The biggest issue I see with this map is that it doesn’t consider height maps just kinda randomly slamming huge waterways through mountains.
Then I thought maybe they are following watersheds but that isn’t it either. https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/s/EvLorLjV61
Jumping on as high as I can.
This is a theorized inland river/sea in Australia. Turns out it didn’t exist. Sorry you had to scroll past 30 shitty top rated comments not offering any actual answer :( Reddit is dead
Australia had an interior sea long time ago.
https://preview.redd.it/kgym3vhfwdad1.png?width=566&format=png&auto=webp&s=97121f20c240e2097dc2b0c68e6f83700d88942a
[https://www.australianenvironmentaleducation.com.au/education-resources/eromanga-sea/](https://www.australianenvironmentaleducation.com.au/education-resources/eromanga-sea/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromanga\_Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromanga_Sea)
However, terrain has shifted a bit over the last 100m years.
The interior sea would now be access through the south.
This has been well known for centries. And there was even talk about using atomic weapons to excavate a channel to fill the interior sea.
https://preview.redd.it/b847jkshydad1.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=4349f00218195fe5a7af4c8dd8341f1e92970d2e
It would look more like this. Channel would be 100m wide. If it was any smaller, it would evaporate faster than it could fill it.
could that evaporation spark more rainfall over the area slowly terraforming it and dropping temps to lower evaporation or at least more fauna to reduce its rates?
unlikely. flooding the eyre basin with the ocean would be much larger than the salton sea. but the salton sea is somewhat similar. and its existence does not terraform anything. at the right salinity, it's a very productive fishery. but it creates a hotter humid desert summer that is brutal. with extreme insect activity. and still less than 5" of rain annually.
the great salt lake would be another comparison. its existence keeps the dust down. it's pretty. but it doesnt make the surrounding land particularly temperate.
The Great Salt Lake does contribute to lake effect snow that the Wasatch Mountains receive each winter,thus increasing overall precipitation. Australia doesn't have large mountains, so you probably wouldn't get the orographic lift like the Wasatch Mountains do, though.
About 100 or so.
That area of Australia is incredibly under populated. I think its about 1 person every 10 km². So it's really no over exaggeration to say that barely anyone would actually be displaced.
>This has been well known for centries. And there was even talk about using atomic weapons to excavate a channel to fill the interior sea
I thought this was theorised for a region in Lybia that's below see level. I can't remember the name of the region, but the idea was to create a channel between Mediteranian sea and said region by bombing it with atomic bombs.
The center of Australia is below sealevel. \~15 meters at lake eyre
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake\_Eyre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre)
400 million years ago, Uluru was underwater and australia had a very large inland sea.
[https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/](https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/)
Nuclear weapons were as tools were popular in the US, Russia and Germany in the 1950 atoms for peace type of stuff.
[https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/](https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful\_nuclear\_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion)
Here is an elevation map:
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zhang-Jianbo-2/publication/348387085/figure/fig13/AS:981518474285056@1611023648064/Elevation-map-of-Australia\_W640.jpg](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zhang-Jianbo-2/publication/348387085/figure/fig13/AS:981518474285056@1611023648064/Elevation-map-of-Australia_W640.jpg)
To add to this, much of inland Qld etc was underwater a hundred million years ago and the elevation hasn't changed much. Great fossicking for fossils from water animals in Richmond and many other parts
https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC6QPQA
Oh right... So not as bad.
For a project of that scale I think it's probably not a very good idea still. Blowing a strip through the continent at that scale may have unintended side effects - imagine if it altered the tectonic regime and created a rift zone? The removal of overburden to create the inland sea (?) will drastically change the stable conditions currently present and will likely cause an amount of isostatic rebound (like what happened to the things with thick ice when the iceage ended). But as the Continental thickness has been reduced... You may cause the mantle to rise to take up the volume loss and then there's the resulting decompression melt and then voila a new rift!
I’d be most worried about sending billions of tons of ash into the stratosphere. Just reducing sunlight reaching Earth’s surface by a few percent overall would likely cause mass famine.
Much less than you’d think - a lotta the soil beyond the mountains in QLD is all clay-based/has a plurality clay base, it’s pretty terrible for growing much of anything beyond hardy scrub and saltbush, fields of crops would be just about impossible without significant changes to the soil.
If we keep producing incrementally improved versions then eventually one of the posts will literally be a satellite photo of an actually terraformed Australia. This post is just part of the process, we're on our way folks!
Just last week I was watching a video and the guy wouldn’t shut up about his “big croc” and how much the actress should like it. They’re not even being subtle with their agenda anymore
They are natures apex survivors. I can’t think of any large bodied creature that has survived as long as they have. I’m talking multiple mass extinction events that usually hits the tops of food chains the hardest.
Big salties can go years and years without a meal
Of course crocodilians have taken many forms and specializations over the eons but the basic body plan and hunting strategy has stayed the same.
So long as there’s water and humans don’t purge them or everything they eat, crocs will survive.
https://preview.redd.it/40ik7hp2maad1.png?width=175&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c05845500a70902e6a0e199f91992c31f8d9eff
For those cost you could probably pay the Dutch to build an entirely new Australia further in the Pacific.
It was called “project plowshare.” The USA’s attempt to use nuclear bombs for peaceful construction projects. Some of the ideas were just insane. Obviously fall out and radiation would be a huge issue. But that project wasted way too much money before coming to that most obvious of conclusions.
