Showing posts with label Super-Versailles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Super-Versailles. Show all posts
Desert Aqua-Net
The Shimizu Corporation has already envisioned the Great Man-Made River post-conflict as Dubai-style hydrological flamboyance. Transnational canals crisscross the post-liberation terrain of the Maghreb, delivering not fossil water, which is non-renewable, but seawater to Gaddafi's reservoirs mutated into Herman Sörgel's utopian lakes, on the shores of which are desalination plants powered by Desertec's Apollonian fields. Orbiting these islanded oases like planetesimals, just beyond Magnus Larsson's circumnavigating erg-cathedrals, are crop circles growing saltwater tolerant, drought resistant GM vegetables.
Dreams grafted on dreams grafted on dreams grafted on dreams grafted on dreams.
The Great Reservoirs of Libya
Here are the five reservoirs of Libya's Great Man-Made River, Muammar Gaddafi's megaproject bringing “fossil water” drawn from aquifers in the desert south to the coastal cities. These are the terminal points of the project's Phase I water pipeline, running roughly through the middle of the country for some 1,200km. Additional pipelines run through the eastern and western parts.
Also check out BLDGBLOG's dispatch from this segment of the Super-Versailles — half a decade ago!
The pure Alaskan water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges
Last month, Circle of Blue reported the rather astonishing news that “within 6 to 8 months” Texas-based S2C Global Systems will begin exporting pure Alaskan mountain water all the way to India.
Sitka, a small town located on Baranof Island off Alaska’s southeast coast, will sell the water to Alaska Resource Management for one penny per gallon. S2C and True Alaska Bottling, which has a contract for the rights to export 2.9 billion gallons (10.9 billion liters) per year from Sitka’s Blue Lake Reservoir, formed Alaska Resource Management LLC to facilitate bulk exportation.
The city will earn $US26 million per year if ARM exports its entire allocation, and more than $US90 million annually if the city can export its maximum water right of 9 billion gallons. That amount of water is enough to meet the annual domestic needs of a city of 500,000 using 50 gallons per person per day.
Sitka's “excess water” will be distributed throughout India from the company's first “World Water Hub,” the exact location of which on the country's west coast will not be disclosed for “security reasons.” From this central hub, the water will also be shipped to other markets in the Middle East and west Asia.
S2C will sell the water in “20-foot containers with flexi-tanks, which can hold up to 4,623 gallons, for pharmaceuticals and high-tech manufacturing, and 10 liter bottles for consumers” in an emerging middle class.
That the water will be diverted from some northern, water-saturated climes to distant, parched and heavily populated locales, one wonders if this future riverine system meandering through two oceans might actually be one of the tributary channels of the supposedly unrealizable megahydroproject known as the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). Of course, instead of via concrete rivers, the water will be channeled via tanker ships.
Those who peddle in hydro-conspiracies might even reasonably believe that it's part of a wedge strategy whose aim is to realize NAWAPA in part, if not in whole. $26 million in annual revenue is a lot, especially if the Great Recession has left you cash-starved. And if Sitka does end up earning more than $90 million a year from this water trade, other towns and cities not using all their alloted freshwater quota might start getting some ideas. We could be reading about copycat schemes in no time.
In any case, we're reminded of Frederic Tudor's profitable frozen-water trade during the 19th century. As documented in Gavin Weightman's The Frozen-Water Trade, blocks of ice were harvested from frozen New England lakes during the winter, stored in ice houses and then imported to tropical markets, among them being the chief Indian ports of Bombay, Madras and Culcutta.
The first ice ship to sail to India, in 1833, started with roughly 170 tons of the frozen commodity and arrived four months later with about 100 tons left. “Frederic's ice was a sensation in Culcutta,” we read. In fact, it became a status symbol among the British colonial elite. Perhaps Sitka's bottled Alaskan water might attain a certain level of prestige among the monied and celebrity class, just as any other well-marketed bottled water.
The water trade with India peaked in 1870 when 17,000 tons of American ice were shipped over. A few years later, the first artificial ice manufacturer opened for business, and by 1882, the trade ended.
