Sahara Sea: The Insane Plan to Create a Sea in the Sahara Dessert 

Yeah I was expecting that

They are a non-renewable resource, not a great plan to significantly rely on them.

quite awhile ago I also read about increasing the size of lake Chad using the underground aquifers, so I was expecting at least a mention.

@@greywolf7422 There is enough freshwater in the Saharan aquifers to last the next 10,000 years + at current consumption rates.

Wonder what the effect of billions of gallons of salt water seeping into the aquifer would have on it.

Probably not, depending on how wide the canal is. The Mediterranean itself is a closed body of water with a relatively narrow inlet, but there's enough exchange between it and the Atlantic that it's only slightly more saline, more so in the east than the west and more in the summer than at other times. And depending on how the sea influenced the climate in the area, there might be increased inflow of fresh water from new rivers. The Dead Sea, by contrast, is fed ONLY by the Jordan and cannot possibly send any water upstream.

Yes, it would eventually become so salty that fish couldn't survive in it, like the Dead Sea. It might still be useful as a waterway, though.

The other side problem is the discussion about the Sand from the Sahara effectly act as fertilizer for the Amazon Rainforest. Wouldn't that be a problem as well...

Just melt the polar ice caps, all ice is freshwater and when it melts into the ocean it'll alter the salinity ratio, in turn increasing evaporation. If you do it correctly, you should be able to get things back to around 10k years ago when we had the Sahara grasslands.

@RK Not to mention all the potential knowledge and other benefits the desert species could give us if we don't absolutely annihilate their environment.

I'd watch a video about those they seem insane to work on yet alone build.

Wouldn't catch me on one of those 😂 I'm not scared of heights but absolutely fuck that hahahaha

bro. i would absolutely go up on one. dont know how id feel about working in the elements that high up. Seems like super cold super windy or super hot

They should interview you about the experience, I'm sure there's a lot of work that we don't realize goes into those and their maintenance.

Wear a go pro and record yourself at work, guarantee you'll very quickly have thousands of views

Thank you

Lake Eyre is actually 9m - 15m below sea level.

I'm pretty sure the problem was too much evaporation. The plan called for water in North Queensland to be redirected south and actually looked kind of plausible, but had made its' calculations using European temperatures rather than Australian ones.

@@twrampage l think if it was done, the rainfall patterns to the east of the lake would benifit from the evaporation, and we could have salt prodution similar to the one on the Dead Sea.

There are weather experts who doubt that man made inland seas would create extra rainfall in adjacent desert regions, and point to many other regions where there are deserts right next to large bodies of water. But then again, these weather _experts_ are often wrong about certain factors around _climate change, global warming/cooling._ So maybe the only way to find out is to build it.

Apparently it was in the plans of the Japanese if they were to successfully invade and conquer Australia.

would it not just be easier for him to stop talking about imperial measurements, and get the punters from the good old US of A a reality check and become more educated.......

Aye. Any place that receives below a certain amount of precipitation (whether that's rain, snow, ice, etc), qualifies as a desert. So we have hot and frozen deserts all over the world. Isn't nature fascinating?

I wonder if any other deserts will grow larger. Gobi is growing like over 3,600km a year or around 1,400 square miles. Which is just mind boggling. Sahara mean while growing at 30 miles. Give it a century if it doesn't stop! I remember hearing the Sahara might start shrinking in some theories, but who knows.

@@angelitabecerra is the bottom of the ocean a desert?

@@angelitabecerra less than 25mm, with some excerptions

Yes the desert is the hottest desert but not the biggest, so what's the problem!?

The good news is, these projects were stupid and couldn't work anyway. So you get to save that money, and use it on fixing your economic and political situation.

@@zimriel Even if government somehow decides to go forward and make the project public, the country would go into chaos since it will literally require drowning densily populated cities, their heritage and agricultre. The sad news is, even if the project is far from taking place, the money is not fixing our economic and political situation.

@@zimriel but megaprojects might unite a country. It might create the mindset of setting aside our problems for a bigger cause

It might seems great at first indeed, but it could effect palm trees in the south due the new humid weather and our dates industry, besides there are risks regarding the increase of the sea level in close areas

You’re Tunisian? Which exit?

right, coz the Atlantic is in the sahara... makes no sense? :P

@@TheBarretNL nah he's right, before we had the Sahara, Mediterranean, Black Sea and Caspian sea there was once a ancient sea there called the Tethys Sea, which has since turned into the seas we know today and the Sahara.

