Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
that's an interesting observation! the humidity up north, for the settlers was too much?
Lot of Americans here that own houses in Florida, don't stay during "summer" due to the extreme heat and humidity. Pretty much if you weren't born and raised in a tropical location, adjusting is much harder without racking up quite the electric bill. I'm lucky to have been born and raised in a Cairns-like climate so adjusting again only will take me a few months
Problem is, Australia seems to lack huge underground aquifers like the U.S. has in the western Plains and large rivers running through the desert regions (think the Colorado and Gila Rivers in Arizona) that are consistently supplied with an abundant supply of water from melting snowpack in the Rockies and other high mountain chains.
The best they could do would be to undertake a project like the Trans-Alaska pipeline but instead of oil it would channel desalinated water into the interior into a massive man-made reservoir to use. But that is undoubtedly going to cost in the hundreds of billions.
I used to visit a message board devoted to space exploration where one of the big topics was terraforming Mars in specific and anywhere in general. One of the posters was Australian, and he had a rather novel take on water in Australia. Basically he felt manmade mountain ranges (enormous inflated structures actually) should be placed in the deserts to force orographic precipitation which could be collected and then channeled to wherever it was needed. According to him (and here I have no idea how accurate he was though the scheme is feasible in concept though perhaps not in Australia and specifically its deserts) there was plenty of water in the air over Australia for most of the year, but as there weren't a lot of high mountains there was nothing to really force precipitation as there is in other parts of the world. Good luck getting that by an environmentalist though.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,029,399 times
Reputation: 11862
Quote:
Originally Posted by AuburnAL
I used to visit a message board devoted to space exploration where one of the big topics was terraforming Mars in specific and anywhere in general. One of the posters was Australian, and he had a rather novel take on water in Australia. Basically he felt manmade mountain ranges (enormous inflated structures actually) should be placed in the deserts to force orographic precipitation which could be collected and then channeled to wherever it was needed. According to him (and here I have no idea how accurate he was though the scheme is feasible in concept though perhaps not in Australia and specifically its deserts) there was plenty of water in the air over Australia for most of the year, but as there weren't a lot of high mountains there was nothing to really force precipitation as there is in other parts of the world. Good luck getting that by an environmentalist though.
Inflatable structures what, 4-5 kilometres high? I'd like to see that, haha.
Indeedily doodily. The world needs the Big Australia.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
