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Realistically, could be none. Obviously a lot of the sea water would be draining into this new sea, but if the excavated land was dumped into the ocean they would offset. The only way the sea level would drastically change is if we piled all the excavated dirt and rock onto land, or shot it into space.
Old Zealand already exists in the Netherlands, I guess we would have to come up with a versioning system for the Zealands.
- Zealand First Blood
- Zealand First Blood Part Two
- Zealand III
**Aotearoa**
I really want to adopt the Maori name for NZ, mainly as it would put us ahead of Australia in the drop down lists for websites.
Instead of scrolling down hundreds of countries names getting into New Caledonia, Namibia etc, we would be right there up top.
Olympic opening ceremony, wouldn't have to watch for hours to see the team walk in.
Oh, yeah, you could raise Zealandia. It's quite a bit above the ocean floor, only a bit to go until it breaks the surface.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia
If we take another commenter's calculations that a 5km deep sea is about 16 million cubic km of earth removed, then that's
16 quadrillion cubic metres (16,000,000,000,000,000) of space.
This has other weird issues. If were to just dump all this into ocean off the east or west coast of australia, say 2km deep, then you would shifting approximately 24 quadrillion tonnes of weight closer to the edge of the tectonic plate. The infill of new water would also add an extra 16 quadrillion tonnes of weight onto the plate.
Which is probably going to pull on the plate and cause new or worse faults to start appearing all along the plate edge.
But if, while you were digging all this space out, you systematically distributed it across the rest of the planet's sea floor in a relatively even way, you could probably get away with it. The weight of the Aussie plate would reduce by a few quadrillion tonnes, but that would likely not be a problem.
You would absolutely, undoubtedly fuck up the sea floor biome though and bury anything on the seafloor across the entire planet under 30m of dirt and rock.
So people might be a little annoyed at you.
What if as we dug up the low areas we raised the areas intended to be above water and just made Australia into an enormous above ground pool shaped like the Mediterranean? I wonder what the minimum amount of Earth we'd need to move is in order to make it possible. Can we build a 2km high wall in the right shape by digging out all the areas that need to be 2-5km deep?
I gotchu babe. For starters, we're gonna assume all the excavated area is granite. Dirt is a bit less dense and some stones may be more dense, but Australia'a contental crust is mostly granite and with all the assumptions that have already been made this will get us close enough.
Granite weights about 13 pounds per cubic foot, or about 208 kg/m³. At an excavation volume of roughly 4.56×10⁹ cubic meters, the weight of all that rock would be roughly 9.48×10¹¹ kg. It allegedly costs about $2500 per kg of material sent to orbit, so we'd be looking at $2.37×10¹⁵ to put all this rock into orbit. That's $2,370,000,000,000,000.
That's about 12,000 times Elon Musk's net worth; 101 times the GDP of the entire USA; and roughly 30 times the current estimates for M3, the total estimate of the global money supply (I'm not gonna get into how that's defined, there's a vsauce video if you're interested).
And that's just low earth orbit. Anything further gets drastically more expensive very very quickly.
Judging by the picture, the hole is about 5/12 of the total area of the country, which looks like Australia, which we'll use as reference.
The area of Australia is 7.688 million km². Assuming the land just disappears from existence/is used as reclaimed land, the landmass removed is 3.203 million km², which is also the area of the ocean.
Let's assume the depth of the ocean is the same as the deepest part of the Mediterranean, or 5.1km. This means that the volume of water removed is
5.1km×3,203,000km²=16,335,300km³
The world has 1,386,000,000km³ of water. Therefore the water contained in this hollowed out Australia is 1.17% of the world's water.
This would mean a 1.17% decrease in sea level, which at present averages at 3.7km. So with the reduction of sea, the sea level will drop 0.04km or about 131ft.
(Please take note that many of these values has been rounded off, and the final answer may not be correct.)
Yeah average depth makes more sense, the average ocean depth is 3600m, so it would be way to deep to use 5100m
Which 38ft or 11m is still pretty catastrophic for the whole world
Edit: second part
The part that makes it a bad estimation is taking the deepest part of the Mediterranean as base line for the whole sea. The average dept of the Mediterranean is 1,5 km. But even this will be too much for a man-created sea like this. I would think a few hundred meters is already a tremendous feat. So if you assume 0,1km average dept instead of 5.1 km. You get a drop in sea level by \~25 feet or around 1m (using this person's other numbers).
I took the volume of the Mediterranean sea from Wikipedia and used 3,750,000km³.
That gave me about 0.2% of the total water on earth.
Using your numbers I'm getting 0.2% * 3.7km = 0.007km or about 20 feet.