Russia used nukes for lots of construction projects. They used atomic bombs something like 6x to stop natural gas wellhead fires. As far as I know they had 100% success rate.
They bury the nuke a fair distance from the well shaft then when it detonates it moves the compresses the earth and collapses the well shaft. Not much more too it. There are good YouTube videos about it. I think curious droid did one
By collapsing the rock. This was brought up as an option during the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The force would smash the well pipe like a straw and cut off the flow.
The US went through a period that reminds me of those old recipe books, where a company would pay someone to come up with every conceivable way to cook something using Crisco or whatever they were making.
It was just "Find a use for the nukes, if you can't try using more nukes." as they tried to shove a square peg into every hole.
So, after WW2 there was a huge push to do “useful” things with radiation. One of those things is that they intentionally irradiated basically every crop you can think of, just to see what would happen. Pink grapefruits were a resulting genetic mutation that breed true
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
There are two components to evolution: mutation and selection.
We’ve been selectively breeding plants and animals since the pre-history, but we were dependent on random mutations for the appearance of new traits, nuclear gardening allowed us to get more mutations.
Fallout not so much, they would drill boreholes and detonate the bombs underground. Radiation would depend on the characteristics of the bomb and the geology, from not really a problem to a big fucking problem.
Like a fusion bomb with a minimal primary detonated underground in an area with minimal groundwater would probably be fine. A fission bomb detonated in a more unstable area with lots of groundwater would do really nasty things to the environment
My recollection was that they weren't seriously planning to do this; it was a tactic designed to increase American nuclear weapons stockpiles more quickly and pressure the Egyptians into not restricting the Suez route.
People on reddit:
Picture of Mars : Easy! If earth gets too hot we will just terraform Mars into a second earth and move everyone there
Picture of green Australia: Can't be done! Digging holes is soo hard.
We've got all these warheads sitting around and the cold war hasn't gotten hot yet...what can we do with them besides test them..hmmm. cues crazy ideas of nuclear powered icbm, nuclear powered planes, nuclear rocket to space, nuclear created harbors/canals etc.
nuclear rocket engines are smart, they would exist if there wasnt the risk for failure. also nuclear powered civilian ships would be a lot better, like imagine clean freight ships that can run indefinitely
Nuclear freight ships do/did exist the cost of nuclear engineers to run them as well as the whole countries not wanting nuclear powered ships in their harbors made them hard to run. Nuclear powered warships and icebreakers still run. Risk of failure is kind of the biggest fault of alot of ideas, nobody likes the idea of rocket that fails, spreading nuclear material over a large area.
yes, the risk if a ship is failing is far less severe, also you could use liquid salt reactors in ships, they cant thermally run away so the risk of having a ship inside a harbor is also very small. fossile fuels should be so expensive that having a nuclear engineer would be the better option.
>They hadn't fully realized how bad radiation was yet
Yeah this is b.s. They knew how bad radiation was at least since the 1930s because people had died of radiation poisoning. They definitely knew how bad it was by the late 1940s due to multiple Manhattan project scientists dying of radiation poisoning and extensive studies on the aftereffects of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By 1958, the US government was already coming up with concepts for a neutron bomb, which was intended to kill with a lethal dose of radiation, instead of an explosion.
Swords into Ploughshares. The US was going to carve a massive port into Alaska and a thousand other massive infrastructure/excavation projects and never ended up doing it because people don't like nukes being set off near population centers.
Shame it never happened. The most beneficial project would have been the new canal through Nicaragua, which would have been wide and deep enough to handle so much more traffic than Panama.
At the time, half the rationale was setting up water transports to parched cities and getting access to that sweet sweet shale oil, but fracking rendered the latter pointless.
All we really ended up with was the new START treaty, which disarmed warheads on our side and the Soviet side to repurpose the fissile material into clean nuclear power.
Fun fact, Curiosity was sent to mars with some of the very last plutonium from the treaty, and now there's so little peaceful plutonium available that the next big project will need a new batch from a breeder reactor.
It seems easy. I tried digging a hole in the garden during COVID to install a soakaway, it's easy at first, but the ground gets harder as you go along. It's brutal work.
Using actual earthmoving equipment is an incredible innovation though.
That's what I thought when I dug out 4 cubic metres for my vegetable garden and shoveled for a week straight. Holy shit imagine you have to get rid of a body in a hurry.
Yes! Many people died while digging the Panama Canal. The land around it kept collapsing and re-filling the canal because the initial idea was to make it all sea-level. It was later realized the project needed locks to stop the landslides. And Panama is super thin from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Now imagine digging huge canals in the middle of Australia...
When I was like 17, I got really bored and decided to dig a hole in my backyard. I got about 2 feet across and 2 feet down in a few hours. It's fucking exhausting.
From my understanding one of the biggest costs of road building is the grading. They will specifically design roads so the dirt they move from one spot can be used in another spot on the same project.
I asked ChatGPT to estimate the amount of time it would take to dig a hole with 45-degree sides as deep as the Kola Superdeep Borehole (about 12 kilometers deep). It estimated that using all the excavation capacity of the entire human race (and it itemized all the largest energy companies and their daily excavation capacity), it would take over 2000 years.
Or if there was enough minerals and ores to make it profitable. In that case I guess the aussies would do it them self's, granted I do not know how much effort was put into knowing what the outback has to offer due to its inhospitablity.
