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Hydraulic geoengineering
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For the uses of hydrology in geoengineering to control global warming, see Arctic geoengineering
Some large scale water management and hydraulic engineering projects could be considered to be geoengineering, in that they involve changing the hydrological processes of an entire region, or using weather modification for hydraulic engineering purposes.
China region
For years there have also been fears in India that China would start diverting water from the
Yarlung Zangbo River (upper reaches of the Brahmaputra) in the
Himalaya to the north of China.
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Encyclopedia
For the uses of hydrology in geoengineering to control global warming, see Arctic geoengineering
Some large scale water management and hydraulic engineering projects could be considered to be geoengineering, in that they involve changing the hydrological processes of an entire region, or using weather modification for hydraulic engineering purposes.
Australia
- In 1998, John West came up with the idea of a 2,300km canal to split Australia in two, from Darwin in the north to the Spencer Gulf in South Australia. The canal would allow ships to access the center of Australia and provide water for irrigation by means of desalination plants. Much water would evaporate inland from the canal and contribute to clouds and rain.
- Lawrence James Hogan described in his book "Man-made mountain", 1979 (ISBN 0959557105) the idea to construct a mountain range, 2000km long, 10km wide at the base, 4 km tall and with a 2km plateau at the top, from the south of Australia to the Timor Sea in the north. The idea was that this could create rain in the dry interior of Australia, starting rivers that could fertilize large tracts of land.
- Proposals to pipe or channel seawater into Lake Eyre were made as far back as 1883. Lake Eyre is a usually dry lake which at its lowest point is 15 meter below sea-level. Flooding Lake Eyre could create clouds and rain for inland Australia, which could similarly turn desert into fertile land.
China region
For years there have also been fears in India that China would start diverting water from the
Yarlung Zangbo River (upper reaches of the Brahmaputra) in the
Himalaya to the north of China. In 2006, China's Water Resources
Minister Wang Shucheng, a hydraulic engineer, denied that there were
such plans, but the fears continue in India and Bangladesh.
Because such plans affect huge amounts of people and span huge amount
of land, they are sometimes described as geoengineering projects.
Similarly, the Three Gorges Dam, constructed along the Yangtze river,
is - because of its huge scale - sometimes described as a hydrological
geoengineering project.
In 2003, the Chinese government announced plans for a $60-billion
scheme to divert water from a tributary of the River Yangtze
northwards from three different locations, partly using the old Grand Canal, which was built in imperial times to transport goods. Earlier
this month, New Scientist reported that the completion date for the
has been postponed and that the project is now in doubt. The eastern
route, using the ancient Grand Canal, is held up because factories are
polluting the canal. The western route, tapping the Yangtze headwaters
in Tibet, has not been started. Officials also blame pollution for the
latest delay to the middle route - a canal stretching more than 1200
kilometres from the Danjiangkou reservoir on the River Han.
Russian region
These suggested projects are over a century old.
The project to turn Siberian rivers South is well-known in Russia and the origin of the idea goes back as far as to the 1830s when a czarist surveyor named Alexander Shrenk first proposed it. when the big canal engineering projects were conceived (i.e. the Suez and Panama canals).
A century after Shrenk expressed his idea of redirecting Russia's rivers to the South, The USSR Academy of Sciences held a conference investigating his ideas in November 1933. This conference spun out interest that produced many serious engineering case studies trying to validate the possibility of the water return concept. The Hydroproject, the dam and canal institute, led by Sergey Yakovlevich Zhuk commenced many of these studies.
In 1970's construction started to divert the Pechora and Kama Rivers toward the Volga and the Caspian Sea in the south in western Russia. For the sake of cost-effectiveness, a 70-mile stretch was levelled with the help of nuclear explosives, this novel land clearance method drew sharp criticisms on environmental pollution grounds for fear of pollution. Three 15-kiloton devices were deployed and it was estimated that 250 more nuclear detonations was required to complete the levelling for the channel if the procedure had been continued. The pollution on surface was found to be manageable. In the US the expert opinion was divided with some endorsing this project like the physicist Glenn Werth, of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, as "both safe and economical". Others feared climatic cooling from reduced river water flow, while others thought that increased salinity would melt ice and cause warming. Further work on this irrigation canal was soon stopped.