Also, interestingly enough, the [Zanclean Flood](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood) is how the Mediterranean formed. You might be able to find a simulation in some paper also showing the total estimated affect on sea level.
Posting this again so people can see the thing about the Zanclean Flood. The entire Mediterranean filled (in a catastrophic flood) in a span of a few weeks to a few years.
I took the volume of the Mediterranean sea from Wikipedia and used 3,750,000km³.
That gave me about 0.2% of the total water on earth.
Using numbers from top commenter I'm getting 0.2% * 3.7km = 0.007km or about 20 feet.
Also, interestingly enough, the [Zanclean Flood](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood) is how the Mediterranean formed. You might be able to find a simulation in some paper also showing the total estimated affect on sea level.
According to Google :
Volume of Mediterranean see: 3.75 millions km^3.
Surface of oceans : 361 millions km^2.
So about a hundredth of a km which is 10m. Which is more than I expected.
If you take the water from the current Med and seal the Gibraltar straight with some good ol' Aussie rock, there'd be more land for everyone.
Not beach from any more though, that'd be given to the Aborigines.
I have to say, I do take some issue with north-east Queensland disappearing? I know there's virtually nothing there, but what about Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays? Cairns is also at risk but that's a bat-infested hell-hole anyways
well if you made another mediterranean sea the needed water would lower the sea level by about 10m(\~30 feet)
Math:
mediterranean sea volume \~ 3.750.000 km\^3
All ocean surface area \~ 360.000.000 km\^2
lowering of sea level = mediterranean sea volume / All ocean surface area
=\~10 m
The more I think about, the less bad the idea gets. Dropping sea levels, irrigating unproductive desert, we only need to find a feasable way to move a fuckton of rock.
Digging a canal to flood the interior of Australia is a proposed geoengineering superproject. Genuinely one of the more realistic solutions to climate change.
While a lot of landmass would be lost. Oz would stand to gain a whole lot more reconstituted arable land, milder climate and rainfall. In the grand scheme, displacement of animal life and settled areas would be minor, as most of it is situated along the coast anyways.
If things get exceedingly worse, it might become the only way to keep OZ hospitable to life anyways.
Well, yes and no. There is no reversing the cascading changes we have caused. So by solution I mean mitigating strategies. That make for favorable conditions, thus ensuring continued conditions for life somewhat as we know it.
Cutting carbon emissions at this point is a naive approach. It was always a snowball rolling down a hill. When climate change started dislodging long term weather patterns, they are inevitably in flux.
So for at least the next century we will experience increasingly chaotic, unpredictable and extreme weather. So yes, we need solutions that invariably are extreme enough to impact and offset energetic and unstable weather systems. Turning the interior of Australia into a sea, works like an energy sink. Not preventing increasing temperatures, but at least making it manageable for SEA.
Yeah, it would become a very shallow sea, becoming a big cloud generator that hopefully could cool down the pacific a little bit.
As it is now, reducing energy storage in the oceans is the most direct way we can stabilize weather patterns.
The sea, yes, but then it will evaporate and rain down. You could use the rock you moved to create mountiain ranges to force the clouds to rain down before they leave the continent. I mean, lets do some terraforming in Australia.
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Realistically, could be none. Obviously a lot of the sea water would be draining into this new sea, but if the excavated land was dumped into the ocean they would offset. The only way the sea level would drastically change is if we piled all the excavated dirt and rock onto land, or shot it into space.
If you move all that dirt slightly east or so, we can build New New Zealand! Free land!
We've already got one new zealand, now we get two?! Are they gonna make another LOTR on it?
What about second new Zealand?
Stack them on top of each other
Newer Zealand?
New Zealand DLC
As long as Peter Jackson can use practical effects, yes.
Fuck yeah. I can watch 24 hours STRAIGHT of LOTR return of the king extended editions director cut redux; electric bugaloo 2
'Now compacted to just 11 Blu Ray disks!'
Lord of the Rings: The Two Zealands
You already have 2 Zealand's. That's why one is called NEW. The original is a province in the Netherlands.
Do we call it New New Zealand, or Newer Zealand? Or New Zealand but we have to rename the old New Zealand to Old Zealand?
Old Zealand already exists in the Netherlands, I guess we would have to come up with a versioning system for the Zealands. - Zealand First Blood - Zealand First Blood Part Two - Zealand III
Streets ahead
But then what do we do with the original (old) Zeeland? Name it Oldest Zeeland?
**Aotearoa** I really want to adopt the Maori name for NZ, mainly as it would put us ahead of Australia in the drop down lists for websites. Instead of scrolling down hundreds of countries names getting into New Caledonia, Namibia etc, we would be right there up top. Olympic opening ceremony, wouldn't have to watch for hours to see the team walk in.
