Richard B. Cathcart

Aral Sea Partial Refilling Macroproject

A geographically and technically comprehensive control strategy to partly recreate the Aral Sea, which is now expected to virtually disappear by 2020, involves several hydrological factors: (1) an overland pipeline conveyance of Caspian Sea water that is deposited into the Aral Sea Basin; (2) an overland pipeline conveyance of Aral Sea brine deposited into the Caspian Sea, and (3) compensating overland pipeline importation of Black Sea water to the Caspian Sea. The effects of hydrological macro-management of the Syr Darya and the Aral Sea’s regulated Western Basin as well as technical/economic modeling are offered. Our macroporject offers a unique, and previously unused, inter-basin water transfer.

Shaped Metal Earth-Delivery Systems

Michel Verne (1861-1925), son of the famous storyteller Jules Verne (1828-1905), rewrote and posthumously published The Chase of the Golden Meteor (1908). An entirely gold metal asteroid of enormous size, the public announcement of its “out-of-the-blue” coming to rest on the Earth’s surface provokes an epic worldwide financial crisis. In 1941, Georges Prosper Remi (1907-1983), also widely known by his penname “Herge”, published a newspaper serialized children’s tale featuring his internationally beloved child-adventurer, the boy TINTIN, performing in “The Shooting Star”, and considering the effects on fiercely rival capitalist financiers competing over possession of the strange solid body containing a fictitious mineral, “phostlite”, which exhibits previously unknown, environmental-active globally influential properties.

Reducing the Risk Associated to Desalination Brine Disposal on the Coastal Areas of Red Sea

By the end of 2005 the global installed capacity for desalination of seawater was about 24.5·106 m3/day. The geographical distribution of the desalination plants was as follows: 77 % in the Middle East and North Africa, 10 % in Europe, 7 % in the Americas and 6 % in the Asia-Pacific region. The volume of brine discharged in the Red Sea increased from 6.4 million m3/day (in 1996) to 6.8 million m3/day (in 2008) and is still increasing due to the observed tendency to improve the average recovery ratio from 30 to 50 %. This will make the environmental concerns much more important in the future. There are two main sources of problems, i.e. the concentrate and chemical discharges and the cooling water effluent discharges. The salinity is expected to increase in the long term if larger and larger amounts of desalinated water are removed from the water bodies. A proper solution for the desalination waste brine disposal process requires a good balance between technical constraints (i.e. placing a pipe on the sea-bottom), environmental conditions (i.e., finding an optimum distance from the seashore where high salinity brine should be discharged without significant environmental impact; also, the availability for long run of brine disposal placement should be considered) and as low as possible overall economic costs.

Geo-Engineering South Australia: The Case of Lake Eyre

This macroengineering project proposal exploits technologies that have the potential to enliven the arid region surrounding Lake Eyre, South Australia. The distinctive macroproject components are: Lake Eyre is gradually filled to a higher level by controlling evaporation and by pumping seawater from the nearby ocean using cheap tension textile tubes. The necessary energy could be produced by photovoltaic cells in a very attractive application without electricity storage requirements. Eventually, Lake Eyre is to be partially lidded with a floating impermeable plastic cap that reduces evaporation. Filled with seawater, Lake Eyre can be used as a giant reservoir for irrigation in biosaline agriculture. Elementary mathematical models for the proposed tasks and rough economical estimations are presented. Based on overall results, we concluded that the macroproject is feasible already with existing technologies and could even become profitable in a few decades. But beyond paying off the capital investment, the greatest implementation benefit is the prospect of creating conditions for human settlement in the low fertility soils of the Lake Eyre Basin. Additional research directions are briefly presented. Keywords: Australia, Lake Eyre, Macro-engineering, Evaporation control, Imported seawater, Aquaduct, PV cells, biosaline agriculture.

The Bering Strait Seawater Deflector (BSSD): Arctic Tundra Preservation Using an Immersed, Scalable and Removable Fiberglass Curtain

The First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization, held at Iowa State University during 2–5 October 1977 (Husseiny 1978) awakened the world-public’s interest in a mega-engineering concept first advanced circa 1949 by John Dove Isaacs (1913–1980), the maverick USA oceanographer (Behrman and Isaacs 1992). More than 60 years ago few took Isaacs’ mega-project proposal seriously and, until 1977, little was done by mega-engineers to rigorously evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of towing tabular icebergs, naturally and artificially calved from the periphery of the icy continent of Antarctica, to the warm dry-land regions enduring, or predicted to endure during the twenty-first century, significant consumer demand-driven freshwater shortage. During the twenty-first century, the Earth’s two coldest regions, our planet’s northern and southern Polar Zones, achieved their commonly accepted cultural–geographic status as the axial and symbolic polar foci of the supposed anthropogenic “Global Climate Change” (Yusoff 2005; Cameron 2005). In the Arctic, at the southern tip of Novaya Zemlya (i.e., the island of Yuzhnyj), which lies at about the same latitude as Alaska’s northernmost point (latitude 71oN), the Russians demonstrated their technology by detonating on October 30, 1961 the most powerful aerial nuclear explosion in history—the Tsar Bomb yielding 50 Mt; the Arctic is contaminated by decaying radioactive materials deposited by weapons test fallout, industrial nuclear accidents on land and warship mishaps at sea, and from intentional disposal of nuclear waste by marine dumping. However, and beneficially, with the advent of nuclear-powered submarines “…the entire Arctic Ocean…ceased to be remote and is open to study on a year-round basis…” (Molloy 1962). We accept the practical mega-engineering outlook that physical things of our world are never truly static, and that utopia/dystopia is a dynamic terminology and, therefore, the properly professional approach of the mega-engineer is ‘if it needs to be done, it can be done’. We only have to secure a real need.

Macro-Engineering Lake Eyre with Imported Seawater

By conduction and thermal radiation (~11.7%) and rising air (~7%), approximately 18.7% of the Earth’s energy budget is used for direct heating of the air. Whatever the causes—perhaps, in part, an expansion of the width of the Earth’s Southern Hemisphere atmospheric Hadley cell (Johanson and Fu 2009; Liu et al. 2007a, b)—a widening of the Tropical Zone air circulation and a southward shift of the Southern Hemisphere’s tropospheric jet stream and Australia’s associated subtropical arid lands appears to be taking place (Fu et al. 2006; Evans et al. 2009). It is worth noting, too, that since the “Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994” became Australia’s newest country-wide geographical coordinate system, it has been discovered and documented subsequently that Australia, an isolated landmass, is moving to the Northeast at ~3 cm/year. The geographical shift of the continent’s supporting tectonic plate bodes a future change in Australia’s vital hydrologic cycle. Australia is the world’s driest permanently inhabited continent and it has the most variable precipitation, with periods of widespread drought (Sohn 2007).