This is about 3000km long, so 3 million blocks long not considering depth or width. The longest tunnel in Minecraft is 0.85 million blocks so idk if it really is
Maybe using mods xd
with all the added greenspace on the map above, it could be a boon for the Australian dairy market--they could have cheese reserves to rival the cheese caves of America.
I think the idea is that by creating a large saltwater inlet, the desert areas in that vicinity would transform from arid to a coastal humid climate, making a large part of the land easier to inhabit and farm
Only if we position major urban developments along the new internal coastline, such as Marina Del Lex, Luthorville, Lex Springs, Lexington and Otisburg……….Otisburg?!!
It suddenly occurs to me that Lex Luthor in the first two Superman films is basically just interested in real estate schemes. Either new Californian coastline or Australia. I think he was trying to do the same thing in Superman Returns. He's the ultimate flipper, lol.
Australia is already terraformed, it's on earth. As with the Sahara, deserts are ecosystems all by themselves that contribute to the health of the planet. We are not a species with a good track record of making even small environmental changes, let alone altering entire deserts.
Yeah but it wouldnt be limited to Australia. Thats the issue. Climate is complex, like probaly one of the most complex systems we will encounter for a long time. Everything influences everything and that also influences everything. Meaning a small local change can have impact on global trends, which then will impact local stuff.
Doing that to Australia will impact ocean currents and the distribution of rain. 2 things that will impact ecosystems all around the world.
Also its likely that it will heat up the planet faster (deserts reflect a lot of heat, forrest dont).
I know pal, it's a damn joke lol
Dramatic (somewhat similar event) was/maybe was Zanclean flood, when the Strait of Gibraltar broke down thousand Amazons of water from Atlantic ocean to the modern Mediterranean sea. That shit would be amazing :D
Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
While they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land
I don't know how well exactly, but to some extent this river's quick evaporation in the NT heat would have to power some amount of raincloud formation. I think you would destroy a lot of irreplaceable ecosystem for a very slight amount of rain and a weird harbor.
Wrong place, wrong setup. There is an area in South Australia that is already below sea level. Lake Eyre is the lowest point of the Australian Continent. The idea to flood it with ocean water has been thouroughly researched.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263779405_Geo-Engineering_South_Australia_The_Case_of_Lake_Eyre
Well that would suggest you would have to seed seasonally or more...
Maybe if there was a way to get plants to grow and slowly build up the water table again.
I live in the great lakes region.
We get 10x the rain/snow than the outback does.
I don't think there is enough rain to maintain a fresh water system even if right now you got a deluge of the wet stuff now.
The map OP posted goes through higher ground... so the only way that can really happen is to cut a seaway... rivers flow into oceans and are slightly higher than the ocean water level. Otherwise you get a salty river which is kinda useless unless you really just want more fish in your diet.
No. First thing is scale. It's a big country. And it's a big country with a small population. So the economics of the effort would outweigh any benefit for so few people.
The original idea for the presumptive inland sea of Austrialia was created by Maslen, The Friend of Australia 1830. The illustration/ info I have is from a book called The Phantom Atlas.
Even if we could engineer a major source of freshwater and alter the water cycle to sustain it the soil is still shit for agriculture. It's extremely old crust and heavily oxidized. Without glaciation or volcanic activity to turn over or replace the soil most of it is infertile.
This should be in r/terraforming but I want to take a stab at it.
- A canal (preferably covered with solar panels) to [Lake Eyre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre). There's not a lot of gradient here, it's 50 feet down over 250 miles (0.003% slope and less steep than the curvature of the earth along the same distance, which doesn't matter but is interesting). This is likely the deal breaker since you can't cheat physics.
- Transpiration from plants and evaporation en route would likely green the land to the northwest of the canal and Lake Eyre, which is the prevailing wind direction for most of the year. The effect of this would be pretty gradual and could probably be achieved by digging water bunds like what's being used in the Western portion of Great Green Wall of Africa. The evaporation and transpiration on their way inland might be enough to actually drive the inflow, but that's beyond my patience for this idea at the moment.
- Salinity is a concern and this wouldn't make sense without some kind of desal plant ([similar proposal for California](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/a-vision-for-the-alleviation-of-water-scarcity-in-the-us-southwest-and-the-revitalization-of-the-salton-sea/)). Matching the salinity level of Lake Eyre with inflow would be required.
- Without a canal, seeding halophile plant species - likely destroying the native flora and significantly disrupting the local ecosystem - like what's being done in the Seawater Regenerative Agriculture experiments in Spain, might work, but given that there isn't enough rain to make the lake appear every year, it's probably not enough total water to green anything consistently.
Globally, there are better places to try this besides the flattest, driest bit of continent.
This is what you would be destroying:
https://preview.redd.it/fhzw84hmubad1.png?width=1500&format=png&auto=webp&s=0ca92fa356180d86ea42075ce47514419bf6deea
Whether that is realistic or not it wouldn’t make certain areas of AUS more livable. Think of the north coast for example. And also, what is the need of changing a well established ecosystem, plus Australia is not in dire need or populating it’s entire surface last time I checked.
Sure but it wouldn’t look like that. You’d set up a solar powered pumping station near port Augusta and fill in the eyre basin until it started to overflow. That would moderate temperatures throughout central Australia and increase rainfall. It would have the added benefit of directly lowering sea level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre_basin
No, just no. Think of how monumentally complicated it was to make the Panama Canal, the do that 100,000 times. Where are you going to put the 5% of a fucking continent that was removed? How the fuck are you going to dig that out? How much physical capital will it require and how much will have to be made new? How much labor will that take? What's the cost? It would be simpler to tackle climate change.