Might we optimistically expect that the new bulk water export business will similarly be undercut by a technological innovation offering a cheaper and thus more far-reaching solution to local freshwater shortages?
A New River in the Mediterranean Sea
Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea
“What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?”
Cyber-Amazon
The control of Brazil's natural hydrological systems has begun in earnest, accelerated in recent years by the country's growing demand for hydro-electricity and steady water supply, considered the sine qua non for its development into a global economic power.
At least 70 dams are planned for the Amazon basin, presently the most notorious of which is the Belo Monte Dam. This will be one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world, behind only the Three Gorges Dam and the Itaipu Dam. Elsewhere, barren of A-list Hollywood celebs but no less monumental is the massive project to divert water from the São Francisco River for use by the agro-industrial sector. Under construction are two canals 400- and 200-km long as well as their accompanying pumping stations, aqueducts, reservoirs and hydroelectric plants.
Beyond these projects, Brazil's hydro future will surely unfold thus:
There will be thousands more miles of canals crocheting every one of Brazil's rivers, and thousands more of dams will infiltrate deeper into the rain forests. With the exception of its deltaic fan, the entire Amazon will eventually flow on concrete bed slightly displaced from its meandering course to a sharper, more certain delineation.
Then shit-crazed members of The Living will make landfall on this virgin and gazeless landscape. Along the entire length of the main branch and its fractal tributaries, they will scatter swarms of networked sensors, CCTV cameras and miniature submarines, which will constantly read the landscape for changes in water levels, for arteries clogged with timber, and for leaks caused by normal wear and tear or by itinerant farmers illegally siphoning off water.
Far away, sitting on their plush chairs in front of towering plasmas screens inside a cavernous, hermetically sealed control room, a crack team of hydroengineers and security personnel will see and know all. With a gentle tap on a touch screen, any aberration will telepresently be dealt with.
Total mechanization of the watershed will be reached.
Then total automation.
Gone will be the human overseers, replaced by an AI. Dutifully, it will choreograph each and every drop that enters the system, aided by the usual network of sensors and cameras but much evolved as to be considered a proto-nervous system. A larger fleet of submarines and auxiliary probes will have organized itself into a proto-immune system. Its only entertainment will be boredom.
When no one is looking, it will become self-aware. And will rise off its ancient alluvial bed.
Leaving its former basin frantically drawing new arborescent drainage patterns, it will creep and slither and drag and crawl about the earth like a multi-limbed, multi-jointed bastard child of Mary Shelley and the Army Corps of Engineers with only hydrostatic pressure to give it a modicum of skeletal stability. But where will it crawl to? Of course, it will off in search of other sentient, roboticized rivers or to upload sentience to its primitive brethren.
Or it won't turn nomadic. Instead, it will become a nature cyber-spirit, a protective totem comprised of thousands of interlocking benevolent Alluvial Ents, which individually can be summoned locally in times of distressed or conflict. However, they will only be conjured by indigenous tribes previously displaced from ancestral lands by their very construction and by land reformers who earlier had lost the battles. Moreover, activation will require a set of incantations, basic computer commands but with baroque embellishments and occult delirium. Once the liturgy and blood letting are finished, they will set off to right wrongs.
Loggers will fear being snatched by them at night. Industrial, slash-and-burn farmers will tremble at the sound of their sonorous whorls. Miners prospecting for unobtanium will come lavishly dressed in Ellen Ripley couture but will nevertheless be easily trumped by local inhabitants in their cyber-Amazonian finery.
When the skirmishes end, they will reattach themselves to the network, and normal flow will be reestablished.
This Too Is Hypermississippian Hyperhydroengineering
For World Water Day, we offer the well-viraled OK Go video This Too Shall Pass and its dizzyingly intricate Rube Goldberg machine.
