(10-03-2023, 11:09 PM)Snarl Wrote:(10-03-2023, 10:07 PM)Ninurta Wrote:(10-03-2023, 04:59 PM)NightskyeB4Dawn Wrote: Now let man put his greedy hands on the greatest water supply we have on Earth, and true disaster is due to follow.
When they desalinate this water, where does all the salt go?
I thought about that. Then I asked myself, "Where will all this newly desalinated fresh water wind up going?"
Knowing that the quantity of water (salty or otherwise) on this planet has not changed substantively over the last 4.5 billion years, I suspect it's going to work it's way back into an ocean sooner or later. I also thought about all those underground salt deposits and wondered just how salty the water on this planet 'could' have been in the ancient past.
More of those salt deposits are forming right now, as we speak, at places like The Great Salt Lake, The Salt Flats, and the Dead Sea. There is actually substantial salt locked up in the ground here, where I sit. It bubbles up out of the ground at salt springs here, which is where the pioneers got their salt, and what drew them to this area to begin with - the salt springs create "salt licks" that draw animals in from far and wide, and all one had to do was sit on a salt lick for a while to kill a few critters and get a few hides.
Right here in this local area, the water is called "sulfur water" instead of salt water, and it has a good bit of iron in it, too. There used to be a sulfur water well on this spread before a mine running underneath the land cut the bottom out of the well, and it wouldn't hold water any more. At the creek that runs under my bridge, you can see rust building up on the creek bank during periods of calm water, and that oxide is created by the interaction of the salt and the iron in the ground, and it leaches out at the head springs of the creek.
A nearby settlement named "Swords Creek" was named after the first settlers in this area, the Sword brothers. They were "Long Hunters", and initially came here because of the bounty of game drawn in by the salt licks.
If the salt were put to good use, that would be better than resaturating the ocean with it. The Gulf Stream is a major component of the thermohaline cycle in this hemisphere. It transports heat from the equatorial regions and deposits it in the north, near Greenland and iceland. As it released the heat , it gets cold and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, travels back south, where it gets re-heated before cycling back to the north again to repeat the cycle.
One component of that convection cycle is the salinity of the water. It assists the water in sinking to continue the cycle by making it heavier to begin with. Increased salinity would cause it to reach a point where it stays low instead of resurfacing to transport the heat northward. That allows the north to get cold, cold enough to start making glaciers and ice caps.
Oceanic circulation particularly affecting the Atlantic ocean was disrupted about 6 million years ago when the Isthmus of Panama closed up, and closed of the pacific from equatorial communication with the Atlantic. That seems to be what started this most recent round of Ice Ages as the oceanic circulation seeks equilibrium. Disrupting the Gulf Stream further by over-salinization would be a bad, bad thing for living things north of about 38 degrees north latitude, and it would be devastating to the UK and western Europe in particular.They depend on that Atlantic circulation cycle for their calm weather. "Calm" as in not freezing, "an 80% chance of glaciers and woolly mammoths this evening, and over the weekend, possibly extending for the next several weeks or millennia".
The formation or extension of glaciers and ice caps initiates a positive feedback loop - the colder it gets, the colder it gets. tTat's because the ice reflects heat from the sun back into space, and away from the Earth. More ice means colder temperatures, which make more ice, which make colder temperatures, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, until Hell has frozen over.
And it all starts with disruption of oceanic circulation and heat transport northward. I guess that's one way to de-populate the planet. Then we won't have to worry about not having enough water to go around for all the teeming masses, eh?
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