From the Daily Mail:
It took just six months for a warm and sunny Europe to be engulfed in ice, according to new research.
Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade – but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.
In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.
Not mentioend in the article is the likely reason *why* the Gulf Stream suddenly slowed down: The ice dam holding back Lake Agassiz broke, and dumped more fresh water than is currently held by all the lakes on Earth directly into the Atlantic ocean via the St. Lawrence seaway. The article *does* crank out the “O Noes! Greenland is melting” scarememe, which is quite a lot less of an impact due to the extremely slow rate at which fresh water is added to the Atlantic as compared to Lake Agassiz emptying out in about a year.
But if you really wanted to freeze out Europe (and who doesn’t?) how would you go about it? Well, you could nuke the bejeebers out of the Greenland ice sheet in the hopes that you’d melt enough fresh water to do it… unlikely. But there might be another possibility: nuke the crap out of the Panama Canal. The Pacific Ocean is about 10 inches higher than the Atlantic at that point; if you could nuke a channel all the way through the canal zone – this would probably require a 100-kiloton class nuke every half mile or so along the whole fifty miles of the canal – the Pacific would try to empty itself into the Atlantic. This would surely change Gulf Stream flow patterns.
1) You might be able to pull this stunt off with a handfull of really big Soviet citybusters. A few H-Bombs in the 10 megaton range taken to Lake Gatun on board a cargo ship, then dumped overboard at the appropriate points (better would be to dump them through locks cut into the bottom of the ships hull, so the operation won’t be seen) and detonated at a precise sequence might do the job. The bottom of Gatun is something less than 40 feet above sea level, so you’d need to excavate the whole length of the lake to at least that depth. The process of doing so would almost certainly create a series of tsunamis which would take out the locks on either side, opening the way for the Pacific to race in and do its thing. So along with the extraordinary panic this act would create, you’d also have the excitement of throwing transcontinental shipping into chaos, as the new channel would not be passable by ship, and of course people trying to walk or drive from North America to South America would find the way not only blasted apart, but radioactive. And then, if all goes to plan, Europe gets thrown into a new Ice Age. Huzzah!
2) ???
3) Profit!
14 Responses to “Last Ice Age took just SIX months to arrive”
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You should be living on an island with a Mad Genius idea like draining the Pacific into the Atlantic. It’s Brilliant on a level lunacy I can hardly fathom. 🙂
And make sure the Island has a Volcano. Al super villains have volcanoes on their Islands dontchaknow? 😛
You can nuke Lake Gatun as much as you want and that isn’t going to lower the Culebra Cut anymore and it is 26m above sea level. Since the Culebra is ‘upstream’ to the Pacific end you need to lower it to sea level to see any drainage. Since Gatun is actually a gravity dam of the Charges River you could empty it by destroying the barrage but that is just the minuscule (on a global scale) flow from this river.
As to deepening the Culebra to open the Pacific to the Atlantic even nuclear demolitions is unlikely to help much because of the weakness of the strata. The biggest problem to dig the canal was actually landslides from the edges. You have to dig a very wide cut to maintain a very shallow gradient along the sides. To dig a deeper cut you would need to widen the cut from about 500m to 1,000m and deepen it from 40m to 70m along a length over 10km. That’s a volume of about 450 million cubic metres of soil you need to remove via your nuclear crater making. (Yes I’ve just been reading a book about the building of the Canal: Panama Fever by Matthew Parker.)
But then after all that if you were able to dig a sea level canal through the Culebra (the rest is easy since you don’t need to worry about the Chargres flooding the canal) any water flow would be not as significant as you imagine. Firstly while the average sea level of the Pacific may me much higher than the Atlantic the difference on either side of the Panama Canal is only 20cm. Which is caused by a range of effects that are unlikely to change that much such as weather, water density, etc. Even if water started to gush from one side to the other it would be limited by the flow volume of the canal. Canals are not big waterways and even a radically expanded canal is unlikely to allow for a discharge of more than 75 million cubic metres per day (new lock size at the velocity of Niagara Falls). While this sounds pretty good its only 1/20,000 of the discharge of the Glacial Lake Agassiz. Plus it’s a discharge of sea water not fresh water and it’s also being discharged much further from the Gulf Stream than from St. Lawrence and from the formation zone of the stream not interrupting it mid flow.
