Could rising sea levels caused by climate change be thwarted by digging a big hole at the bottom of the sea?
I’m not proposing this as an actual solution, it’s just a dumb idea. But if we dug a huge, wide hole at the bottom of the ocean, or maybe widened the Mariana Trench or something, could that extra space make the sea levels drop enough to keep the land from flooding?
To lower the surface of the ocean 1" you would need to move 1.1 billion cubic kilometers of dirt/rock. That’s 12 million MT Everests worth of material.
If you spread this evenly across the entire surface of the land, it would raise it by 7".
Is it probable? No Is it possible? Technically yes? But that’s purely hypothetical.
Sourse: Duck duck go AI and bad math so take it with a grain of crack
take it with a grain of crack
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The Irish version would also work here.
“Take it with a grain of craic”
I have a grain of crack here for those who are interested.
You don’t need to do many calculations to see that the AI has gone slightly wrong. Since water covers roughly twice as much of the Earth’s surface as land does, lowering the oceans 1 inch should raise the land by about 2 inches, assuming that the volume of dirt isn’t changed by the process of moving it.
More precisely: Area of the oceans = 361,000,000 km^2^ 1 inch = 2.54cm = 0.0000254 km Volume of dirt = 361000000 * 0.0000254 = 9169.4 km^3^ Area of land on Earth = 149,000,000 km^2^ Height of dirt spread over land = 9169.4 / 149000000 = 0.0000615 km = 6.15 cm = 2.4 inches
Not going to say how many Everests as estimates for the volume of Everest seem to be all over the place. But the point stands that it’s a huge amount of material making the idea somewhat impractical.
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