Hi Maggie
The level of the water table under the Sahara is very low. The water is
already very saline. The porosity of the rock is enough to take about 2
metres from all the oceans. Water flows down hill so 'all you need' is
a sloped tunnel from the oceans and solar-powered desalination plant for
all the inhabitants. The top kilometres of desert soil can go on doing
good things.
Stephen
On 18/09/2015 19:09, 'Maggie Zhou' via geoengineering wrote:
Maybe not so simple. Deserts have in recent years been discovered as
possibly a huge carbon sink that has been soaking up atmospheric CO2
and storing it as inorganic carbon (both in soil and in ground water).
How will flooding with sea water affect that? See:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5882/1409 (2008)
"A CO2-gulping desert in a remote corner of China may not be an
isolated phenomenon. Halfway around the world, researchers have found
that *Nevada's Mojave Desert, square meter for square meter, absorbs
about the same amount of CO2 as some temperate forests*. The two sets
of findings suggest that deserts are unsung players in the global
carbon cycle.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6058/886.2.summary (2011)
Report of "significant terrestrial C accumulation caused by CO2
enhancement to net ecosystem productivity in an intact, undisturbed
arid ecosystem" (the Mojave desert)
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n5/full/nclimate2184.html (2014)
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/43/5/375.abstract (2015)
"Together, inorganic carbon as soil carbonate (∼940 PgC) and as
bicarbonate in groundwater (∼1404 PgC) surpass soil organic carbon
(∼1530 PgC) as the largest terrestrial pool of carbon."
Maggie Zhou, PhD
https://www.facebook.com/maggie.zhou.543
On Friday, September 18, 2015 11:29 AM, Brian Cady
<[email protected]> wrote:
Diking and flooding tropical deserts, primarily the Sahara, might:
- Isolate some seawater.
- Allow more sealife/mariculture, and thus, perhaps
- fix more carbon from air via life.
Brian
On Saturday, September 12, 2015 at 4:03:16 AM UTC-4, Parminder Singh
wrote:
Recent measurements by NASA using satellites indicate around 8cm
rises and predict to increase to around a metre at the end of the
century if temperatures remain unchecked. Worst to come with
complete ice melts from the Antarctica/Greenland.
One paper mentioned the Sahara.
(Schuiling, R.D. in Geochemical Engineering: current applications
(1998) The greenhouse effect; cures from geochemical engineering
and future trends. Eds. S.P.Vriend and J.P.Zijlstra.
J.Geochem.Expl. A9-A13).
Parminder Singh
Independent Civil Engineer
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
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