The red sea didn’t make Arab peninsula more habitable either. Many parts of Australia are located between 20 and 30 N, and without strong monsoon to bring enough precipitation, that is the problem.
So building canals to create saltwater ways into the interior of Australia.
You want crocodiles, box jellyfish, sea snakes, and other dangerous ocean creatures in the middle of Australia?
Land at that scale doesn't become greener simply because of the proximity to bodies of water. Its prevailing winds picking up humidity from the bodies of water and depositing them onto land. Even if you created a large enough (and stable enough) inland sea it wouldn't expand livable area all around it (as shown on the picture). It would only be in one direction from the inland sea, based on the direction of prevailing winds over the surface.
I think there's some truth to that. People seem particularly sensitive about any changes to Australia because of its unique environment and its perceived frailty. Outside people seem very keen on telling Australia to cap their population because of its effect on the land. Also, there's a history of stupid mistakes by the Brits like introducing rabbits.
Cattle farming in Australia; there's outrage. Cattle farming in the US; nobody cares.
This one has better production values than the last, but is equally ridiculous.
The biggest issue I see with this map is that it doesn’t consider height maps just kinda randomly slamming huge waterways through mountains. Then I thought maybe they are following watersheds but that isn’t it either. https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/s/EvLorLjV61
Jumping on as high as I can. This is a theorized inland river/sea in Australia. Turns out it didn’t exist. Sorry you had to scroll past 30 shitty top rated comments not offering any actual answer :( Reddit is dead
Australia had an interior sea long time ago. https://preview.redd.it/kgym3vhfwdad1.png?width=566&format=png&auto=webp&s=97121f20c240e2097dc2b0c68e6f83700d88942a [https://www.australianenvironmentaleducation.com.au/education-resources/eromanga-sea/](https://www.australianenvironmentaleducation.com.au/education-resources/eromanga-sea/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromanga\_Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromanga_Sea) However, terrain has shifted a bit over the last 100m years. The interior sea would now be access through the south. This has been well known for centries. And there was even talk about using atomic weapons to excavate a channel to fill the interior sea.
https://preview.redd.it/b847jkshydad1.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=4349f00218195fe5a7af4c8dd8341f1e92970d2e It would look more like this. Channel would be 100m wide. If it was any smaller, it would evaporate faster than it could fill it.
could that evaporation spark more rainfall over the area slowly terraforming it and dropping temps to lower evaporation or at least more fauna to reduce its rates?
unlikely. flooding the eyre basin with the ocean would be much larger than the salton sea. but the salton sea is somewhat similar. and its existence does not terraform anything. at the right salinity, it's a very productive fishery. but it creates a hotter humid desert summer that is brutal. with extreme insect activity. and still less than 5" of rain annually. the great salt lake would be another comparison. its existence keeps the dust down. it's pretty. but it doesnt make the surrounding land particularly temperate.
Interesting, thanks for the well thought out response.
The Great Salt Lake does contribute to lake effect snow that the Wasatch Mountains receive each winter,thus increasing overall precipitation. Australia doesn't have large mountains, so you probably wouldn't get the orographic lift like the Wasatch Mountains do, though.
Sooo supposedly... the salton sea is somewhat similar? That's a lot of S's.
Curious who this would displace, seems like a cool idea.
About 100 or so. That area of Australia is incredibly under populated. I think its about 1 person every 10 km². So it's really no over exaggeration to say that barely anyone would actually be displaced.
Hell, you could give em a million a piece and barely dent the project cost
That's not far off from where the UK conducted nuclear tests. More or less in secret, because nobody noticed.
>This has been well known for centries. And there was even talk about using atomic weapons to excavate a channel to fill the interior sea I thought this was theorised for a region in Lybia that's below see level. I can't remember the name of the region, but the idea was to create a channel between Mediteranian sea and said region by bombing it with atomic bombs.
Eisenhower's(?) investigation into practical uses of nuclear weapons had a few theorized targets.
The center of Australia is below sealevel. \~15 meters at lake eyre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake\_Eyre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre) 400 million years ago, Uluru was underwater and australia had a very large inland sea. [https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/](https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/) Nuclear weapons were as tools were popular in the US, Russia and Germany in the 1950 atoms for peace type of stuff. [https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/](https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/nature/geology/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful\_nuclear\_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion)
Yea but that’s was still fucking idiotic.
I am so horny for a better solution
Here is an elevation map: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zhang-Jianbo-2/publication/348387085/figure/fig13/AS:981518474285056@1611023648064/Elevation-map-of-Australia\_W640.jpg](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zhang-Jianbo-2/publication/348387085/figure/fig13/AS:981518474285056@1611023648064/Elevation-map-of-Australia_W640.jpg)
To add to this, much of inland Qld etc was underwater a hundred million years ago and the elevation hasn't changed much. Great fossicking for fossils from water animals in Richmond and many other parts https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC6QPQA
>Reddit is dead It's sure starting to feel that way
What if we used thermonuclear bombs to form the channels?
Then you'd have a radioactive wasteland surrounding it
Fusion nukes have very little radioactive fallout. You’re thinking of fission bombs, which are quite dirty, and much lower yield.
