ENGINEERED AUSTRALIA –
(So improbable is this idea that I thought I must have imagined it until I discovered the book at the NSW Library)
“MAN-MADE MOUNTAIN” – LJ Hogan (1979)
In the early 1980’s, a “vote-for-us leaflet” from “The Engineered Australia Party” (EAP) was dropped into my Bondi Beach mail box. The EAP’s incredulous scheme, as briefly explained in the leaflet, was to solve the problem of Australia’s vast dry interior by excavating an enormous water channel from the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory to the Gulf of St Vincent in South Australia, thus dividing Australia into 2 large islands. Such a channel would have been >2000 km long and, judging from their map, about 200km wide.
I believe the plan was to do this with nuclear explosions..! (They would have been popular wouldn’t they?).
Hogan’s plan, theoretically plausible if one ignores the gargantuan scale of such a project, was to pile the excavated material onto one side (east or west I don’t recall which) thus creating a new mountain range onto which rain would fall in abundance and green the desert.
Given the scale of such an undertaking their idea was of course completely mad, but the principle is interesting.
Is it possible to generate rainfall in otherwise dry areas by building mountains next to a sea?
Clearly the short answer is “yes”, but how high do the man-made mountains need to be?
Later, when I began formulating and refining my MC3 (DEM) ideas, I recalled the EAP and it made me think about the possibility of greening the desert – or rather small parts of some coastal deserts – by building pyramid arcologies along the coast. It would certainly be an attractive location.
Each hectare of surface intercepts 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) per each 10 centimeters of annual precipitation. With purification and reuse, there is very little need to worry about water shortages. Lion Kuntz.
A little research on precipitation reveals that rainfall depends on several climatic/geographical factors, but a combination of these 4 will almost certainly produce rainfall over land –
- High solar radiance, creating evaporation of seawater.
- Low air pressure
- “Onshore” winds (ie, coming from the sea)
- Mountains (and possibly even quite low hills?) next to the sea
3 of these 4 conditions exist on the dry and barren Atlantic coast beyond Saldanha Bay (200km north of Cape Town). The only missing element is the lack of coastal mountains; therefore the heat wafting up from the barren land sweeps the moisture-laden air high up into the stratosphere.
On the other hand the western side of the Cape Peninsula, where 750m (2500ft) mountains do rise steeply out of the sea, gets much less rainfall than the eastern (inland-facing) slopes, from Newlands to Constantia, which year-round are lushly carpeted in greenery.
And yet, on these drier Atlantic slopes, one often sees eerily dense banks of fog drifting in from the sea like an enveloping monster.
I also recall when visiting Swakopmund (Namibia) that there was a lot of morning fog and the temperature was pleasantly cool for the time of year (February) the hottest month in Cape Town 1000 miles south.
I have often wondered whether Δ built on this coast would be able to condense the water contained in these fogs.
One question is – how high a hill/mountain would induce the rain to fall? Perhaps if the “mountain” were very close to the sea it would only need to be maybe 150m (500ft) high in order to condense the mists.
To help the process perhaps Δ, using giant induction fans in the base, could suck the fog inside where it could be condensed into water?