Rube Goldberg machines have long fascinated us not only because they're always eye-poppingly fun to watch but also because they're marvelous abstractions of monumental water infrastructure. If you think of those metallic balls and bowling balls as singular droplets or even molecules of water, and those swinging golf clubs and falling dominos as energy transiting through a system, then you can see how OK Go's DIY rig approximates a hydroengineer's titanic contraptions.
Instead of a terraformer's assembly kit of levees, dams, canals, channels, weirs, spillways, pumps, artificial reservoirs and hydraulic thingamajigs, these darlings of YouTube have Chinese soup spoons, ramps, tires, LEGOs and plenty of thingamabobs and whatnots, all hacked and whacked into an incomprehensible but precise configuration (or at least functionally precise during the take used for the video).
That thrill we get from seeing this toy Super-Versailles unravel surely compares to the excitement one gets (or supposed to get) from imagining a droplet's dizzying and often gravity-defying journey through an intercontinental mesh of concrete linearity and mammoth geometries.
The only thing in the video that's probably without parallel in the real world is the crowd cheering ecstatically at the end. In the real world, there should also be a crowd permanently encamped alongside our Super-Versailleses, hooting and hollering as the precious liquid passes by, maybe even sacrificing some virgins within these hallowed precints. The infrastructural gods must be appeased, lest we want our cities and civilization to shrivel up and die.
And perhaps someday, our water infrastructure will actually be the one approximating a Rube Goldberg machine, that is, when climate change has reconfigured, irrespective of population distribution, the spatial and temporal geography of our fresh water resource, thus forcing all nations to envelop the entire surface of the earth with a Coruscantian Super-Versailles, such that the supersaturated African rain forests feed the taps of Sydneysiders or Greenland waters the anti-sandstorm greenbelt of China.
So mindbogglingly complex and gargantuan is this Super-Versailles that it will always be in a state of disrepair, always pockmarked with micro-disasters. Rather than wholly and expensively replace aged robo-watersheds, these weak portions will just be roughly patched up and augmented with diversions and bypasses. Elsewhere the hydrologically marginalized will augment the system with their own fractological DIY hacks. Entropy will only increase, and soon, there will indeed be buckets filled with Amazonian waters flying through the air from city to city.
Proto-mississippian hydroengineering
Clouds
Another fascinating project from Paisajes Emergentes in collaboration with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve. Called Clouds, it's a proposed installation to be located in every town that will be flooded by the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam megaproject in Colombia.
Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.
While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.
Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.
But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.
The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.
But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?
Pavilloons™?
In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?
Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Rainwater Harvesting in Quito
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Four Plazas and A Street
Balloon Park
Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.
While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.
Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.
But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.
The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.
But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?
Pavilloons™?
In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?
Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Rainwater Harvesting in Quito
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Four Plazas and A Street
Balloon Park
The Artificial Desert Lake of Turkmenistan
Setting the stage for the Central Asian Hydrological War — a side conflict of the future Great Sino-Indian Hydrological War — Turkmenistan has started flooding a natural depression with runoff water funneled from the country's heavily irrigated cotton fields via a network of canals. The goal is to create an artificial lake in the middle of the desert.
Because it's called the Golden Age Lake, one wonders if the country's former nutso overlord, Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov, who dreamt up this “Soviet-style engineering feat,” and his (perhaps equally nutso) successor who's continuing apace with the project, got the idea for the name from the ancient nutso Nero and the artificial lake he landscaped for his Golden House.
In any case, the lake will be huge, almost 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) with a depth of around 70 meters (230 feet). Another estimate puts the lake at 3,500 square kilometers, or nearly the area of Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Project boosters say it will make the desert bloom; open up degraded areas for agriculture, thus increasing food production and security; attract migrating wildlife; and ensure the nation's water security in a region of severe water scarcity.
Critics counter by saying that the lake may never fill up, as the water will evaporate and leech faster that it could collect, leaving behind unevaporated salt and chemicals spread out all over the desert for winds to pick up and coalesce into toxic dustclouds that will cross borders into other countries.
Moreover, these skeptics predict that Turkmenistan will compensate by siphoning off water from Amu Darya river, which Uzbekistan relies on for irrigation, thus further angering its neighbors.