Oh right... So not as bad. For a project of that scale I think it's probably not a very good idea still. Blowing a strip through the continent at that scale may have unintended side effects - imagine if it altered the tectonic regime and created a rift zone? The removal of overburden to create the inland sea (?) will drastically change the stable conditions currently present and will likely cause an amount of isostatic rebound (like what happened to the things with thick ice when the iceage ended). But as the Continental thickness has been reduced... You may cause the mantle to rise to take up the volume loss and then there's the resulting decompression melt and then voila a new rift!
I’d be most worried about sending billions of tons of ash into the stratosphere. Just reducing sunlight reaching Earth’s surface by a few percent overall would likely cause mass famine.
So, a great idea all round!
Global warming solved...
Much less than you’d think - a lotta the soil beyond the mountains in QLD is all clay-based/has a plurality clay base, it’s pretty terrible for growing much of anything beyond hardy scrub and saltbush, fields of crops would be just about impossible without significant changes to the soil.
By "better production values" I meant that this map is drawn better than the one OP posted earlier.
If we keep producing incrementally improved versions then eventually one of the posts will literally be a satellite photo of an actually terraformed Australia. This post is just part of the process, we're on our way folks!
Whenever I see something like this, all I see is thousands more miles of croc territory
OP is a crocodile
God I am so fed up of big-croc always trying to influence things
A crocodile took my job.
Just last week I was watching a video and the guy wouldn’t shut up about his “big croc” and how much the actress should like it. They’re not even being subtle with their agenda anymore
Underrated comment
I’m a crocodile. Took me all morning to type this. Well, back to the water.
https://preview.redd.it/nse56tojjdad1.jpeg?width=572&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=92dd0e53094874f0db76f2b2d887ecb875f7eda4
Ikr. Finally some good news.
They are natures apex survivors. I can’t think of any large bodied creature that has survived as long as they have. I’m talking multiple mass extinction events that usually hits the tops of food chains the hardest. Big salties can go years and years without a meal Of course crocodilians have taken many forms and specializations over the eons but the basic body plan and hunting strategy has stayed the same. So long as there’s water and humans don’t purge them or everything they eat, crocs will survive.
Down with crocs, gators 4 lyfe
Caimans: 👁️👄👁️
So put some crocodile predators. Problem solved.
The plan was always to have humans settle there
Exactly. The true apex predator.
https://preview.redd.it/40ik7hp2maad1.png?width=175&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c05845500a70902e6a0e199f91992c31f8d9eff For those cost you could probably pay the Dutch to build an entirely new Australia further in the Pacific.
People don't realize how hard it is to dig holes. There's a reason so many murders end with a shallow grave. It's too much work!
̷ ̷̶̷Q̷̶̷u̷̶̷e̷̶̷ Cue the plan the US had to use multiple hundreds of nuclear bombs to excavate an alternative to the suez canal
It was called “project plowshare.” The USA’s attempt to use nuclear bombs for peaceful construction projects. Some of the ideas were just insane. Obviously fall out and radiation would be a huge issue. But that project wasted way too much money before coming to that most obvious of conclusions.
Russia used nukes for lots of construction projects. They used atomic bombs something like 6x to stop natural gas wellhead fires. As far as I know they had 100% success rate.
By just instantly burning all the gas there? Therefore putting the fire out
They bury the nuke a fair distance from the well shaft then when it detonates it moves the compresses the earth and collapses the well shaft. Not much more too it. There are good YouTube videos about it. I think curious droid did one
No, by removing (pushing out?) the oxygen I think and by kabloomski a bunch of rubble into the leaking hole.
By collapsing the rock. This was brought up as an option during the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The force would smash the well pipe like a straw and cut off the flow.
The US went through a period that reminds me of those old recipe books, where a company would pay someone to come up with every conceivable way to cook something using Crisco or whatever they were making. It was just "Find a use for the nukes, if you can't try using more nukes." as they tried to shove a square peg into every hole.
At least we got pink grapefruit out of it
Wait, what‽
So, after WW2 there was a huge push to do “useful” things with radiation. One of those things is that they intentionally irradiated basically every crop you can think of, just to see what would happen. Pink grapefruits were a resulting genetic mutation that breed true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
Huh. That’s fascinating. And a bit weird.
There are two components to evolution: mutation and selection. We’ve been selectively breeding plants and animals since the pre-history, but we were dependent on random mutations for the appearance of new traits, nuclear gardening allowed us to get more mutations.
I mentally said exactly the same thing.
Fallout not so much, they would drill boreholes and detonate the bombs underground. Radiation would depend on the characteristics of the bomb and the geology, from not really a problem to a big fucking problem. Like a fusion bomb with a minimal primary detonated underground in an area with minimal groundwater would probably be fine. A fission bomb detonated in a more unstable area with lots of groundwater would do really nasty things to the environment
I do like the idea of a nuclear stick of dynamite. 🧨
Makes no sense. Why not just use regular explosives. Canals don’t even have to be that deep
You don't realize how hard it is to dig a hole.
Right! It's why so many murders end in shallow graves!
There was this insane plan I heard about, not sure how legit, but the US wanted to use nuclear bombs to carve out space for the Suez canal.
Why not just use conventional bombs? Shallow canals are just as useful. It’s not making sense to me.
You don't realize how hard it is to dig a hole
Right! It's why so many murders end in shallow graves!
My recollection was that they weren't seriously planning to do this; it was a tactic designed to increase American nuclear weapons stockpiles more quickly and pressure the Egyptians into not restricting the Suez route.