Exactly what i was going to write. If you know anything about the Sahara, you would know this. Lots of fresh water still there, and is being used by the people.

The only way to build any kind of inland body of water in the Sahara or any kind of desert for that matter and not have it turn into a repeat of the Salton Sea or Lake Arial would be to use de salination plants to process sea water into distilled water. And that requires StarWars technology, cause water and salt Love each other there is next to nothing more energy intensive than separating the two and pumping it upland.

​@@jonathanburmeister1946solar and wind power. Probably also a good alternative for the shit ton of money being poored into the continent for food if you would focus on getting water to places.

plus evaporation doesn't even cause additional rain near the evaporation site, that's been shown over & over again. Beyond me why people don't call these project dreamers out on that one everytime they start talking about this ridiculous environmental vandalism

A handful of people living in the desert... It's worth the small sacrifice. Plus with increased rainfall probably build your own reservoirs or build desalinization plants along the inland sea using the abundant solar to power it.

QI did a sketch on the Sahara Desert being the Desert-Desert.

The Rio Grand River is the same way, Rio is Spanish for river, so it's the river great river.

Real world, final boss of generic names!

chai tea

And gobi means waterless place, so there's another desert desert too

I do - it's in the western edges of the Sahara and it's incredibly short-lived. Likely not even long enough for life to take hold.

I think I've seen a few of the articles your thinking. If you have the digital archive, you might want to search for articles on the Bonneville salt flats, the dead sea (actually the salt flats around the dead sea), and other salt flats.

i just replied talking about something like that. it rains and can put your car underwater in an hour then when it stops the water disappears like nothing happened. a normal tuesday.

Maybe you're thinking of the Okavango Delta in Botswana? It's a weird place, where a seasonal river flows from highlands into a basin where it turns into a huge inland delta that creates marshland for part of the year. I happened to notice it recently on Google Earth, and it's very peculiar: clearly a river flowing down from a mountainous area, but then it just spreads out and disappears.

@@allanmason3201 botswana desert isnt like sahara

It could be possible, if you find a suitable "pool(s)" to fill, and desalinate water through vaporization, and direct re-condensated water to the "pool(s)" using gravity. No electricity needed, but would propably need much of infra and maintenance (+securing sabotage of infra), thus costing a lots of money. Guess that is why many would rather make those "pools" new salt lake(s) with a simple canal from the sea.

The salt could be extracted, processed, and sold as table salt, ice melt, and even for large-scale sodium-ion batteries, which could be used to build up a sustainable energy grid. This would help further drive Egypt's economy, making it a win-win all around.

Either Nile + irrigation runoff and treated wastewater water (perhaps already from desalination units) can be used, but that perhaps would not be sufficient, or as saltier water is heavier, there could be set of tunnels at the bottom of the lake that would alow saltier water to return back into the sea while upper set of tunnels or canal would feed it with new water. If properly designed, the water would perhaps circulate in the lake.

The solution is a two lake setup- water flows from the Mediterranean to the first lake, a dam is in the first lake dividing between a second lake where salt water evaporates. The first lake is only slightly saltier than the Mediterranean because water is always flowing through and out of it. The second, lower lake is for salt, lithium and magnesium production

That area already has the largest and oldest oases and the biggest fresh water reserve in the world flooding it with seawater spells disaster

@@lethal_tempo could be mitigated by solar desalination plants and pumped into a series of Wadis and ponds upstream with shade and fog nets to reduce evap while using permaculture to establish the pioneer trees for shade and soil fixing/building. It's a commitment and needs timeline upwards of 1-2 generations. But the desert can be reclaimed.

There is a cycle that moves the monsoon rains north. There are cave paintings in the Sahara that show animals we associate with areas to the south. The current Lake Chad is a remnant of a much larger lake. When the last cycle ended (I don't know, maybe 10k years ago?), desertification began quickly. Some of the inhabitants likely migrated to the Nile valley. This would have been pre-dynastic Egypt, so just tantalizingly on the edge of history, and more the province of archaeologists and paleontologists. "History became legend. Legend became myth" ... so to speak. The cycle has been repeated any number of times. You might search for "green sahara".