In 1980's at least twelve the Arctic Ocean-bound rivers were proposed to be redirected back to the south. At that time it was estimated that an additional freeze-up would occur to cut the brief northern growing season by two weeks if 37.8 billion extra cubic meters of water was returned annually to the south in European side of Russia and 60 billion cubic meters in Siberia. The adverse effect of climatic cooling was feared very much and contributed much to the opposition at that time and the scheme was not taken up. Severe problems was feared from the thick ice expected to remain well past winter in the proposed reservoirs. By retarding the spring thaw, it was feared, the prolonged freeze-up could cut the already brief northern growing season by two weeks. The prolonged winter weather was also feared to cause increase in spring winds and reduce vital rains. More disturbing, some scientists cautioned that if the Arctic Ocean was not replenished by fresh water, it would get saltier and its freezing point would drop, the icecap would begin to melt, possibly starting a global warming trend. Other scientists feared that the opposite might occur: as the flow of warmer fresh water would be reduced, the polar ice may could expand. A British climatologist Michael Kelly of the University of East Anglia cautioned of the consequences: changes in polar winds and currents might reduce rainfall in the regions to benefit from the river redirection. In a retrospect, this Arctic cooling fear has proven to be quite horribly misplaced advice as the north of Russia has had a significantly increased rainfall while the rains in the south have decreased without any helpful supply from the proposed supply of 100 billion cubic metres of water per annum as it was proposed.
In 1986 a resolution "On the Cessation of the Work on the Partial Flow Transfer of Northern and Siberian Rivers" was passed by The Resolution of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU which halted the discussion on this matter for more than decade. The Soviet Union and then Russia have continued with the other regional powers these studies weighing in the costs and benefits of turning Siberia's rivers back to the south and using the redirected water in Russia, Central Asian countries plus nearby regions of China for agriculture, household and industrial use, and perhaps also for rehabilitating water inflow to the Aral Sea.
According to Aleksey Yablokov, President of the NGO Center for Russian Environmental Policy, 5-7% redirection of the Ob's water could lead to long lasting might change the climate in the Arctic and elsewhere in Russia and opposes to these changes to change the environment by Siberian water redirections to the south.. Despite the increase in Siberian rain fall, the redirection has become highly politicised and Yaroslav Ishutin, director of the Altai Krai Regional Department of Natural Resources and the Environment claims that the Ob has no water to spare and Siberia's water resources are threatened.
In early 21st century interest on this Siberian "water return" project was again resumed and the Central Asian states (President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan as well as the Presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) held an informal summit with Russia and China to discuss the project.
Large Water Bodies Oxygenation Projects
Very large scale plans to oxygenate seas, oceans, and major river systems such as the Amazon river belong to realm of geoengineering projects due to nature of these large scale attempts to modify the oxygen, phosphate and organic matter composition of these water bodies to improve their ecosystems and make them more resilient against stresses such as pollution, climatic warming related weather events and other natural events such as sea currents that cause major losses of natural life. In the context of global warming these efforts aim to make the ecolocical systems more resilient to heat stresses, often amplified by direct human activity that provides the initial burdens.
Large scale perennial and temporary oxygen depletions are observed in the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, Chesapeake Bay, the Pacific Ocean on the coasts of Washington and Oregon states, the Atlantic Ocean around St. Lawrence, and the Amazon river in South America. One of the principal contributors has been the increased water temperatures that reduce amount of the oxygen that is dissolving as well as the disappearance of rains that create air bubbles onto the surface of water (which is important in the tropical rain forest river systems thus oxygenating them, but not in the oceans or lakes away from these types of rainy regions).