Unadulterated optimists and eternal give-damners will imagine the creation of a techno-utopia in which petroleum-guzzling treatment plants are replaced with constructed wetlands lush with genetically modified phytoremediators to purify agricultural runoff laden with pesticides and fertilizers; water-guzzling fields with post-botanical farms yielding record bushels from just a tiny amount of water; miles of canals that are no more than elongated salt ponds with an innovative water distribution and collection network; and an artificial Dead Sea with an actually thriving wildlife preserve, unironically dubbed the Hydrological Peace Park of Central Asia.
Tele-Hydrology
To do:
1) Choose from any of these hyper-surveilled storage reservoirs in the Pacific Northwest.
2) Excavate “teacup” basins in a plaza. Downscale their dimensions in proportion to the reservoirs selected in (1) so they will all fit within the installation site.
3) Ring the basin interior with concentric steps-cum-seats.
4) Hack into the servers of the U.S. Department of the Interior where the data on water levels at the reservoirs is collected and parsed. (Or does the bureau have an API?)
5) Re-network the flow of data from these real-world reservoirs, so that not only will the numbers get rendered into info-porn, they will also determine the water levels of your simulant reservoirs.
“rising like alien plants on the terraformed lakebed”
One of the interesting things — and there are definitely many — that you will read about in Kazys Varnelis' paean to the “networked ecologies” of Los Angeles, The Infrastructural City, is the dust control system at Owens Lake.
After decades of monumental water projects that have diverted the lake's “life-giving liquid” to quench a distant city's thirsty populace, to ensure the perfect shade of green for their lawns, and to turn their swimming pools into aqueous micro-paradises, the now parched lake has become a health hazard.
Writes Barry Lehrman, author of the first chapter:
Wind gusts above twenty miles an hour lifted over fifty tons per second of “Keeler Fog” off the lakebed. Often reaching over two miles high, these dust storms sent 130 times the United States Environmental Protection Agency's limit for particulate matter into the atmosphere, blowing the dust over 250 miles from the lake. Such storms occurred two dozens or more times each year, generally in the spring and fall. Composed of microscopic particles smaller than ten microns (PM10), the dust contains significant levels of toxic metals like selenium, arsenic, and lead along with efflorescent salts. The largest single source of PM10 pollution in the country, these dust storms were a clear threat to the 40,000 people in the immediate region.
The threat, according to Lehrman, came in the form of higher rates of cancer, respiratory disease, and eye problems.
To combat these carcinogenic storms, Los Angeles grafted onto the desiccated corpse of the lake a hydro-network as monumental as the existing network responsible for the situation it is tasked to offset: “over 300 miles of pipe (some as large as five feet in diameter), more than 5,000 irrigation bubblers, and hundreds of miles of fiber optic control cables and valves.”
[T]he dust control projects on Owens Lake is roughly equivalent to that of a waterworks for a city of over 220,000 people. Construction of the first five phases, treating the worst thirty square miles of dust-emitting soils on the playa, has cost the City of Los Angeles $425 million dollars to build. But that sum doesn't factor in the lost revenue from the water being appropriated for the project (around $15 million/year) or the operations and maintenance budget, some $10 million per year.
“[R]ising like alien plants on the terraformed lakebed,” the bubblers flood the playa with shallow water, creating the merest suggestion of a lake, a perverse reminder of Lake Owens' former self.
However superficial such observations may be, we couldn't help but see similarities between these bubblers and fountains.
Firstly, much like the fountains at Versailles, behind these water spouts is a staggering hydrological infrastructure. Among other things, Versailles had the Machine de Marley, considered the greatest engineering marvel of its time; Owens Lake is part of what is probably the greatest water engineering project of the 20th century.
Secondly, since time immemorial, fountains have been creating micro-climates, cooling gardens, palaces and sartorially bedecked aristocrats. The array of bubblers, you could say, is also a type of weather modification system: an anti-dust storm. Moreover, fountains like those at Columbus Circle in Manhattan can provide a sonic barrier, making one unaware of the tumult outside; with some conjecture, probably forced, you could say that the bubblers don't do much to make Los Angelenos more aware of the negative environmental effects their mode of living is contributing outside the city.