Atlantis was real...

Isn’t that where they think Atlantis was

@@fjkelley4774 well said

@@jackryan4313 Well, the quote is actually Tolkien's. I had to stop myself from adding "this has all happened before and it shall all happen again". But it will; it's related to a slight "wobble" in the earth's rotation. A full cycle is about 20K years. Or so they say.

and solar farms

Sahara was green until a few thousand years ago. I didn't realise the Amazon was such a young forest!

Yeah, and environmental scientists predicted that Lake Mead and Lake Powell would have taken years to get back to the level they are at now. The reality is *you can't predict climate change.* So you therefore cannot say that bringing water to an arid region would do more harm than good, because you don't actually know that to be the case.

@milesedgeworth1297 FYI, when the Boulder Dam was originally built there was only one-one dam upstream from it. Guess the number there are today? It's more than one. I forgot the latest number, but it's greater than 20.

those are small areas in comparison to the size of Sahara. I doubt they won't too much.

A one hundred megaton russian nuke will do...

*hurl*

Yeah, the resulting dust cloud will improve the weather in Europe. 😂

I think Africa has enough on its plate already…

ah yes not throw, but HURL a meteor AT AFRICA...thats one way to scare your enemies

Keeping the second lake at a lower elevation may also protect the desert aquifers but I don’t know enough about the area’s geology

Soviet engineering projects exemplify the words "huge" "insane" and "dangerous" like an adolescent's power fantasy. Best viewed from a distance and not as a direct neighbor.

The easier way to refill the lake is to raise the amount of rainfall. How? More plants. How watering them - solar desalination. At Port Augusta Sundrop farm has ONE plant usiung seawater from the Spencer Gulf and Sunlight to farm Tomatos. Now make hundred or a thousand of those plants - the make enough water to grow coastal forests which will evoporate water.

salt water not good for growing stuff.... last time it filled was with rain water which is good for plants to grow

The last time Lake Eyre filled was 1899???? Cause that's when Australia's worst cyclone in history occurred isn't it! I have no idea wtf you're on about, or how water in the south of Australia would cause cyclones over a thousand kms to the north! Not how weather systems work! Lake Eyre does frequently fill/part fill as a result of the extra water from cyclones though, but not the other way around

Sit back and wait. Melting ice caps and rising sea levels will do 99% of the work for us. We'll still need to make sure the Eyre Sea doesn't turn hypersaline. A pipeline from somewhere in the north to pump the most saline water back out to the ocean will probably be required.

Right. We simply need a new Ice Age to pull it off. lol

If you want the ocean and climate messed up and the destruction of the Amazon Forrest then yeah, wonderful

The price would be a big issue. How much?

Dust from the Sahara blowing over the Atlantic keeps the soil in the Amazon fertile. You can’t just massively change the climate of one part of the world without messing up another pet of it

@@jacob4920 Not an Ice Age, just a change in the Earth's tilt. The Sahara has a cycle where every 20,000 years(based on when the Earth's tilt changes) it goes "green" for the next 20,000 years before drying out again(with the last green period ending somewhere between 6,000 to 5,000 years ago). Funny enough, increased precipitation creating very large inland lakes is what usually starts the runaway effect that turns the Sahara green(and by green I don't mean tropical rainforest. The climate was "merely" lush savannah with grasslands, rivers and lakes). And it wouldn't destroy the Amazon rainforest either because the Amazon rainforest still existed during the last green Sahara period. The Saharan dust is helpful for the Amazon but it's not essential.

Not really. Confined aquifers are non-renewable specifically because there is an impermeable layer of rock above them that prevents percolation. The bigger issue is being reliant on a confined aquifer for fresh water.

Wouldn't it be a better idea to create a large, passive solar still at the coast? You could have it evaporate to a valley near the coast, and once that's filled, find another valley nearby further inland, until you have a series of freshwater canals projecting further and further inland and resupplying aquifers in it's vicinity and creating a series of oasis

This! That and geothermal where possible seem like a great path forward.

