We could really use a new Aral sea, but intuitively I’d expected that this would be a tiny dent in the depth of the oceans. So, to the maths:
Wikipedia claims that from 1960 to 1998 the volume of the Aral sea dropped from its 1960 amount of 1,100 km^3 by 80%.
I’m going to give that another 5% for more loss since then, as the South Aral Sea has now lost its eastern half enitrely.
This gives ~1100 * .85 = 935km^3 of water that we’re looking to replace.
The Earth is ~500m km^2 in surface area, approx. 70% of which is water = 350m km^2 in water.
935 km^3 over an area of 350m km^2 comes to a depth of 2.6 mm.
This is massively larger that I would have predicted, and it gets better. The current salinity of the Aral Sea is 100g/l which is way higher than that of seawater at 35g/l, so we could pretty much pump the water straight in still with net environmental gain. Infact this is a solution to the crisis that has been previously proposed, although it looks like most people would rather dilute the seawater first.
To acheive the desired result of 1 inch drop in sea level, we only need to find 9 equivalent projects around the world. Sadly, the only other one I know of is Lake Chad, which is significantly smaller than the Aral Sea. However, since the loss of the Aral Sea is due to over-intensive use of the water for farming, the gives us an idea of how much water can be contained onland in plants: I would expect that we might be able to get this amount again if we undertook a desalination/irrigation program in the Sahara.
Dead Sea and Salton Sea leap to mind as good projects.
Also could we store more water in the atmosphere? If we just poured water into a desert like the Sahara, most of it would evaporate before it flowed back to the sea. This would seem to raise the average moisture content of the atmosphere. Sure eventually it gets rained back down, but this would seem to be a feature more than a bug for a world that keeps looking for more fresh water. Indeed my mind is currently inventing interesting methods for moving the water around using purely the heat from the sun as an energy source.
However, since the loss of the Aral Sea is due to over-intensive use of the water for farming, the gives us an idea of how much water can be contained onland in plants
Isn’t it more of an indication of how much water can be contained in the Aral Sea basin? The plants don’t need to contain all of the missing Aral Sea water at once, they just need to be watered faster than the Sea is being refilled by rainfall. How much water does rainfall supply every year, as a percentage of the Sea’s total volume?
We could really use a new Aral sea, but intuitively I’d expected that this would be a tiny dent in the depth of the oceans. So, to the maths:
Wikipedia claims that from 1960 to 1998 the volume of the Aral sea dropped from its 1960 amount of 1,100 km^3 by 80%.
I’m going to give that another 5% for more loss since then, as the South Aral Sea has now lost its eastern half enitrely.
This gives ~1100 * .85 = 935km^3 of water that we’re looking to replace.
The Earth is ~500m km^2 in surface area, approx. 70% of which is water = 350m km^2 in water.
935 km^3 over an area of 350m km^2 comes to a depth of 2.6 mm.
This is massively larger that I would have predicted, and it gets better. The current salinity of the Aral Sea is 100g/l which is way higher than that of seawater at 35g/l, so we could pretty much pump the water straight in still with net environmental gain. Infact this is a solution to the crisis that has been previously proposed, although it looks like most people would rather dilute the seawater first.
To acheive the desired result of 1 inch drop in sea level, we only need to find 9 equivalent projects around the world. Sadly, the only other one I know of is Lake Chad, which is significantly smaller than the Aral Sea. However, since the loss of the Aral Sea is due to over-intensive use of the water for farming, the gives us an idea of how much water can be contained onland in plants: I would expect that we might be able to get this amount again if we undertook a desalination/irrigation program in the Sahara.
Dead Sea and Salton Sea leap to mind as good projects.
Also could we store more water in the atmosphere? If we just poured water into a desert like the Sahara, most of it would evaporate before it flowed back to the sea. This would seem to raise the average moisture content of the atmosphere. Sure eventually it gets rained back down, but this would seem to be a feature more than a bug for a world that keeps looking for more fresh water. Indeed my mind is currently inventing interesting methods for moving the water around using purely the heat from the sun as an energy source.
Isn’t it more of an indication of how much water can be contained in the Aral Sea basin? The plants don’t need to contain all of the missing Aral Sea water at once, they just need to be watered faster than the Sea is being refilled by rainfall. How much water does rainfall supply every year, as a percentage of the Sea’s total volume?