Disclaimer: This article does not present a practical solution. Please do not try these solutions at home… Actually, go ahead and try them at home. If you succeed (and people are left on the planet), you’ll win a Nobel Prize of some sort. I hope.   

In case you haven’t heard, sea levels are rising. If you believe in global warming, which I sincerely hope you do, one of the more pertinent facts which probably concern you since you  live in Santa Cruz, is that ocean levels are rising. This is bad. If you need reasons, ask, well, anyone. Take a look at this:

According to this fancy graph, the world’s oceans appear to be rising at around one inch per decade, which doesn’t seem like much. However, since the total ocean’s surface area is 360 million kilometers squared, that’s a total of 18,288 cubic kilometers [360,000,000 km squared * (2 inches * 2.54 cm/inch * 0.01cm/m * 0.001m/km) = 18,288 km cubed]. Yes, I converted inches to centimeters.

18,288 km cubed is a lot of water. It’s a cube of water measuring over 26 kilometers on all sides (cube root of 18,288). The cube wouldn’t extend out into space, but that’s still pretty high; it’s over double the height of Mount Everest.  

Perhaps we could simply scoop the water out of the ocean to stop the oceans from rising? Never mind where we’d put all of the extra water; it’ll go somewhere where water is needed. We could send it to, say, Matt Damon on Mars.

Back when I was in 7th Grade, when Mr. Hanson still taught at PCS, I suggested that to stop the ocean levels from rising, we should bomb a few islands in the Pacific so that the water that flooded into the previously existent islands would balance out the glaciers melting. I wasn’t aware this has already happened. The Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific, has been used for nuclear bomb testing; 23 bombs have been tested (i.e., blown up). Because of this, the Bikini Atoll is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (and, apparently, not a barren nuclear wasteland?).

Unfortunately for my modest proposal, no discernible effects have been detected from these tests, from an ocean level perspective. But what if we just dug up an island ourselves by hand?

If we, collectively as a species (stretch your imagination for a second), were to move 18,288 cubic kilometers of dirt, sand, water, or other material from underwater to above water every decade, it would divide out to around 0.00000261257 cubic kilometers per person (18,000 km cubed / 7,000,000,000 people on Earth). This is still 2612.57 cubic meters of material per person per decade, which is equivalent to around a cube 13 meters on all sides (cube root of 2162) being moved every decade. Divided out, that’s around 0.7 meters cubed of water every day (2612 / 10 years per decade / 365 days per year = 0.7 meters cubed per day).

That sounds suspiciously easy, so I checked how much 0.7 meters cubed is in gallons. It turned out to be 184 gallons per day for the next ten years… oh wait, actually forever.

If you want to feel really good about yourself (or you’re outrageously, insanely bored), go down to the ocean, take a bucket, and scoop 200 gallons of water out of the ocean and dump it somewhere else (somewhere where it won’t go back into the ocean). Then you can go home with the satisfied feeling that you have done your part to stop global warming.

Maybe we could instead dig a giant Grand Canal like the Sui Dynasty did. According to the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, the Chinese Grand Canal is 30-60 meters wide and 0.6 -4.6 meters deep. If we wanted to dig a canal of these proportions until it displaced 18,288 km cubed of water, it would only have to be about 66 km long, which is over 10 times shorter than the actual Grand Canal.

Did you spot the error I just made? I wrote 60 and 4.6 meters–not kilometers. Adjusted for the right units in kilometers, we would have to dig a Grand Canal over 75,000,000 kilometers (18,288 km cubed / 0.06 km / 0.004 km = 76,200,000 km) long. The Earth’s circumference (all the way around) is only 40,075 km, and the actual Chinese Grand Canal is only 1,776 km. We would only have to dig 42,000 Grand Canals (76,200,000 km / 1776 km per GC = 42,905.405 GC’s–I’ll take 0.405 Canals; you take a full Canal) in the next ten years, every ten years, for the next . . . forever. By most approximations, about 3,000,000 people died building the original Grand Canal, so if we dug 42,000 Grand Canals under those conditions, we (or rather, I) will have killed 126,000,000,000 people. That’s 126 quadrillion people and 18 times more people than there are on the planet right now.  

Houston, we have a problem.