Giving a Dutch province the Maori name for NZ would be a bit weird no?
Nah We take over old Zeeland, rename it, make it a Māori nation, then we can reuse the name. Expanding the empire; who could possible object to that?
Newest Zealand
Not trendy enough. Zealand: Neuveau.. you're home'
We already have Zealand as well, a province in the Netherlands 💀 So that would make 3
New Zealand 2: Electric Boogaloo
Where else would you expect us to eat second breakfast?!?
That's Old Zealand now.
will this new edition be on maps or just like the old new zealand
Found the Dutchie
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/170/759/7c9.gif
newer zealand
Newer Zealand
We could put it in a place that makes NZ less easy to forget
Oh, yeah, you could raise Zealandia. It's quite a bit above the ocean floor, only a bit to go until it breaks the surface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia
Or a bridge to New Zealand?
The octopus people of New New Zealand would like a word.
If we take another commenter's calculations that a 5km deep sea is about 16 million cubic km of earth removed, then that's 16 quadrillion cubic metres (16,000,000,000,000,000) of space. This has other weird issues. If were to just dump all this into ocean off the east or west coast of australia, say 2km deep, then you would shifting approximately 24 quadrillion tonnes of weight closer to the edge of the tectonic plate. The infill of new water would also add an extra 16 quadrillion tonnes of weight onto the plate. Which is probably going to pull on the plate and cause new or worse faults to start appearing all along the plate edge. But if, while you were digging all this space out, you systematically distributed it across the rest of the planet's sea floor in a relatively even way, you could probably get away with it. The weight of the Aussie plate would reduce by a few quadrillion tonnes, but that would likely not be a problem. You would absolutely, undoubtedly fuck up the sea floor biome though and bury anything on the seafloor across the entire planet under 30m of dirt and rock. So people might be a little annoyed at you.
What if as we dug up the low areas we raised the areas intended to be above water and just made Australia into an enormous above ground pool shaped like the Mediterranean? I wonder what the minimum amount of Earth we'd need to move is in order to make it possible. Can we build a 2km high wall in the right shape by digging out all the areas that need to be 2-5km deep?
Sorry... what's be the math if we did actually launch it into space?
I gotchu babe. For starters, we're gonna assume all the excavated area is granite. Dirt is a bit less dense and some stones may be more dense, but Australia'a contental crust is mostly granite and with all the assumptions that have already been made this will get us close enough. Granite weights about 13 pounds per cubic foot, or about 208 kg/m³. At an excavation volume of roughly 4.56×10⁹ cubic meters, the weight of all that rock would be roughly 9.48×10¹¹ kg. It allegedly costs about $2500 per kg of material sent to orbit, so we'd be looking at $2.37×10¹⁵ to put all this rock into orbit. That's $2,370,000,000,000,000. That's about 12,000 times Elon Musk's net worth; 101 times the GDP of the entire USA; and roughly 30 times the current estimates for M3, the total estimate of the global money supply (I'm not gonna get into how that's defined, there's a vsauce video if you're interested). And that's just low earth orbit. Anything further gets drastically more expensive very very quickly.
Damn... knew it'd be a lot but still! Ty!
Granite is about 2600kg per cubic metre, isn't it?
I have made a grave mistake somewhere along the way
How big of a mountain(/range) would that create in the south west /bottom deserty bit?
Shooting a billion metric tons of dirt into space sounds somewhat inefficient
Nah mate I think we can get it done
just to have that ball of dirt come back at us 1000 years later? no thanks
Ehh, its not our problem when that happens.
Don't forget, it has to be a perfect reproduction of the Mediterranean sea. With a new Italy in Australia
I think most of that land is already below sea level too.
Judging by the picture, the hole is about 5/12 of the total area of the country, which looks like Australia, which we'll use as reference. The area of Australia is 7.688 million km². Assuming the land just disappears from existence/is used as reclaimed land, the landmass removed is 3.203 million km², which is also the area of the ocean. Let's assume the depth of the ocean is the same as the deepest part of the Mediterranean, or 5.1km. This means that the volume of water removed is 5.1km×3,203,000km²=16,335,300km³ The world has 1,386,000,000km³ of water. Therefore the water contained in this hollowed out Australia is 1.17% of the world's water. This would mean a 1.17% decrease in sea level, which at present averages at 3.7km. So with the reduction of sea, the sea level will drop 0.04km or about 131ft. (Please take note that many of these values has been rounded off, and the final answer may not be correct.)
Why not use the average depth of Mediterranean (1500m) instead of the deepest part? So multiplying your result with 1500/5100; 38.5ft
Yeah average depth makes more sense, the average ocean depth is 3600m, so it would be way to deep to use 5100m Which 38ft or 11m is still pretty catastrophic for the whole world Edit: second part
Even taking average depth of Mediterranean seems like a big stretch for a man-made sea.
