If the sea level is going up, due to global warming.......?

Question

If the sea level is going up, due to global warming, then why not dig a big trench from the sea to an underground cave complex, and drain some of it away?

Answer 1

Hi, never mind the answers, the question is brilliant it self. Very thought provoking and leaves food for thought.

Answer 2

Hi!

By the way have a nice mayday.

Yes it is due to global warming.

Good question we can but it will cost a lot of money and fuel.

and if we dig underground the fossil fuels will spread in the sea and kill marine animals.

We can suck the fossil fuels but we don't know if the fuel is still underground where we are going to dig.

Answer 3

omg you just solved one of the biggest political scams ever!!!!

Answer 4

The problem can't be solved by digging a trench, though that is "out of the box" thinking. Nor can we build a tube to funnel water off into space or to Mars, the logistics and engineering of that are centuries too advanced for us. And we may decide we need that water in the future so it's best to keep it here.

Sea levels have risen in the past, people either build dikes or other barriers to counter the increase, or else they move inland as coastal areas fall below the new high tide level. JS and Clive and even Ken make valid points about sea level. There is just no cave complex big enough to make a dent in our oceans and putting water into a chamber that deep would be unwise since it's almost certainly volcanic in origin.

Any sea level rise will be gradual enough to let us adapt to it but there is no easy solution if it increases by as much as Al Gore claims in his movie. Fortunately, it can't increase that much, no one but Al and a few fringe scientists think it could. If we had the engineering ability and the will, we could pump seawater inland to fill deserts and basins, but that would probably backfire by altering the climate in undesirable ways. None of us knows what the impact of such a major action would be, but I imagine disaster is more likely than success.

Since part of the rise is due to expansion as the water warms, I suppose we could look into using solid-state refrigeration to lower the temp in specific areas, powering these devices with solar or tidal energy. Again, it would take a lot of research before I'd be convinced it's a good idea.

Answer 5

why only dig a trench can't we move to higher paces.

Answer 6

Ignore answerers who don't provide any links to support their statements. They are often uninformed.

Yes, the sea level is unquestionably going up and the warmer temperatures (whether caused by humans, natural processes, or both) are the reason.  The warmer temperatures have reduced that amount of land-based glacier mass in the world, which causes more water to run into the ocean.  The second reason for rising sea-level is thermal expansion. As the ocean warms it expands and must go up.

World Glacier Monitoring System:

http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb9/su...

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research:

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/e...

Here's a chart showing the rise:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/0...

Answer 7

the oceanographic data suggests that sea level will rise by about 48cm during the 21st century. Just forget about Al Gore's nonsense and Hollywood hype

Answer 8

Too much effort. We'll just all retreat to higher ground. Oi, you folks on the hill? move over.

Answer 9

Several points which have to be made in answer to you question.

1) Sea levels are not rising, and if they were to rise would be more like 1/2 inch than 20 feet.

2)Water always maintains it's level.

Your idea of trying to 'Bury Water' is insane to say the least.

I really hope you are joking, and you just waned to see what type of moronic responses you received.

You seem to have already received a few!

Answer 10

It will have to rise a very long way if it's going to reach the same level it was back in Roman times.  If you visit the Roman Fortress (complete) of Anderida at Pevensey in Sussex, England; you can see there the remains of the Roman Harbour - about 1.5 miles inland from the sea today.

Pevensey: Information and Much More from Answers.com

In the old town, the site of the Roman fort Anderida, are remains of Roman walls ... Wikipedia: Pevensey. A map showing the location of Pevensey. Enlarge ...

http://www.answers.com/topic/pevensey

The Argus: What's on: Sussex walks: East Sussex: Pevensey circular Click here to view map. Pevensey circular ... Founded as the Roman Fort of Anderida to resist Saxon incursions, Pevensey Castle was adapted and developed by ...

http://www.theargus.co.uk/whatson/walks/...