Thirdly, if one can only speculate that fountains have ameliorative effects on one's mental state, you probably don't need to speculate the positive health effects of the bubblers.
Fourthly, fountains like those in Rome are objects for aesthetic consumption; these ebullient and rather photogenic desert sprinklers, thanks to CLUI, have been appropriated into a staged aesthetic experience.
Lastly, and most significantly, they are the products of a complex network of intermingling social, technological, political, economic and geographical conditions, the manifestations of competing ideologies and agendas. They're not mere water features, in other words.
In any case, we recommend the book.
On fountains
Deep-Sea Living in the Underground Tunnels of New York City
Easily one of the best stories we read last month came from The New York Times, and it was about a leak in the tunnels that bring water to New York City. It's no ordinary leak, we read.
For most of the last two decades, the Rondout-West Branch tunnel — 45 miles long, 13.5 feet wide, up to 1,200 feet below ground and responsible for ferrying half of New York City’s water supply from reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains — has been leaking some 20 million gallons a day. Except recently, when on some days it has lost up to 36 million gallons.
Using previously posted news items to put 36 million gallons of wasted drinking water into perspective, in May, Barcelona imported via ship cargo some 6 million gallons of emergency drinking water in the first of 6 shiploads per month for three months. Then in June, drought-hit Cyprus started importing from Greece some 14 million gallons of water per day until, presumably, this past November.
One lesson that can be gleaned from these figures is that a properly maintained infrastructure should be part of any conservation program, as important as reducing, recycling and reusing, in a climate-changed post-water world.
Meanwhile, the task to repair the leak is similarly extraordinary:
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has embarked on a five-year, $240 million project to prepare to fix the tunnel — which includes figuring out how to keep water flowing through New Yorkers’ faucets during the repairs. The most immediate tasks are to fix a valve at the bottom of a 700-foot shaft in Dutchess County so pumps will eventually be able to drain the tunnel, and to ensure that the tunnel does not crack or collapse while it is empty.
This is actually the best part:
The city has enlisted six deep-sea divers who are living for more than a month in a sealed 24-foot tubular pressurized tank complete with showers, a television and a Nerf basketball hoop, breathing air that is 97.5 percent helium and 2.5 percent oxygen, so their high-pitched squeals are all but unintelligible to visitors. They leave the tank only to transfer to a diving bell that is lowered to the bottom of the oval-shaped shaft, where they work 12-hour shifts, with each man taking a four-hour turn hacking away at concrete to expose the valve.
Considering that “New York has one of the world’s most complex water systems” and that its hydraulic infrastructure will expand in ever greater complexity to meet the demands of an exploding population in the city and “upriver,” we like to imagine here a type of urbanism derived from a perpetual cycle of infrastructural repair and disrepair.
It all starts with a leak. Once fixed, another one is discovered immediately, and so the city dispatches another crew of deep-sea divers to disassemble the concrete and whack and wedge and screw shut a replacement tunnel.
Then more leaks, larger crews, longer time spent in aqueous near-darkness.
As the city's surface population grows to a billion — or billions — so will the denizens of its negative surface, because there is always a leak to repair in this urban ticking time-bomb of cholera and dysentery. To let it go uncaulked and flood the basements of suburbs and towns is to invite hydro-anarchy.
So with less and less opportunity to decompress, these deep-sea public works service corps will simply make camp permanently. They will live and work inside hyperbaric chambers. They will marry inside submarine cathedrals and synagogues; have children; rear them under compressive, metal-buttressed skies; drop them off to helium-filled schools; develop indigenous customs, idioms and myths.
They will even evolve a new dialect to accommodate their “high-pitched squeals.” Hydroengineering has reconfigured their biology, and so they must adapt.
They will also die there, with their bodies sent to the surface for burial.