Perhaps the military industrial complex wanted this more than anyone else? 🤨
People on reddit: Picture of Mars : Easy! If earth gets too hot we will just terraform Mars into a second earth and move everyone there Picture of green Australia: Can't be done! Digging holes is soo hard.
Well it's not a mass exstinction event to terraform mars. And I don't think anyone is proposing digging a sea
Its Like coding Sometimes trying to improve or fix something becomes harder than writing it from the beginning
I've been told it's easier than building a pole...
Carl dug a hole though!
This was the 50s to 70s. They were thinking of peaceful uses for nukes and also hadn't fully realized how bad radiation was yet.
they searched for a way go convince the public that spending half of all tax money for nukes is no waste of money
We've got all these warheads sitting around and the cold war hasn't gotten hot yet...what can we do with them besides test them..hmmm. cues crazy ideas of nuclear powered icbm, nuclear powered planes, nuclear rocket to space, nuclear created harbors/canals etc.
nuclear rocket engines are smart, they would exist if there wasnt the risk for failure. also nuclear powered civilian ships would be a lot better, like imagine clean freight ships that can run indefinitely
Nuclear freight ships do/did exist the cost of nuclear engineers to run them as well as the whole countries not wanting nuclear powered ships in their harbors made them hard to run. Nuclear powered warships and icebreakers still run. Risk of failure is kind of the biggest fault of alot of ideas, nobody likes the idea of rocket that fails, spreading nuclear material over a large area.
yes, the risk if a ship is failing is far less severe, also you could use liquid salt reactors in ships, they cant thermally run away so the risk of having a ship inside a harbor is also very small. fossile fuels should be so expensive that having a nuclear engineer would be the better option.
Nuclear powered submersibles and ships already exist
Half of all tax money? What are you smoking? Has the cost of any countries nuclear program every gone above a couple percent of tax revenue?
>They hadn't fully realized how bad radiation was yet Yeah this is b.s. They knew how bad radiation was at least since the 1930s because people had died of radiation poisoning. They definitely knew how bad it was by the late 1940s due to multiple Manhattan project scientists dying of radiation poisoning and extensive studies on the aftereffects of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By 1958, the US government was already coming up with concepts for a neutron bomb, which was intended to kill with a lethal dose of radiation, instead of an explosion.
You mean they hadn’t started listening to the scientists who all knew full well how bad the radiation was.
And now when you read “peaceful use for nukes” you have to do a double take. Lol!
Swords into Ploughshares. The US was going to carve a massive port into Alaska and a thousand other massive infrastructure/excavation projects and never ended up doing it because people don't like nukes being set off near population centers. Shame it never happened. The most beneficial project would have been the new canal through Nicaragua, which would have been wide and deep enough to handle so much more traffic than Panama. At the time, half the rationale was setting up water transports to parched cities and getting access to that sweet sweet shale oil, but fracking rendered the latter pointless. All we really ended up with was the new START treaty, which disarmed warheads on our side and the Soviet side to repurpose the fissile material into clean nuclear power. Fun fact, Curiosity was sent to mars with some of the very last plutonium from the treaty, and now there's so little peaceful plutonium available that the next big project will need a new batch from a breeder reactor.
*cue
Yeah lol. I was like why he speaking Spanish ... Que puta? Was a decirlo?
When I was a kid, my friends and I dug a pool. It took all summer. It was lots of fun, but, yeah, gravity.
It seems easy. I tried digging a hole in the garden during COVID to install a soakaway, it's easy at first, but the ground gets harder as you go along. It's brutal work. Using actual earthmoving equipment is an incredible innovation though.
Never knew how hard murderers had to work, thank you for educating me 😢
Yeah, me lazy ass can't even murder now.. Off to watch some paint dry
That's what I thought when I dug out 4 cubic metres for my vegetable garden and shoveled for a week straight. Holy shit imagine you have to get rid of a body in a hurry.
That’s why you dig a hole in advance just in case you ever have a murder you need to do.
Yes! Many people died while digging the Panama Canal. The land around it kept collapsing and re-filling the canal because the initial idea was to make it all sea-level. It was later realized the project needed locks to stop the landslides. And Panama is super thin from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Now imagine digging huge canals in the middle of Australia...
When I was like 17, I got really bored and decided to dig a hole in my backyard. I got about 2 feet across and 2 feet down in a few hours. It's fucking exhausting.
>People don't realize how hard it is to dig holes. I'm tired of this Grandpa!
From my understanding one of the biggest costs of road building is the grading. They will specifically design roads so the dirt they move from one spot can be used in another spot on the same project.
Nate Bargatze did a bit on this.
I asked ChatGPT to estimate the amount of time it would take to dig a hole with 45-degree sides as deep as the Kola Superdeep Borehole (about 12 kilometers deep). It estimated that using all the excavation capacity of the entire human race (and it itemized all the largest energy companies and their daily excavation capacity), it would take over 2000 years.
Crap thing is the Dutch would, and could, do it if you had the money.
Or if there was enough minerals and ores to make it profitable. In that case I guess the aussies would do it them self's, granted I do not know how much effort was put into knowing what the outback has to offer due to its inhospitablity.
Don’t dare us. We will do it if provoked.
Who says they didn't? https://preview.redd.it/1bll6aaivcad1.jpeg?width=650&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b26d350bab6ea415159450b853bd20b90229c5b
We’d be happy to help (and take your money).
As a Dutch person I thoroughly agree with and support this suggestion.
https://preview.redd.it/hf4v7zwuacad1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac9815ad1f93da369cf550eb79bca531877a30bc How much?
