T22:44:10Z")
Well you aren’t creating water, you are transferring salt water 500km to a dry salt lake which is a max of 6m deep and subject to 2.5m annual evaporation to create a wasteland 10 times the area of the Salton Sea … deliberately. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/84 "2025-01-07T22:44:56Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > (I’ll make an exception for the Salton Sea, but IIRC that was mostly an accident.) That’s mostly the objection, though. This idea would be the Salton Sea writ very large and quite deliberately. There’s very little rainfall and a relatively high amount of evaporation. ETA: Ninja’d! ETA2: The thing about water creation projects in the works is…well, the engineers looked at it and said it might be feasible and might make sense. They’d be silly signing off on something that wouldn’t work. Likewise, the same sorts of people say this idea is infeasible and unwise. Context matters! ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2025, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/85 "2025-01-08T00:10:58Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > I’m trying to think where a water creation project has been a negative, except when it involves damming a river. Usually it’s the other way around, draining an area causes problems. > **[World's Biggest Man-Made River: The Mega $25 Billion Great Man-Made River...](https://constructionreviewonline.com/construction-projects/worlds-biggest-man-made-river-faces-challenges-the-mega-25-billion-great-man-made-river-in-libya-project/)** > > Known for its arid climate and water scarcity, one North African state, Libya, has pinned its hopes on an impressive network of pipes and reservoirs to meet its irrigation needs. The Great Man-Made River (GMMR) is a monumental infrastructure project... Stranger ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2025, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/86 "2025-01-08T00:32:41Z")
The GMMR “channels high-quality freshwater from ancient aquifers”, which akin to all the other “water creation projects” for irrigation, starts with fresh water. The Lake Eyre Inland Sea proposal starts with ocean water. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2025, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/87 "2025-01-08T00:47:19Z")
> [@penultima\_thule](#): > > The GMMR “channels high-quality freshwater from ancient aquifers”, which akin to all the other “water creation projects” for irrigation, starts with fresh water. The Great Man-Made River is also an ecological nightmare and will never return anything like the outrageous cost to maintain—much less the US$25B to construct—the project. Agreed that there is no advantage and enormous downsides to trying to artificially recreate the Lake Eyre Inland Sea. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2025, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/88 "2025-01-08T03:49:18Z")
I’ll agree there. The Eyre Lake project description glosses over how complex the canal would be. Presumably they need to dig some pretty deep trenches to create a sea-level canal into the interior. The other question is whether the evaporation would produce enough rain local enough to the lake to fall back into its drainage area. And yes, at a certain point the salt would overwhelm the lake. And if there were serious railfall once in a while flushing it out to sea, the whole bay where the canal originates would presumably become an over-salted dead zone. (The Dea Sea project had a rise of IIRC 600 feet from the Red Sea and needed some serious pumping. Eyre claims it would be a sea level canal.) Of all the GMMR’s problems, the results of the new expnases of water appears to be nothing since it never happened. It does not say that this would feed any lakes near the coast, either. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2025, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/89 "2025-01-17T00:09:40Z")
People messing with Australia’s ecology have caused massive problems even when operating on a tiny scale ([Common myna - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_myna#Australia)). I can’t even imagine what a massive experiment like this would do. It’s worth noting that desalination on a big scale creates salt on a big scale. That salt all has to go somewhere - likely pumped back into the ocean with much less water. Australia is already one of the saltiest places on Earth ([Salinity in Australia - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia)). It’s one of the reasons that stromatolites have survived into the present day at Shark Bay ([Shark Bay - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Bay)). ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2025, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/90 "2025-01-17T17:46:44Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > People messing with Australia’s ecology have caused massive problems… The Dead Sea or Great Salt Lake are good examples of a dead end (so to speak) body of water. I doubt anyone anywhere contemplates desalination on a massive scale to feed a lake. It seems the goal with this australian dream is to create a body of water that feeds a precipitation cycle to the point where seasonally the resulting rainfall would flush leftover salt out to sea. However, I doubt the result (if it actually worked) would be sufficient to keep salinity under control, and I agree that should there be an outflow at times, it would likely be fatally salty for the ecology around the inlet and a ways out to sea. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2025, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-a-sea-in-australia/918059/91 "2025-01-17T17:55:20Z")
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