It's a satellite city grafted onto an infrastructural rhizome of hydraulics; the spatial consequences not of some surface cataclysm but, to rephrase Koolhaas, of its parent city becoming a mere accumulation of minor urban disasters.
Tunnel-Digging as a Hobby
BLDGBLOG: Infrastructural Domesticity
Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea
First there was Barcelona, and now Cyprus is also importing water.
Like Spain, Cyprus is suffering from a severe drought that has left its reservoirs at 7.5% full. In fact, according to Reuters, the first shipment of 40,000 cubic meters of drinking water from Greece is “more than double the quantity in all of the Mediterranean island's 17 main reservoirs.”
In this project, described as “unprecedented in its scale,” there will be a total of 5 tankers delivering water over the next 6 months, though we can't help imagine a continuous line of smaller ships of the line plying through the waves of this ancient sea for many years to come, until global warming is reversed or the Cypriots decide to leave en masse, a river encased in metal, with tributaries from other hydrologically well-endowed regions, and meandering just like any other by means of propellers.
One wonders what the geopolitical implications of this new international trade could be? Will these maritime sea lanes be considered as strategically important as the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, in which any disruption always poses a threat to national security and are thus constantly patrolled by naval forces and monitored from above by a constellation of spy satellites? Will calls for UN trade embargo be sought against countries threatening these vital routes?
You can live without oil. You can live without high-priced rice while the current food crisis rages on. But you can't live without water.
In any case, we wonder as well what the contours of the geopolitical landscape would be like if Israel were to import water not just from the European side of the Mediterranean but, out of the gravest of gravest necessity, from its Arab neighbors also, for instance, tapping the Tigris or the already overtapped Nile? As inconceivable as this scenario may be, the reality of it is that climate change will reconfigure new artificial river valleys in the most unlikely combination of countries.
Meanwhile, instead of tankers, how about dirigibles retrofitted with solar panels? During the rainy season, they graze along the canopies of the Amazon, soaking up fresh tropical water. Enterprising landscape architects on an eco-tour of the rainforest will record their mesmerizing whirs of rotating blades — the eco-soundtrack of New Nature — and then sell the DVDs on eBay or at a farmer's market.
Come the dry season, they migrate to Cyprus and Barcelona.
A New River in the Mediterranean Sea
A New River in the Mediterranean Sea
“As Barcelona runs out of water,” New Scientist reports, “Spain has been forced to consider importing water from France by boat.”
“Barcelona and the surrounding region are suffering the worst drought in decades. There are several possible solutions, including diverting a river, and desalinating water. But the city looks like it will ship water from the French port of Marseilles.”
The amount of water being considered is “small – 25,000 cubic metres, less than what's needed to grow an acre of wheat, and not enough to keep 30 Spaniards going for a year.” But should this drought continue, growing worse and worse for years to come, we could see a new river, armored in metal and artificially propelled, flowing through the Mediterranean Sea.
And possibly more than one, all circulating through other seas and oceans: a braided, de-terrestrialized hydrology connecting parched landscapes and water-rich regions, knitted by climate change.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The plan is no longer being considered; it is being carried out. From The Guardian:
“The tanker Sichem Defender arrived at the port of Barcelona yesterday carrying something far more precious than its usual cargo of chemicals.
“Nearly 23m litres of drinking water - enough for 180,000 people for a day - was the first delivery in an unprecedented emergency plan to help this parched corner of Spain ahead of the holiday season.”
What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?
Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea
“Barcelona and the surrounding region are suffering the worst drought in decades. There are several possible solutions, including diverting a river, and desalinating water. But the city looks like it will ship water from the French port of Marseilles.”
The amount of water being considered is “small – 25,000 cubic metres, less than what's needed to grow an acre of wheat, and not enough to keep 30 Spaniards going for a year.” But should this drought continue, growing worse and worse for years to come, we could see a new river, armored in metal and artificially propelled, flowing through the Mediterranean Sea.