Such a better idea than building dams in lush areas which upsets delicate ecosystems

Spell checking has never been their forte. "Iniciative" is a new word they invented for this video.

It's a bit dry and has an earthy taste but there's lots of it

There is a plan on place to do this it's ip

Good point.

salt water not going to make the desert bloom

@@basillah7650 What about evaporation, No effect?

Salt water can be used to create electricity through osmosis.

@@placeholdername0000 After you reverse the flow of Entropy. That would be the tricky part.

But why?

@@jamesdough6406 The reverse of reverse osmosis.

Lots of things become possible if you assume electricity is free. We're a long way from free electricity, however.

That was back in the last ice age when things were a bit different, like the area of Chicago being under a kilometer thick sheet of ice. The temperate zone and the winds, etc., sort of shifted since then.

​@@mikeynth7919there's also another factor at that time - the Earth had a different tilt back then, and for whatever reason the planet suddenly shifted it's tilt and forever changed the climate

@@timothyharshaw2347 exactly, but shifting the earth's tilt is difficult. Shifting the angle of incidence for sunlight is doable, thereby replicating the effect

@@DG-mk7kd I believe it is physically possible to alter the earth's tilt and climate if you were to nuke repeatedly one specific side of the planet vs the other. Given the sheer power of modern nuclear weapons, it may not take too much. The same science applies to terraforming Mars

No. If all the ice melted only 4% of land would be lost and thats assuming people dont build sea walls and other stuff. Only 1/2 of all land is currently inhabited and thats with a pop density of less than 200 people/sq mi. NYC has a pop density of 25k+/sq mi. If youre worried about rising seas then live on a boat. Flooding the sahara will do nothing but destroy all the 500+ species that live there. Why cant we just bulldoze your house and put a pond there instead.

We are only at the beginning of reconstructing people's migration history. Europe's population, for example, got replaced at least 3 times almost entirely. (Neanderthals got replaced by first modern humans, who got replaced by farmers from the near east) Also there are several "minor" migrations that shaped europe's languages (The near eastern farmers got completely swallowed by a steppe people that we call "Yamnaya" who brought the european languages to europe, the only remaining language of the old inhabitants is, possibly, basque. Then there were several steppe people migrations, mostly of turcic origin, but also the magyars). We also have no idea when the suomi and the finns came to europe, we only know that they share an uralic ancestor with the magyars, who came much later.

​@@valentinmitterbauer4196there is some evidence that the dene people in north America have links to the yamnaya . They came in a lot more recently than most north American natives , and still don't get along with the rest very well

About 12. It was covered in grass and trees then too.

oh girl if you liked this you should check out Brain Blaze, formerly Business Blaze, especially the older videos before Simon "sat down" and stopped roaming while he blazes. Also Charlotte ETA Salter, everyone's favourite married transgender blazement radiator that did unforrtunately disappear 😭 Danny must still be taking it hard

ITs not quite the same concept. The problem with salton Sea is that it use hard to get fresh water. This sea would use plentifull and free salt water.

So how exactly is sea water, with no fresh water input, once cut off from ocean sources, going to turn into fresh water?

They won’t stay there. They will be in Europe.

The water wouldn't just "become fresh", and there's not enough local rainfall to dilute out the salt - it would keep getting saltier, much like the dead sea has.

Seas have been rising at 1 to 2 mm a year for thousands of years.

and then some!

That is not entirely true. 1. Parts of the Amazon are over 1 million years old, where as the Sahara is only 5,000 to 6,000 years old. So the Amazon can survive without it. 2. Every region of the Sahara has a different salt deposit. The Eastern regions have sodium cloride (indicating that a large area was once attached to the ocean but then was blocked off) . The sands that scientist are referring to as "fertilizer" comes from Western Sahara. That's an area with huge amounts of phosphate. That is the stuff that makes the Amazon robust. 3. If the Sarah sands were really as fertile as some articles claim it is, then the Sahara would obviously not be a desert. It would be a giant grassland.

And you know it rains there

Weird that the Amazon was around while the Sahara was a lush grassland then isn't it? Not to talk about the age of the Amazon being 50+ million years while the sahara is only a few million.... Nutrients from the Sahara might help, it is not the reason the Amazon thrives.