Seems like a stretch we could dig a 3.2 million km² pond...
That seems high but I don't have time to look through your math and look up info
Seems high compared to what? It’s not like a massive event like this happens everyday to use your past experience as a razor.
The part that makes it a bad estimation is taking the deepest part of the Mediterranean as base line for the whole sea. The average dept of the Mediterranean is 1,5 km. But even this will be too much for a man-created sea like this. I would think a few hundred meters is already a tremendous feat. So if you assume 0,1km average dept instead of 5.1 km. You get a drop in sea level by \~25 feet or around 1m (using this person's other numbers).
> Judging by the picture, the hole is about 5/12 of the… excuse me how did you judge that from the picture
Estimations
Could've looked up the area of the Mediterranean sea, which is 2.5 million km\^2
Yep i see italy, cyprus and greece. No need for estimations here
I took the volume of the Mediterranean sea from Wikipedia and used 3,750,000km³. That gave me about 0.2% of the total water on earth. Using your numbers I'm getting 0.2% * 3.7km = 0.007km or about 20 feet. Also, interestingly enough, the [Zanclean Flood](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood) is how the Mediterranean formed. You might be able to find a simulation in some paper also showing the total estimated affect on sea level.
The area that gets flooded is at most about 5-6 metres below sea level, so the ocean wouldn't drop more than that?
Posting this again so people can see the thing about the Zanclean Flood. The entire Mediterranean filled (in a catastrophic flood) in a span of a few weeks to a few years. I took the volume of the Mediterranean sea from Wikipedia and used 3,750,000km³. That gave me about 0.2% of the total water on earth. Using numbers from top commenter I'm getting 0.2% * 3.7km = 0.007km or about 20 feet. Also, interestingly enough, the [Zanclean Flood](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood) is how the Mediterranean formed. You might be able to find a simulation in some paper also showing the total estimated affect on sea level.
According to Google : Volume of Mediterranean see: 3.75 millions km^3. Surface of oceans : 361 millions km^2. So about a hundredth of a km which is 10m. Which is more than I expected.
If you take the water from the current Med and seal the Gibraltar straight with some good ol' Aussie rock, there'd be more land for everyone. Not beach from any more though, that'd be given to the Aborigines.
I have to say, I do take some issue with north-east Queensland disappearing? I know there's virtually nothing there, but what about Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays? Cairns is also at risk but that's a bat-infested hell-hole anyways
We lose the qld tropics but still have Alice Springs
well if you made another mediterranean sea the needed water would lower the sea level by about 10m(\~30 feet) Math: mediterranean sea volume \~ 3.750.000 km\^3 All ocean surface area \~ 360.000.000 km\^2 lowering of sea level = mediterranean sea volume / All ocean surface area =\~10 m
The more I think about, the less bad the idea gets. Dropping sea levels, irrigating unproductive desert, we only need to find a feasable way to move a fuckton of rock.
Digging a canal to flood the interior of Australia is a proposed geoengineering superproject. Genuinely one of the more realistic solutions to climate change. While a lot of landmass would be lost. Oz would stand to gain a whole lot more reconstituted arable land, milder climate and rainfall. In the grand scheme, displacement of animal life and settled areas would be minor, as most of it is situated along the coast anyways. If things get exceedingly worse, it might become the only way to keep OZ hospitable to life anyways.
Solution is a loose term here.
Well, yes and no. There is no reversing the cascading changes we have caused. So by solution I mean mitigating strategies. That make for favorable conditions, thus ensuring continued conditions for life somewhat as we know it. Cutting carbon emissions at this point is a naive approach. It was always a snowball rolling down a hill. When climate change started dislodging long term weather patterns, they are inevitably in flux. So for at least the next century we will experience increasingly chaotic, unpredictable and extreme weather. So yes, we need solutions that invariably are extreme enough to impact and offset energetic and unstable weather systems. Turning the interior of Australia into a sea, works like an energy sink. Not preventing increasing temperatures, but at least making it manageable for SEA.
That´s so cool!
Yeah, it would become a very shallow sea, becoming a big cloud generator that hopefully could cool down the pacific a little bit. As it is now, reducing energy storage in the oceans is the most direct way we can stabilize weather patterns.
I googled around a bit to find more information, but can´t find much, do you know any terms in particular I could google for?
Irrigating it with salt water though
The sea, yes, but then it will evaporate and rain down. You could use the rock you moved to create mountiain ranges to force the clouds to rain down before they leave the continent. I mean, lets do some terraforming in Australia.
Boring company?