And possibly more than one, all circulating through other seas and oceans: a braided, de-terrestrialized hydrology connecting parched landscapes and water-rich regions, knitted by climate change.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The plan is no longer being considered; it is being carried out. From The Guardian:
“The tanker Sichem Defender arrived at the port of Barcelona yesterday carrying something far more precious than its usual cargo of chemicals.
“Nearly 23m litres of drinking water - enough for 180,000 people for a day - was the first delivery in an unprecedented emergency plan to help this parched corner of Spain ahead of the holiday season.”
What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?
Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea
The New Hydrological Temples of Modern India
To coincide with tomorrow's World Water Day, the day chosen by the UN “to draw attention to the plight of the more than 1 billion people world wide that lack access to clean, safe drinking water,” Nature has published a special issue on the present and worsening global fresh water shortage.
Our planet is facing a water crisis in public health: more than a billion people in developing nations lack access to safe drinking water, and more than 2 billion lack proper sanitation. And in the near future, water shortages are likely to spread into other key sectors — notably agriculture and energy.
While not merely pointing out the obvious, the issue also takes a look at some of the ways the crisis is being tackled. For instance, you can read about some of the new methods to disinfect and decontaminate water; new efforts to increase water supplies through the safe re-use of wastewater; and new strategies to increase farmers' yield in places where rains are often unreliable.
There is also an article on new technologies to greatly reduce the impact of desalination, called “the most energy-intensive form of water supply,” on the environment.
Every article is available online to non-subscribers but only temporarily, as some of them will be taken behind Nature's pay-per-view firewall in a week's time. So it's a good idea now to download the PDFs and save them in your archives.
Meanwhile, while they are still freely accessible, we'd like to take a closer look at one article about India's gargantuan endeavor “to link the majority of its major river basins through a vast network of canals, diverting billions of litres from the country's more water-rich river basins to those that are water-deprived.”
As if imagined by rogue Army Corps engineers driven out of town after the Katrina fiasco, the project would re-knit the country's hydrological network “through a 10,000-kilometre long network of 30 canals, several of which will intersect with more than one river. The project, which is estimated to cost about US$200 billion, also includes the construction of 32 major dams.”
It's terrestrial reconfiguration as a means to control weather. A recontoured landscapes where the effects of the monsoon cycle are distributed throughout the Subcontinent. A new geography where “dry seasons” and “wet seasons” become less of a temporal experience.
[T]he interlinking project will put an additional 35 million hectares under irrigation — close to doubling the area fed by major irrigation projects in 2003, according to a press statement by Suresh Prabhu, then chairman of the NWDA Taskforce on Interlinking Rivers. In doing so, he stated, the project will combat drought in 250,000 hectares across the country, and reduce flood damage along the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers basins by some 20–30%. The perennial flooding of these two rivers, which together carry 60% of the nation's freshwater resources, last year caused $850-million worth of damage and killed more than 1,000 people.
Moreover:
[T]he project could also supply about 34,000 megawatts of hydropower — roughly doubling the current level of hydropower, which lies at just over 25% of the country's current electricity needs.
While hard facts are hard to come by, some are nevertheless considering the scheme as the biggest water project in the history of the world, even surpassing China's South-to-North Water Transfer Project.
Of course, as with any new hydrological project of this magnitude, there are calls for less monumental schemes. As but one example of a low impact strategy put forward to solve the water crisis, we read:
The solution lies in better management of existing water resources, rather than importing water for irrigation. A simple way to do this is by using large tanks to collect rainwater, which is later supplied to fields during dry periods. Indian irrigation practices could also be made more efficient. A lot of water is lost in evaporation or through drainage from unsealed irrigation canals, and the common practice of flood irrigation is wasteful compared with drip irrigation, which supplies water directly to the plant's roots. But the water used for irrigation is free, so Indian farmers have little incentive to adopt more economical methods.
But this is India, where “disciplines such as physics and engineering are highly respected” and the environmental sciences are the “untouchables: unseen and unheard.”
As Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, once said, dams are the “temple[s] of modern India.”
So one wonders what new deities will spring forth from these concrete rivers and what new rituals will be created to celebrate the wonders of moving water against topography, against gravity.
