if pumping water would not be the issue, is there an obvious reason not to pump a lot of ocean water to salt plains (that used to be lakes/seas) or other zero/low risk areas to lower sea levels?

Question

if pumping water would not be the issue, is there an obvious reason not to pump a lot of ocean water to salt plains (that used to be lakes/seas) or other zero/low risk areas to lower sea levels?

In: Earth Science

Answer 1

The ocean is insanely large, like bigger than you can effectively fathom but not quite astronomically large

The oceans and seas cover 362 million km^2

Lets say you want to lower the sea level by a single millimeter and you’ll store all that water in Nevada, its a big empty government owned desert after all, how deep would the water cover Nevada?

The entire state of Nevada would be under **1.25 meters of sea water**. That would make commuting quite problematic and will only have reduced sea level by a single millimeter but projects are that it will rise by over 300 millimeters by 2050 soooo you’re going to need to drown a lot more than Nevada

If you want to deal with those 300 millimeters of ocean you’d need to cover all of Russia in over **16 meters of water**, aka restore the massive glaciers to the pole.

Its wayyyy easier to keep the water as an ice cap/glacier than to try to deal with a hundred trillion tons of water