So the effects of the Pacific draining into the Atlantic via Panama – as unpossible as it is to make happen – is not going to cause a new Ice Age. Those “mutant neutrinos” are more likely…
I have seen a couple of small articles speculating about the speed with which glaciers form, and about how quickly year round snow cover would move south. The reduction of Solar output is being pegged as the primary factor in each, and we may get to see just how quickly they happen.
As for your most excellent MS plan, yea, you need a volcanic island lair!
> You can nuke Lake Gatun as much as you want and that isn’t going to lower the Culebra Cut anymore and it is 26m above sea level.
Then it will have to go as well.
NOTE: sitting about 20 feet from me are a series of annual reports and collections of diagrams regarding the construction of the Canal. Seems I had an ancestor who was an engineer on the project… named his daughter “Culebra.” Very detailed stuff, but also hideously fragile. One of these decades I’m gonna have to do something with ’em.
> You have to dig a very wide cut to maintain a very shallow gradient along the sides.
Not a problem. One large nuke dead center to make a nice deep hole; a few smaller nukes off to the side to wipe out the nearby hillsides.
> Plus it’s a discharge of sea water not fresh water…
Sure. Instead of a salinity change causing the Gulf Stream to go funny, here the idea is to simply add more water. Granted, it’s a bit like trying to change the flow patterns in a hot tub by squirting a Super Soaker into it… but every little bit helps when one is contemplating mass devastation.
Proper planning would involve proper timing of the detonations. The best case would be to do this at a time when the Pacific is at its highest; when tides are surging in from the Pacific and lapping against the western shore of the canal zone (which, due to the S-shaped bent nature of the isthmus, is actually to the south-east), and, hopefully, a good storm is beating the hell out of the western side. This way, the forces of wind and water can be used to amplify the effects. Rather than just blasting the rock and soil up and out a little bit, where it can slump back in, the rushing water and wind can blow it out into the Atlantic. Perhaps one final nuke… a truly big Soviet citybuster in the Pacific a mile or two, at the proper depth to send a nice big wave washing through the rubble.
Somewhere around here I have a journal article on Operation Plowshare, showing the plans for nuking a sea-level canal across Nicaragua. As memory serves, the plan called for about 300 nukes of various sizes. Panama would require far fewer due to the shorter length and lower elevation, but as you point out, almost certainly more than my offhand suggestion of just a few citybusters. So how to go about nuking Panama let’s say fifty times?
The first option is to have this be a major American governmental operation. Clearly the US could easily do so. But why would the US do this? What does the US have to gain by wiping out the canal (and thus shipping through it) and also wiping out Europe? At first glance, not much. But as second glance… Obama. As has been made clear by his slights of the Brits (he bows low to every King and Emperor he comes acrss… except for the Queen of England; his idea of an appropriate gift is a pack of DVD’s and an ipod packed with his own bloviations), he doesn’t *like* the Brits. Maybe something to do with the Brits having locked up and tortured his grandfather. So all it would take would be a careful campaign of whispers in Obamas ear to get him to snap and declare a secret war on the British. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge into Supervillain status (though granted, he’s missing the “supergenius” prerequisite; I guess he’d be more of a “superstooge”). Perhaps convince him that the British think he has big silly ears or something. Play on his ego, which is certainly a big enough target.
2) A Chinese operation: They could obviously pull this off as well. But in their case, it’s a much tougher sell. They pretty much own the canal now (thanks, Jimmah), and would lose vast income were it to be trashed.
3) A Jihadist operation: Clearly this is the easiest sell in terms of motivation, but the hardest sell in terms of capability. A half dozen Soviet nukes is about the maximum I could see Al Queda or some such obtaining; in a short while Iran could start adding a nuke a year or so. If Pakistan falls, then their collection of crappy, inefficient nukes could be added to the inventory.
“But surely we could stop the Iranian and Pakistani nukes from being used for an operation like this!” you say. But then you remember, “Oh, yeah. Obama,” and you realize that after a few more years of this chucklehead we won’t be able to stop doodly-squat.
Up next in my “reshaping the world” category: terraforming Utah.
Acutally, IIRC, when South America moved close enough to interupt the flowpattern south of what was North America there was enough of an upset in Global Climate to leave marks that palioclimitoligis could see.
