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[Skyrunner]

Still, Whisper's other point holds, that we haven't explored muh of the sea.

@miauw: Dunno. The book I read said something about the pressure being too high for manned submarines to reach the floor without being crushed.

[pisskop]

We are doing pretty cool thing w/subs theses days...  the nuclear warhead carrying ones can stay underwater for... let's just say the better part of a week with a 18hour air supply and scrubbers.  I think the biggest concern with an submarine 'ark'is babez, fresh water, and routine drydocking.

and fire.  Fire is the scariest thing in the ocean.

[Tellemurius]

We are doing pretty cool thing w/subs theses days...  the nuclear warhead carrying ones can stay underwater for... let's just say the better part of a week with a 18hour air supply and scrubbers.  I think the biggest concern with an submarine 'ark'is babez, fresh water, and routine drydocking.

and fire.  Fire is the scariest thing in the ocean.

Well our Nuclear Subs are designed to stay underwater for months actually. They have electrolysis and filtering systems to produce fresh water and oxygen on board with only need to dock for food supplies

[miauw62]

I agree that we havent explored the ocean at all.
But what would we gain from doing that? Ocean floor is kinda boring.
(except for one part i recently heard about, northeast from england that actually was above water once)

[Pnx]

I agree that we havent explored the ocean at all.
But what would we gain from doing that? Ocean floor is kinda boring.
(except for one part i recently heard about, northeast from england that actually was above water once)

Doggerland? Since it was only a thing during the ice age when the sea levels were lower and it was mostly covered in ice I doubt there's much of interest archaeologically there.

[miauw62]

Yeah, i wasnt really saying that anybody EVER lived there. Geological timescales are HUEG.

[pisskop]

We are doing pretty cool thing w/subs theses days...  the nuclear warhead carrying ones can stay underwater for... let's just say the better part of a week with a 18hour air supply and scrubbers.  I think the biggest concern with an submarine 'ark'is babez, fresh water, and routine drydocking.

and fire.  Fire is the scariest thing in the ocean.

Well our Nuclear Subs are designed to stay underwater for months actually. They have electrolysis and filtering systems to produce fresh water and oxygen on board with only need to dock for food supplies

Oxygen scrubbers are not perfect.  they byrn out quite fast cpmpared to the rest of the sub.  *cough* and it takes a a full workday to change a redtagged valve *cough*.

there's estimated to be extremely fertile soil down there, and who knows what kind of exploitable life.  Its also as close as we may hope to get to the mantle.

So what happens if the artic icecaps kaputs?
Does Russia suddenly economic advantage?  Would Antartica melt, too?

[Starver]

Yeah, i wasnt really saying that anybody EVER lived [in Doggerland]. Geological timescales are HUEG.

Actually, there's some evidence that people did.  Along with various contemporaneous megafauna remains, weapon-heads and tools have been dredged up from area.  Obviously it's problematic to actual digs like those on land, or even near to shore, for other more easily-evidenced prehistoric (or virtually prehistoric) cultures, like Cantre'r Gwaelod, or that which built Seahenge.

(Sorry, this thread is a bit fragmented, I hope I'm not heading in the wrong direction of derail, here...)

[Zrk2]

That's cool. Never heard of it before.

[PTTG??]

ANTacrtica isn't in any danger of completely melting at the moment. It's thicker and far less sensitive to ocean temperature changes, because it (mostly) isn't ocean.

That said, let's say there's a worst-case scenario and a really bad (and quite possibly impossible) arctic hurricane comes up and whips up all the remaining ice and dumps massive amounts of energy into the actic ocean, releasing the stored methane in vast quantity. The effect of THIS would be a substantial expansion in greenhouse effect.

In such a situation, one where the historical climate is effectively completely different, would it make sense to terraform Antarctica?

It sounds absurd, but it's currently nigh-uninhabitable. If the temperature's already rising, would it hurt to find a way to redirect moist air south from the southern ocean?

[Starver]

I think there's quite a bit of a gap in actuality between the occasion of Antartica's edges melting (as they appear to be, anyway; calving off in amounts beyond all historical records[1], some say) and causing the rest of the world problems in addition to those caused by the loss of significant Arctic (and Greenland) ice, and the possibility of actually getting useful Antarctic land as a replacement.  What is it?  An average of 1 mile thickness of ice across an overwhelming amount of the continent?  That's potentially a lot of ice that needs to be removed.

Spoiler: Bad maths (click to show/hide)

Let's say we need to remove half a mile of height from just two million of it's 5+million square miles of surface, as a brute force assumption of how to get some usable land (it'll probably generate far less area than that, unless we can maintain a vertical ice-wall on the bits we're not bothered about, and target only areas that average a half-mile deep... so less in some and more in others).  Going with that completely rough figure, that's 1 million cubic miles of ice.  The density is about 91% that of water (need to look that up, though, going by memory), so the volume is roughly 910,000 cubic miles of water.

At (ooh, I need to look this up, and convert from kmē, which might mean I've misconverted) say approximately 140 million miles squared (whoops, I mean...) square miles of ocean (slightly less then, but then I'm probably underestimating how much over-spill there'd be), that's... oh, assuming I've not messed up the maths, that's ten metres of sea-level (ahem... back to Metric measures; bad me, however, to be switching back and forth), some of which will probably also overspill some of the Antarctic land that we've just 'liberated'.

Of course, there's always the Dwarven Megaproject way.  Carve huge chunks of glacier only off of chosen bits of land (leaving strong ice-walls at the edges, especially at any sea edge), and divert magma up into some middling area to offset the cold sump of air that would result, and/or cart big lumps over to convenient anchorage points in the Southern Ocean to build huge ice 'vanes' that can redirect the prevailing winds that we want onto the continent.


(Yeah, I've definitely gone into fantasy there.)


[1] Not too extensive, admittedly

[Il Palazzo]

that's 1 million cubic miles of ice

That's 5 million cubic miles of ice. 5 million square miles times 1 mile height.
So it's ~50 metres actually, not 10.
But that's only assuming that the oceans would still cover the same % of the planet as the water level rises, which is not a perfect approximation.
On the other hand, the regions under 10m elevation add only 2,5 million square kilometres to the pre-existing global ocean surface area(http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/foresight/docs/migration/modelling/11-1169-mr9-land-and-population-in-the-low-elevation-coastal-zone.pdf), so that's extra 0,75% extra room for the incoming water, which is negligible.
We'd probably still have to look at some 40+ metres total increase.

[Starver]

That's 5 million cubic miles of ice. 5 million square miles times 1 mile height.

I think you missed how I said "Let's say we need to remove half a mile of height from just two million of it's 5+million square miles of surface,".  I wasn't being so ambitious (or malicious) as to remove all the ice from all the continent.

Although if you want to, I can't stop you.<says he, heading off to the nearest phone-booth to transform into his alter-ego>

[Il Palazzo]

Indeed, my desire to prove my intelectual superiority by pointing out any and all of your mistakes took over my vast mental faculties, impairing my reading comprehension in the process. Once again my megalomania is thwarted by your awesome powers of being precise. Damn you, Starver!
I'm off to my hideout, my minions are much easier to intimidate.

[PTTG??]

Moving ice manually seems a crude way to do it. The other thing to consider is that just because there's an average of mile-thick ice over the whole thing, doesn't mean that there aren't some places with exposed rock such as the Antarctic Peninsula. With a warmer ocean and lots of ice melt, you might have more rainfall if nothing else. To make use of this, you'd probably need to build up silt and nutrient-rich soil either in specialized farms or else in open air.