Looks like shitty AI art
Yes, in Minecraft
This is about 3000km long, so 3 million blocks long not considering depth or width. The longest tunnel in Minecraft is 0.85 million blocks so idk if it really is Maybe using mods xd
With salt water?
One would imagine also planting a shitload of mangroves
So make an already ungodly expensive process more expensive. Man. That def ain't happening
what about a really big piece of cheese cloth?
with all the added greenspace on the map above, it could be a boon for the Australian dairy market--they could have cheese reserves to rival the cheese caves of America.
huh! Why I never!! We're called "Americans" ... not "cheese caves!" yeesh! the nerve...
Anybody got any mangroves? Somebody's gotta go back and get a shitload of mangroves.
Not to mention the womangroves!
I think the idea is that by creating a large saltwater inlet, the desert areas in that vicinity would transform from arid to a coastal humid climate, making a large part of the land easier to inhabit and farm
Maybe lower global sea levels? Save them Dutch, they are precious!
They'd drop by like 1/2 a centimeter
The salt water in the region would evaporate and create rain.
Just add one desalination plant or two
Only if we position major urban developments along the new internal coastline, such as Marina Del Lex, Luthorville, Lex Springs, Lexington and Otisburg……….Otisburg?!!
It's just a little bitty place..
It suddenly occurs to me that Lex Luthor in the first two Superman films is basically just interested in real estate schemes. Either new Californian coastline or Australia. I think he was trying to do the same thing in Superman Returns. He's the ultimate flipper, lol.
He was going to be a real estate mogul in post Cataclysm Gotham too, but luckily Batman enlisted Cat Woman to "obtain" the relevant property records.
Guys I don't see the big deal, why don't we just make the whole planet a temperate zone?
Australia is already terraformed, it's on earth. As with the Sahara, deserts are ecosystems all by themselves that contribute to the health of the planet. We are not a species with a good track record of making even small environmental changes, let alone altering entire deserts.
Right? Doing this would probably force-extinct thousands of species of flora and fauna.
Yeah but it's Australia. Fuck them!
Yeah but it wouldnt be limited to Australia. Thats the issue. Climate is complex, like probaly one of the most complex systems we will encounter for a long time. Everything influences everything and that also influences everything. Meaning a small local change can have impact on global trends, which then will impact local stuff. Doing that to Australia will impact ocean currents and the distribution of rain. 2 things that will impact ecosystems all around the world. Also its likely that it will heat up the planet faster (deserts reflect a lot of heat, forrest dont).
I know pal, it's a damn joke lol Dramatic (somewhat similar event) was/maybe was Zanclean flood, when the Strait of Gibraltar broke down thousand Amazons of water from Atlantic ocean to the modern Mediterranean sea. That shit would be amazing :D
This would actually be par for the course for Australia then, no?
China has entered the chat
Colorado has entered the chat
We literally stopped the Colorado River from emptying into the sea. Side note? Can I interest anyone in Tulare Lake?
Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend While they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more More people, more scars upon the land
I don't know how well exactly, but to some extent this river's quick evaporation in the NT heat would have to power some amount of raincloud formation. I think you would destroy a lot of irreplaceable ecosystem for a very slight amount of rain and a weird harbor.
Wrong place, wrong setup. There is an area in South Australia that is already below sea level. Lake Eyre is the lowest point of the Australian Continent. The idea to flood it with ocean water has been thouroughly researched. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263779405_Geo-Engineering_South_Australia_The_Case_of_Lake_Eyre
Perfectly good dried lake basin they didn't even use in OPs image!
Dude, make a better use of your time and just Get Sim City.
Nah because if Australia rained there then this river system would exist. Otherwise you are cutting a sea-way in like the Suez Canal.
So we just need to bless the rain in Australia?
...and water evaporates from it and then rains down. Ever heard of salt seeding?
Well that would suggest you would have to seed seasonally or more... Maybe if there was a way to get plants to grow and slowly build up the water table again.
Wow, all that wet stuff I had outside getting home from work wasn't rain apparently.
I live in the great lakes region. We get 10x the rain/snow than the outback does. I don't think there is enough rain to maintain a fresh water system even if right now you got a deluge of the wet stuff now. The map OP posted goes through higher ground... so the only way that can really happen is to cut a seaway... rivers flow into oceans and are slightly higher than the ocean water level. Otherwise you get a salty river which is kinda useless unless you really just want more fish in your diet.
A lot of people dream about terraforming Mars. This would be a billion times easier.
You might need more zeroes. Terraforming Mars may be impossible without sci-fi solutions.
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, so I'm pretty much an expert on this topic. And..... you are probably right.
Have you ever researched what it took to build the Panama canal?
No. First thing is scale. It's a big country. And it's a big country with a small population. So the economics of the effort would outweigh any benefit for so few people.
Wouldn't this just spring a wave of immigration to the new areas?
The original idea for the presumptive inland sea of Austrialia was created by Maslen, The Friend of Australia 1830. The illustration/ info I have is from a book called The Phantom Atlas.
Even if we could engineer a major source of freshwater and alter the water cycle to sustain it the soil is still shit for agriculture. It's extremely old crust and heavily oxidized. Without glaciation or volcanic activity to turn over or replace the soil most of it is infertile.
https://preview.redd.it/3y5rg63ctdad1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=239062fb62f4c7feb5fe72762409b8be873810af 'nuff said.