Still, freezing Europe … yeah, work on the salinity count of the Gulf Stream, which is already going down IIRC. 😉
But if you want to wipe out the East Coast of the USA … a handful of 10K (or so) Nukes in the Cannary Islands. Trying to evacuate the minimal flood zones along the ENTIRE east coast in less then 6 hours? Yeah, 10 Trillion, easy, in damages and a million plus dead…. Then it gets nasty as the cordnated economy of the World crashes … yeah, the folks that want 12 Century instead of the 21st might get their wish. Except we’d probably crash through the 12th and keep on going for a while….
Oh, and reguarding #3; Al Quada has already publicly stated that one of their contengency ops is that if Secular Pakistan falls then they’re going after their Nukes to use agianst the U.S.A.
>a handful of 10K (or so) Nukes in the Cannary Islands.
Indeed. This has always been a particular favorite of mine:
http://www.rense.com/general56/tsu.htm
Dr Simon Day, who works at the Benfield Greig Hazards Research Centre, University College London*, says that one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries, is unstable and could plunge into the ocean during the volcano’s next eruption.
Dr. Day says: “If the volcano collapsed in one block of almost 20 cubic kilometres of rock, weighing 500 billion tonnes – twice the size of the Isle of Wight – it would fall into water almost 4 miles deep and create an undersea wave 2000 feet tall. Within five minutes of the landslide, a dome of water about a mile high would form and then collapse, before the Mega Tsunami fanned out in every direction, travelling at speeds of up to 500 mph. A 330ft wave would strike the western Sahara in less than an hour.”
Europe would be protected from the fiercest force by the position of the other Canary Islands, but the tsunami would still bring 33ft waves to Lisbon and La Coruña within three hours.
After six hours it would reach Britain, where waves up to 40 ft high would hit southwest England at 500 miles per hour, travel a mile inland and obliterate almost everything in its path. Even Britain’s more sheltered shores, in the North Sea and Irish Sea, will be struck by smaller but still significant swells, causing widespread flooding in major coastal cities.
…
However, the destruction in the United Kingdom will be as nothing compared to the devastation reeked on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Dr. Day claims that the Mega Tsunami will generate a wave that will be inconceivably catastrophic. He says: “It will surge across the Atlantic at 500 miles per hour in less than seven hours, engulfing the whole US east coast with a wave almost two hundred feet high ” higher than Nelson,s Column ” sweeping away everything in its path up to 20 miles inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami, the Caribbean and Brazil.” Millions would be killed, and as Dr. Day explains: “It’s not a question of “if” Cumbre Vieja collapses, it’s simply a question of “when”.
Actually, I suspect you wouldn’t need a “handful” of nukes; one might do the trick. And with careful planning, nukes might not be needed, just a whole bunch of high explosives. In either event, I suspect that the NRO and the CIA… hell the NYPD… have La Palma under constant surveillance. A single nuke that could kill maybe fifty million Americans, and destroy the US as a modern power (at least for the decade or so it’d take to rebuild)? Come on, what Jihadi or Progressive *wouldn’t* be thrilled to shudders just at the very idea?
Terraforming Utah? Not sure there’s anything to work with. If the Great Salt Lake had been fresh water it would make a nice resort area but then it’s only 20 feet deep or so so maybe not. Now if Lake Bonneville had still been around then were talkin’ tourist destination.
> Terraforming Utah? Not sure there’s anything to work with.
Just wait until you see the magnificence of my design.
I have here “The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives,” by Teller, Talley, Higgins, and Johnson (1968). Upgrading the Panama Canal is discussed. (Eisenhower, in 1957, ordered a study of making it a sea-level thing. ) Two routes were deemed practical to be created with atom bombs. All the numbers are here, with the usual diagrams. Pages 215-227, if you have a copy.
> “The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives,” … if you have a copy.
Sadly, no. I’ll give you a brand new shiny quarter for your copy, though…
“…I suspect that the NRO and the CIA… hell the NYPD… have La Palma under constant surveillance….”
A) It would make since, ergo I doubt it’s being done.
B) The last two or three Administrations were focues elsewhere … even after this danger was ID’d.
C) Most Westerners only know about it via CSI:Miami … and let’s not go there on how bad they protraied it.
D) Most of the Progressives homes on the East Coast are in range and while they’re suicidal as a Race (Humans Bad, Too Many Humans, Need Less Humans … but we’re not inclueded in that count) they’re not that Personally suicidal. Unfortunaltly. 😉
“Up next in my “reshaping the world” category: terraforming Utah.”
Now THAT is ambitious!