@@freedomfighter22222 Amazon had receded and advanced in the eons. The species that reside adapts, even humans that lived there. When humans first came there, it seems to be much smaller than it is today. I'm implying that, even with a much drier amazon, when given time, it will recover.

It might just backfill with sand, you might want to make tunnel. Still its not far, it should not be that expensive. We made a tunnel 4 times as long in sweden in the 70s just to have fresh water in the south

Water erosion works in strange ways. As if it has a mind of its own. Without proper guidance it could go wrong. However, I get what you're saying. We could use very minimal techniques to get big results. Let gravity do all the work.

No. The ocean is so vast that the volume of water associated with even a small increase in sea level would be too much for all the depressions of the world to hold. They look big to us, but they are thimbles compared to the Olympic sized swimming pool that is the ocean.

I did a few sums on that last year. If all the world's depressions (below sea level) were flooded, that would lower global sea level by about an inch.

​@David Halliwell damn! That sucks cause I always thought about that. Well wouldn't flooding the sahara cause it to turn green and have greater cloud coverage, hence storing more carbon via vegetation?

@@Adam.Reader14 Arithmetic I can do and if a few big canals could avoid the need to move ports and fortify seaside cities then that would be the cheap option to deal with sea level rise. Sadly not realistic. But the secondary effects of greening the deserts could be huge - I have no way to calculate that though!

@David Halliwell I figured the arithmetic wasn't such a huge mess to make. I actually tried something similar years ago, although I don't know if I did it correctly. I got close to a foot I think (I think zi calculated it for the deep zones to be made artificially deeper). As far as the green zone part, I don't think that anyone can properly calculate that. Then there is the favt that sand from the sahara blows over the atlantic ocean and into the amazon rain forest, creating a positive cycle.

Haven't done a lot of research into this one have you lol Lake Eyre already fills intermittently, so we already know for a fact that filling it doesn't change the weather in inland Australia, mountain range simply isn't high enough to push the evaporation up to where it needs to be to create rain & as for lowering sea levels, um nope, exact opposite actually! Shouldn't be long now before ocean levels are announced, with their DROP, due to the amount of rainfall that's occurred in Australia over the last 2 years & it's unique geography that means that when that happens, the water can't get back to the oceans (other than via evaporation) & therefore global ocean levels fall. It's happened before, about a decade ago (and no doubt other times that didn't get as much attention). If you want to drop global ocean levels using Australia, you do NOT create a join between Australia's inner & the ocean! You create a pathway for water to flow from the north to the inland sea, that is covered in metre long grasses that will act as mulch to stop evaporation on route, along with trees for the same purpose & you spread that long grass out for a few kms either side of the natural river bed, resulting in the water filling that entire area & becoming permanent & from there, it can be spread further & further & additionally, you can add more soil carbon, either in rotting organic matter, or by turning all crop & other waste into charcoal & dumping that in the areas & you let that carbon hold 70 times it's weight in water, underneath those mulch acting grasses, so it's all held there, protected from evaporation. Or basically you just keep things as they are, with no path out for inland seas & you put as much charcoal & carbon as possible into the top foot or so of Australia's soils, everywhere that gets at least some rain, sometimes & it will retain massive amounts of water, causing ocean levels to fall - while also addressing the cause of their rise in the first place, but sucking carbon out of the air to create all the carbon being used as carbon sponges in the desert oh & btw, there is currently 15,600 cu miles of fresh groundwater in the area you're proposing putting SALT water into! The Great Lakes in the US by comparison contain 5,472 cubic miles of fresh water, so how about you join their their entrance to the ocean instead & contaminate them with salt water, or better still, how about refilling all the depleted underwater aquifers in the US with water to pull it back out of the world's oceans! Australia is responsible with it's aquifer management because of what a HUGE ecconomic resourse it is! Farming in Australia is NOT limited to the coastal areas, most "deserts" in Australia are billion dollar cattle stations, using those aquifers to provide the water needed for their operations, not to mention mine operations, that again require isolation from oceans for effective operations without environmental damage. Your proposal would cost millions of jobs & hundreds of billions of dollars to the Australian economy due to the loss of that fresh water aquifer, that's before we even start on the costs involved in transport between the east & west of the "donut" country (which of course would be a horseshoe, NOT a donut, so all transport routes lost & we've already seen in the last couple of years the massive costs involved in dealing with even short term flooding of those roads & railway line linking east to west & everything in the middle haven't we!) You're really out of line to be trying to propose ways to fix the world problems your country has caused via exploiting & destroying another country with ignorance! Fix your own country's water & carbon problems & keep out of the business of countries that are already handling their water reserves in more responsible ways that you could dream of! Just saying!

