We’ve trashed the land in our search for electricity; let’s trash the oceans next

by philg

We’ve scarred the land to drill oil wells, dig coal, and pipe natural gas. We’ve dammed our rivers and impounded so much water at high latitudes that we’ve speeded up the Earth’s rotation (like a skater pulling in her arms). We’ve filled our mountain passes and plains with inhumanly-scaled windmills. What more can we trash in an attempt to generate more electricity? How about the oceans?

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6842 shows how.

[Understanding Earth contains an explanation for how dams built by rich countries cause the Earth to spin faster.]

4 thoughts on “We’ve trashed the land in our search for electricity; let’s trash the oceans next”

  2. Anon: I assume you mean “high latitudes”. The dams pull water away from the the equator, where it was spinning with a high linear velocity, to a high latitude where it will spin with a much lower linear velocity. To conserve angular momentum the Earth is forced to spin a little bit faster when the mass of water is pulled inwards (Quebec and its hydro dams are closer to the center of the Earth than Quito).

  3. Yes, but water flows towards the centre of gravity first, any other direction second. Therefore, to trap it, you must stop it flowing down – thereby adding weight at high altitudes, like Anon said, which would increase linear velocity. However, the effect would be minute.

    I must admit I am a bit skeptical of “Understanding Earth” ‘s (implied) claim that all or most dammable rivers flow toward the equator, and that trapping the water a couple of degrees up (or down) has any measurable effect – enough to cancel out the altitude effect mentioned, anyway. I would like to see some numbers. Referring to books we can buy on Amazon to back up your claims does not cut it.

    Anyway, the effect must be nearly insignificant. If you’re going to start calculating such minute variances, you’d have to take an awful lot of other minor things into account as well – mining springs to mind. Plenty of megatons being shipped around, and unlike dams, the effect is permanent and accumulates. Polar ice. Erosion and earth movements, especially around the equator. A single underground earthquake or volcano in the tropics could easily have more effect, angular-velocity-wise, than all the earth’s dams combined.

  4. Sho: The water stored at high altitude in a dam might be at most a few kilometers farther away from the spin axis of the earth than other water at the same latitude. Water stored at 60 degrees latitude is more than 3300 kilometers closer to the earth’s spin axis than ocean water at the equator.

    I think the directions of the rivers that are dammed are irrelevant, as the water would in all cases reach the ocean, either directly, or through evaporation in cases like the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake.

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