The Baltic Sea Oxygenation Projects
From the large water body oxygenation projects the oxygenation studies on the Baltic Sea are the most advanced, and varied, in the world of the various large water bodies' oxygenation projects conceived or already in various degrees of trials.
Matti Lappalainen began series of studies to establish possibilities to scale up artificial oxygenation from small water bodies such as ponds, lakes and rivers to much large water bodies such as oceans, seas and very large rivers. Artificial oxygenation often reveals a set of feedbacks while it is helpful in cutting off other feedbacks. In some instances, the water bodies store or accumulate away problems (i.e. phosphate load on sediments) and when oxygen is then added, these accumulated problems that had been salted away in the bottom sediments are gradually started to be sorted out and re-emerge, this slows the initial recovery as the old dirt and un-decomposed materials come visible from 'under the carpet' and re-circulate back into system before their final disposal, increasing the cost and reducing perceived recovery speed of the systems. The experiments were made in small Lake Särkinen, Sotkamo, Finland and medium-size Lake Pyhäjärvi, Tampere, Finland using Mixox hypolimnetic oxygenation method developed by Matti Lappalainen assessing the changes in organic and phosphate loads and how the water quality was eventually improving in these.
The artificial oxygenation methods have since then been expanded to larger scale projects with the objective of resolving the oxygen depletion and associated phosphate and organic decomposable nutrient related pollution problems in the Baltic Sea that are influenced by nutrient run off, increasing water temperatures, and changes in the ocean circulation (until now perhaps the most important factor in the Baltic Sea), residue from treated or untreated sewage flow from conurbations and agricultural fertilisation. Atmosmare Foundation is separately investigating and testing methods of cutting off agricultural fertilisation phosphate and biomaterial runoff from the Aurajoki Basin to the Baltic Sea, at Savijoki, Lieto., . According to Matti Lappalainen, the principal difficulty in the scale-up from the lake to sea environment has been the issue of allocating the responsibility and ownership of the problem when seas, oceans or transnational river basins lose their health due to human pollution often in combination with the acts of nature and when the harmful consequences are manifested across the border or on the international waters.
The initial project to learn how it would be possible to oxygenate the Baltic Sea was conducted at Pohjanpitäjänlahti, Finland which is often referred as a ‘Mini-Baltic Sea’ due to similarity of its ecosystems to the structures of the Baltic Sea as a whole.
Naturvårsverket, 'the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency' (in English), Verket för Innovationssystem (VINNOVA) 'Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems' (in English) and The Baltic Sea 2020 are funding PROPPENThe Biological Pilot Research Project to Oxygenate the Deep Water Sites of the Baltic Sea, a €1,000,000 sea-scale oxygenation research project[14] that started 9.1.2009. The project uses Mixox hypolimnetic oxygenation method and is led by Dr. Heikki Pitkänen. with Vesi-Eko Oy, Water-Eco Ltd[www.vesieko.fi] The site to be oxygenated is Sadöfjärden (17 km2), at Hanko Archipelago near Tammisaari, Finland to learn benefits from large area oxygenation with a smaller €200,000 project site Lännertasundet (1.9 km2) in Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden.VINNOVA A second project BOX funded by same consortium is headed by Professor Anders Stigebrand of University of Gothenburg starts €2,000,000 oxygenation project with different method takes place also in Stockholm Archipelago in the Baltic Sea.
The Amazon River Oxygenation
Veli Albert Kallio and Matti Lappalainen proposed oxygenation of the Amazon river at World Water Week in August 2006. There were sustained draught event from 2005 to 2006 that influenced much of the north and central parts of South America leading much of the Amazon becoming anoxic and dead. Their brief paper discussed dangers of sudden swings in the Amazon’s climate and how these ecological risks might be reduced to secure the future of the Amazon river system in a warming climate by some large-scale engineering and land management processes that also included oxygenation of the Amazon river water.
See also
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