@@mehere8038 Many thanks for the detailed response. I concur that such a project would need to be looked at in depth before implementing. That said, Lake Eyre is hardly what I am talking about. In my view it is a tiny lake on the world scale wehn compared to the Great Lakes, etc. . On top of that, it only fills every few years and then is only a metre or so deep. So, really that does not qualify in anyway whatsoever. I was more thinking of a building a canal from say Adelaide (Southern Ocean) to the centre of Australia to allow the sea to fill what is currently below sea level. I believe that it is up to some 80 metres below sea level in places. At the end of the day, we currently have a continent that is only using some 15% of it's area or thereabouts? Now, the world's scientific community is talking about terra forming Mars and yes that may be in a few hundred years time but how about we try something on a smaller scale first such as my suggestion? Human kind has been altering the planet in any case for a while now. Granted, many mistakes have been made. However, some have had success. i.e. The midland USA had major dust storms in the 1920's and 30's making land unuseable. Thus they dammed the Colarado River in several places. This turned a multitude of land into viable farm land. Did it not? Either way, the oceans of the world are definitely rising and given the current projections of the melting rates of Antartica and Greenland, several low lying parts of the world like Manhatten Island, the Thames River, Venice, Netherlands, Pacific Island nations, etc. will most definitely struggle to win the battle against the rising seas. Again, of course feasibility studies are most definitely required on such a project like what I am suggesting but hey on the face of it, it looks like a win/win scenario to me. The planet is approaching 8 billion and if major cities around the world can't hold back the sea.................Well, I guess you get what I am inferring? Doing nothing is no solution in my mind. Again, just saying!

​@@garyfleming5156 So flood your own country! Australia's not a sacrificial lamb to be destroyed so you can keep adding carbon into the atmosphere! You broke it, you fix it, there's no win/win for Australia in destroying the entire continent to benefit the US! The US resourses are almost completely depleted now, within the next couple of decades, it will likely not even be able to produce enough food for it's own people, let alone the world's 8 billion, it's countries like Australia that are set to be the future food suppliers for those people & so it needs to remain under the responsible management it is currently under, NOT have it's management taken over by one of the most irresponsible managers the world has ever seen. Again, Australia's FRESH water underground supplies in the area you want to flood with salt water & therefore contaminate & make useless, is FIVE TIMES the size of all the great lakes combined! That's water over 1 million years old, that is being managed to be withdrawn at a rate ONLY equal to it's refill rate & it supports a $1.5 TRILLION dollar economy in mining & farming, with 3/4 of the food produced being exported to feed the world! And you want to destroy the lot to rescue the world from US fossil fuel use! Not ok! If we do nothing, eventually Australia does develop an inland sea yes, but only up to 15 metres deep at it's deepest, Lake Eyre IS the deepest point in Australia at that depth below sea level, so no, Australia will not be advancing that process to help other countries fix THEIR problems! Plus again, it would WORSEN ocean level rise, NOT reduce it! Clean up your own mess! Start by actually doing some proper research into your proposals to see how useless but damaging they really are!

​@@garyfleming5156 oh & I just figured out what you were referring to with the 80 metres below sea level, that's Death Valley California. Even Coachella is deeper than the deepest point in Australia is, so yeh, makes MUCH more sense to flood California & other parts of the US than it does to flood Australia, especially since resourcees in those areas are so depleted & have not been managed in any sort of renewable manner for so long & the US is the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter & has caused the sea level rise in the first place, so makes perfect sense to flood all below sea level parts of the US to correct the global sea level rises & leave Australia tf alone to actually fix the world's problems in productive ways, like it's already doing

@@mehere8038 I believe China surpassed the US in being the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter.

Even thought Lake Eyre regularly fills on it's own, so it's easy to see that extra water in it has no impact on the rainfall & climate of the desert when it's full vs empty