Discussion»Statements»Rosie's Corner» Can scientists make sea water potable now?If it never rained again what would the impact of that be on the earth?
If it never rained again and all the terrestrial ice melted, all the land would become an arid desert, irrespective of temperature; the rivers would run dry, lakes would slowly disappear; but the sea would still be here. Only, it would be a lot higher because all the glaciers and other land-ice have melted.
No, a waterless planet would not support life, but for a planet to lose all its water would probably take hundreds of thousands if not millions, of years.
It is not difficult to remove the salt from sea-water, and desalination plants to produce water at least suitable for cooking and washing are commonplace on ships, submarines and in tropical countries, especially arid ones as in the Middle East.
Do you think one day that will be all we have to drink? Will desalinated water be flowing from our watertaps? Thank you for your thoughtful and helpful response Durdle. I appreciate it. :)
That is an interesting and disturbing question. It would depend on where you live, the population there and its uses of water, and climate change bringing regional weather patterns no longer able to sustain the rivers.
Alarm bells have already been ringing about glacier retreat in the Himalayas, thanks to less snow-fall, so less water feeding major rivers like the Ganges.
The Aral Sea almost disappeared thanks to excessive abstraction of water over decades from its tributaries for irrigating crops such as cotton and rice in a semi-arid region that cannot naturally support them. It left a sandy salt-plain dotted with the rusting ruins of fishing-boats, and towns with no water-supply. Though the region's politics are hindering the efforts, the countries around it are now trying to restore the lake.
Don't the Colorado River Authority and the managers of the Hoover Dam now have to be much more careful to ensure the river actually manages to reach the sea? I once saw a very impressive photograph of enormous jets of water from the dam's huge drain-valves, opened to maintain a reasonable flow. The size of the pipes could be gauged by a man standing next to them -each about his height. (The hydroelectric power-station at the dam is not a problem, because that simply borrows water and puts it back in the same river just below the dam. The problem is massive abstraction of water for irrigating crops and gardens in what was normally arid countryside.)
The "lost" water is not lost in total. It does find its way back to the sea - the planet's own reservoir - eventually, although some is locked up for a while in various ways in living organisms. If you dry a river by pumping it all out onto crops, that water is all lost to the river but some of it becomes retained by the plants, some is transpired by them into the atmosphere as vapour, and some simply evaporates from the ground and plant surfaces without doing anything useful at all.
I am afraid we do take water for granted in countries like ours - we are sold water pure enough for drinking straight from the tap, so what do we do with it (in total, not individually, of course)? Only squirt it away through hosepipes on the lawn or to wash the car, to fill swimming-pools, and the like.
Given your other question about the slang names for the lavatory, I think it was the Duke of Edinburgh who once commented wryly on toilet cisterns taking a gallon to flush away half a pint - but since then all new cisterns certainly in the UK and I think other European countries, have had to be dual-flush ones to save a lot of water.
There was an article in our local newspaper yesterday about the need for showering and the time in the shower. It was actually about skin-care, not directly about saving water; but commented that a ten-minute shower could use as much water as having a bath. Even more if you use a power-shower. Ten minutes...? My caving-club has coin-operated timers on its showers, set to 5 or 6 minutes. Admittedly they are fairly powerful, but I find even if I am a horrible cold, sweaty lump of mud after a caving trip, that I can be fully clean, hair washed, and warm again, in half that time.
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As for your question about it never raining again.... We humans could, possibly, survive on desalinated sea-water, but otherwise terrestrial life would be impossible. For it to happen though, would need such massive changes in atmospheric and ocean conditions that it would be hard to see how humanity could survive too. The resulting extinction would be far greater than the famous one that knocked out most of the dinosaurs.
I very much appreciate your serious treatment of my serious questions Durdle. I can always count on you for that. Some make fun and are very sarcastically snarky. They are not my cuppa tea. I ask serious questions because I would serious replies. The smart a** insulters need not show up but they do. I wish I knew why. Getting rid of them forever on all of my threads is my fantasy wish. They keep showing to spreak the muck. SIGH. Anyway this is ASKER's PICK reply if I ever saw one!
Agree 100 % Rosie...people that leave crass comments need their bums smacked....not me though....as it's quite bruised enough at the moment here at home.....due to this lock down thing ,I get bored quite a lot ,so I'm always getteing up to mischief at the moment.... :( I do pay for it in the end though and it takes a while for me to sit down again...:(. :).
Water is forever. It changes form in the water cycle to continue to produce precipitation. Yes, there are places where it rarely rains or snows, but that is due to other complex factors that would require a very long answer. And there are places that have immense amounts of rainfall from different factors. Oh, an answer to your original question...Read this very informative article.
It's hard to see it even if you Mist seeing it raining ... And how big would the rain cloud be if all the oceans suddenly over time evaporated or maybe the fish and whales just drank it all.... Now I'm thinking that I don't want to ever come back as a fish.and just wear do they go to use the small room :( !?!
We can grow more Desalination plants but what do you do with all the salt you get for free....your salt of stuck with it as just putting salt back into the sea just makes it extra salty then....we need to think of other ways to Saluter it away or maybe get a Salt Seller to salt the problem out....:)
Apologies to the D. I do not understand a word of you response/reply. I know you are being very clever here and it is wasted on me. Thank you for your reply!
I have that problem to Rosie and I've only just wrote it....it often takes me a while to remember what tricky things I've leaned...I call them my blonde moments and I have so many of them to....lol
Use it in cooking ....preserve foods and carve it in to art structures ....Did you know that Italy has huge salt mines that go for miles out under the Mediterain Sea Rosie......The tunnels they did in salt are huge and huge lorries drive about dowh there.....they also have a huge church carved out in the salt....and everywhere there are salt carvings done by various people or workers over time.... Google it and be amazed...xxx
Where did you get such a crazy notion? It rains just as much as it always has. Aren't there enough real issues to be concerned about without dreaming up imaginary ones?
Replying to Nice Jugs' initial point about who to do with the salt from a desalination plant, I think it is normally just put back into the sea. You can extract the salt completely by evaporating the water but then have the problem of removing it from the evaporators, or you can evaporate only enough water to keep the brine still liquid, so easy to discharge back into the sea. Other desalination plants use osmosis and I think that has the same effect - producing water one side and stronger brine the other.
If you think about it, all such plants simply copy Nature but on a far smaller scale: they extract pure water from the sea, and put it on the land (in effect, even if via living organisms including us and our food-crops drinking it).
That water will eventually find itself back in the oceans one way or another so the overall sea salinity would not be affected.
The sea's salinity is not uniform anyway, even in the open oceans. Their salt load and temperature vary with depth to a marked degree, creating varying layers of different densities. It is thanks to these layers that some marine mammals can call over long distances - they don't "sing" by the way. They just squeak, grunt and squawk. That plangency that makes only humans go all soppy, is given merely by the reverberation due to those density layers and the major boundary that is the sea surface itself.
The salt in mines or carved out for other purposes is the same mineral as in the sea, but deposited as a rock by evaporation of very saline seas or lakes in geologically ancient times. There is a substantial bed of it, covered by a thick stratum of a clay-like material, a few thousand feet below my patch of the Southern English coast, and some years ago a fuel company (I forget which) proposed creating natural-gas storage caverns in it by dissolving the salt and pumping the brine out. It would have used sea-water as the solvent, so would have been a slow process as that is already heavily salted so cannot take up much more of the chemical. The pumped-out brine would have simply been put back in the sea - its overall effect on the sea would be negligible.
Durdle 