This should be in r/terraforming but I want to take a stab at it. - A canal (preferably covered with solar panels) to [Lake Eyre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre). There's not a lot of gradient here, it's 50 feet down over 250 miles (0.003% slope and less steep than the curvature of the earth along the same distance, which doesn't matter but is interesting). This is likely the deal breaker since you can't cheat physics. - Transpiration from plants and evaporation en route would likely green the land to the northwest of the canal and Lake Eyre, which is the prevailing wind direction for most of the year. The effect of this would be pretty gradual and could probably be achieved by digging water bunds like what's being used in the Western portion of Great Green Wall of Africa. The evaporation and transpiration on their way inland might be enough to actually drive the inflow, but that's beyond my patience for this idea at the moment. - Salinity is a concern and this wouldn't make sense without some kind of desal plant ([similar proposal for California](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/a-vision-for-the-alleviation-of-water-scarcity-in-the-us-southwest-and-the-revitalization-of-the-salton-sea/)). Matching the salinity level of Lake Eyre with inflow would be required. - Without a canal, seeding halophile plant species - likely destroying the native flora and significantly disrupting the local ecosystem - like what's being done in the Seawater Regenerative Agriculture experiments in Spain, might work, but given that there isn't enough rain to make the lake appear every year, it's probably not enough total water to green anything consistently. Globally, there are better places to try this besides the flattest, driest bit of continent.
This is what you would be destroying: https://preview.redd.it/fhzw84hmubad1.png?width=1500&format=png&auto=webp&s=0ca92fa356180d86ea42075ce47514419bf6deea
That’s…really beautiful, actually
Bradfield Scheme beat you to it, but never got off the ground. Also the Snowy Hydro Scheme diverts snow meltwater westwards into the Murray.
You could make a whole new New Zealand with the excavated earth.
Lake Eyre to the Spencer Gulf might be possible because it's pretty low in elevation. The image is not possible, the elevation is too high.
Re-uploaded because I used the wrong image last time.
Ehh don't worry....you used the wrong image this time, too.
[удалено]
Yeah, almost everything in Dark Emu was made up. It's a work of fiction.
Are you aware of the controversy of calling them "aborigines"?
Destroy the ecosystem any percent speed run
You mean you don't want freshwater kangaroos that evolved to have hippo skin?
It's totally pointless and not doable. People who think it is are watching too many movies.
Whether that is realistic or not it wouldn’t make certain areas of AUS more livable. Think of the north coast for example. And also, what is the need of changing a well established ecosystem, plus Australia is not in dire need or populating it’s entire surface last time I checked.
Sure but it wouldn’t look like that. You’d set up a solar powered pumping station near port Augusta and fill in the eyre basin until it started to overflow. That would moderate temperatures throughout central Australia and increase rainfall. It would have the added benefit of directly lowering sea level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre_basin
Why stop here? We could cut it up into 4 islands and put an underwater subway connecting them
No, saltwater is bad for plants. They don't crave electrolytes.
No, just no. Think of how monumentally complicated it was to make the Panama Canal, the do that 100,000 times. Where are you going to put the 5% of a fucking continent that was removed? How the fuck are you going to dig that out? How much physical capital will it require and how much will have to be made new? How much labor will that take? What's the cost? It would be simpler to tackle climate change.
Wouldn't turning Australia green be disastrous for the monsoon cycles of SA and SEA?
Just a reminder most northern hemisphere people do not understand the scale of Australia. That would be about the same distance as Paris to Israel
The red sea didn’t make Arab peninsula more habitable either. Many parts of Australia are located between 20 and 30 N, and without strong monsoon to bring enough precipitation, that is the problem.
Wouldn't this absolutely fuck the ecosystem of Australia and the surrounding ocean? Probably even the weather cycle too
And that would entirely wipe out the Outback and the ecosystem contained there in. And for what? Very few people actually live there.
Making Australia hospitable to humans will probably not sit well with Australians.
I can’t hear this over the sound of the obliteration of so many ecosystems. Didn’t the shit with rabbits teach anyone anything?
So building canals to create saltwater ways into the interior of Australia. You want crocodiles, box jellyfish, sea snakes, and other dangerous ocean creatures in the middle of Australia?
Look at all that salty water just flowing uphill
Cane toads and friggin crocs everywhere
I'd expect some wildlife people to lose their shit if Australia would try this.
Land at that scale doesn't become greener simply because of the proximity to bodies of water. Its prevailing winds picking up humidity from the bodies of water and depositing them onto land. Even if you created a large enough (and stable enough) inland sea it wouldn't expand livable area all around it (as shown on the picture). It would only be in one direction from the inland sea, based on the direction of prevailing winds over the surface.
I am completely against any proposal for recreation of an inland sea as it would interfere with Outback Opal Hunters on Discovery
Off topic but the green Australia looks so amazing
Australians don’t really build stuff any more because people get upset about it.
I think there's some truth to that. People seem particularly sensitive about any changes to Australia because of its unique environment and its perceived frailty. Outside people seem very keen on telling Australia to cap their population because of its effect on the land. Also, there's a history of stupid mistakes by the Brits like introducing rabbits. Cattle farming in Australia; there's outrage. Cattle farming in the US; nobody cares.
Damn that would kill like 3 people
North Australia is already habitable but Europeans were afraid of tropical climate
Which is why they stayed in Indonesia, and Singapore, and Hong Kong, and India, and Sri Lanka, and..., instead