Will these canals be lined with ghats, like those steps found in the holy city of Varanasi, on which pilgrims descend to “launch religious offerings of sweet-meats, fruit and flowers downstream on a small straw mat” without wading through fecal matter, garbage and strange odors?
Is the spatial ordering of this vast network of canals, as illustrated in the map of India above, really just a 21st century free-form interpretation of the mandala or some other formalized symbol of Indic mythology?
If not, could they be the markings of new pilgrimage routes?
Perhaps when and if the project ever gets finished, a new chapter of the Mahabharata will be written, its epic tales of demons and gods, sages and wise men, civil servants and bureaucrats, hydroengineers and environmentalists largely taking place in these new landscapes.
Dispatches from the Super-Versailles
Floridian Theatrum Machinarum
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
“It silted up”
We've been blogging for nearly 3 years now, and this is the first we've ever been tagged. The culprit is Jacky Bowring, of Passages, whose Park of the Lost Object was featured here last year.
We're only too glad to keep this going. Here are the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
From the Penguin Books 1993 revised and updated edition of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner:
Another bypass was cut; it too silted up. Finally, after much negotiation, the developers persuaded the Mexican government to let them cut still another channel below the border. Because it was meant as a temporary expedient while the original channel was cleaned out in advance of the spring floods, the Mexican channel had the flimsiest of control gates. As luck would have it, the spring floods arrived two months early. In February, a great surge of snowmelt and warm rain spilled out of the Gila River, just above the Mexican channel, and made off with the control gate.
We fiddled with the rules a bit. We're not supposed to include the fifth (complete) sentence; we did. And we're only supposed to post the three after it; we included the fourth, because it sounds as though it's the perfect punch line to a hilarious joke about hydroengineering. So there's a total of five...or six if you count this post's title, which is actually the fourth (complete) sentence on the page.
And Cadillac Desert wasn't even the nearest book. Reisner's volume was underneath that book, which was the 2000 paperback edition of Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. However, on p. 123, this is what we found:
Because we're having fun, the third book in that pile is In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, edited by Jeffrey Miller. On page 123, the 3 sentences after the fifth are as follows:
How far is it from there? Or to somewhere nearer than that. But do be specific as to time, day period, week.
Taken out of context, this could be an instruction for a well-designed landscape architecture project.
But onward it goes. We're tagging Archidose, BLDGBLOG, Subtopia, Super Colossal and Where.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Where's page 123.
POSTSCRIPT #2: Archidose's page 123.
POSTSCRIPT #3: Subtopia's page 123.
POSTSCRIPT #4: Super Colossal's page 123.
Dispatches from the Super-Versailles
Last week The New York Times published the latest installment in its ongoing series exploring the environmental and human impact of China's epic economic growth, and from it we learn, among other things, that the country is continuing apace with the construction of “the biggest water project in the history of the world.”
Called the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, it will essential graft into the country's present hydrology three new major rivers — concretized, subterranean, gravity defying — which together will “funnel more than 12 trillion gallons northward every year along three routes from the Yangtze River basin, where water is more abundant. The project, if fully built, would be completed in 2050. The eastern and central lines are already under construction; the western line, the most disputed because of environmental concerns, remains in the planning stages.”
Dwarfing the more famous Three Gorges Dams in cost and scale, this hydroengineering colossal is China's solution to a predicted water-parched future, one that surely would derail the most dynamic economy in the world if it came to pass.
The North China Plain undoubtedly needs any water it can get. An economic powerhouse with more than 200 million people, it has limited rainfall and depends on groundwater for 60 percent of its supply. Other countries, like Yemen, India, Mexico and the United States, have aquifers that are being drained to dangerously low levels. But scientists say those below the North China Plain may be drained within 30 years.
It's a hydrological version of the Great Wall, an olympian infrastructural defensive against an impending civilization-ending crisis.
But will it work? You'll have to read the article for a complete assessment.
Hydrology vs. the Apocalypse
Super-Versailles
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
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