Also note that the Isle of Thanet in Kent is now part of mainland Kent and no longer an island.  Most maps of the medieval period show it clearly as an island and you would have had to go on a boat to get to it.

Global Warming is a myth concocted by the Left as a way of leveling extra taxes on everything which they say is leading to Gobal Warming - fuel and energy in general etc.

It's all based on pseudo-science and crapology - everyone knows that, don't they?

Answer 11

I would suggest you ignore people that link to nefarious web sites.  Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years since the last glacial period ended.  As a geologist, I understand better than most that sea levels move up and down.  They are rising very slowly and the rise has not increased in rate to any significant extent in spite of the rhetoric.  There are not enough underground cave complexes.  Most water in caves drain to the oceans anyway.  Rock will fill in voids, especially deep within the earth.  I have thought that maybe they could fill areas like Death Valley, the Salton Sea, and the Dead Sea with Sea Water and that might marginally help but it would probably be better to build marginally higher in elevation.

Answer 12

Well that doesn't really work, there is a lot more water covering the earth than land and if you put it under countries there is the danger it would erode away the land are collapse the land above and there are no caverns under the sea, if there were, the weight of all the sea and land would break into them so if you dig you just reach the earth's core and magma would pour out and create more land and push the seas higher.

However i was thinking we could just get a giant tube and attach it all the way up to the space station and pump some excess water out. We could even send it towards mars and create some life

Answer 13

Yes, sea levels are rising.  Past natural warmings have resulted in sea level rise of about 1.6 meters per century, a number far greater than what most scientists have assumed (in last year's IPCC report for example):

Rohling and his colleagues found an average sea level rise of 1.6m (64in) each century during the interglacial period.

Back then, Greenland was 3C to 5C (5.4F to 9F) warmer than now - which is similar to the warming period expected in the next 50 to 100 years, Dr Rohling said.

Current models of ice sheet activity do not predict rates of change this large. However, they also do not include many of the dynamic processes already being observed by glaciologists, the researchers said.

"The average rise of 1.6m per century that we find is roughly twice as high as the maximum estimates in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and so offers the first potential constraint on the dynamic ice sheet component that was not included in the headline IPCC values," explained Dr Rohling.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/natur...

This would be achieved through accelerated sea level rise, which is now being observed:

"Global averaged sea level continued to rise through 2006 and 2007. Modern satellite measurements reveal that since 1993, sea-level has been rising at an average rate of about 3 mm per year, substantially faster than the average for the 20th century of about 1.7 mm per year, estimated from coastal sea-level measurements. These coastal measurements indicate that the 2006/2007 global averaged sea level is about 200 mm higher than in 1870 and that since 1870 there has been a significant increase in the rate of the sea-level rise."

http://wcrp.wmo.int/documents/WCRPnews_2...

Given that the current rate of melting is much faster than what we're able to see in past natural warmings, that natural rate of 1.6 meters per century could well be esceeded:

"Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in 'imminent peril.'"

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserve...

Caves would not hold enough water... caves are mostly rock, with a small amount of space for air or water!  Your idea has some merit though.  Some scientists have proposed that we could build a dam to create a massive reservoir in Northern Canada that could hold much of the excess water.  (I don't recall the details well enough at the moment to find a link.)

By the way, beware of responses from geologists.  Most of them are employed by the oil industry, and even the ones that aren't were taught by former oil industry employees.  

Ken makes a valid point about reponses with no supporting links.  You simply can't check the source of their information.

Answer 14

yeah they are and we've had some unusual weather

Answer 15

well, all the ice from the north and south pole is slowly melting and all that water is gonna cause rises in sea level

Answer 16

Even though I;m not entirely convinced by the global warming issues, its not just the rising sea levls, but the crazy weather systems that they are predicting

Answer 17

I think maybe if there really is a raise in the sea levels due to global warming I feel they should use the same technique that one would use to fill water in the aquarium, I mean a couple vacuum pumps, containers, cargo ships and planes & right there you can transport water atleast to the states with droughts and other countries with less and unclean water.