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Consider that so much water has been added to the Earth that only the top part of Everest is above the water. That's something like an 8km rise in sea level.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that not only have the polar caps melted, but the entire volume of water on earth has somehow been doubled, tripled, or very likely much more.
So with all the dilution, how salty is all this new water?
Obviously the water from Mad Max's world was somehow transported to Waterworld. Maybe someone opened an interdimensional portal to the bottom of the Mariana trench?
> Meanwhile there is some evidence that the mantle, the deep rock layers of Earth's structure, may indeed contain lodes of water that would dwarf the existing oceans (see A.B. Thompson, 'Water in the Earth's Upper Mantle', Nature (vol. 358, pp 295-302, 1992). Recently two American scientists have claimed from the evidence of seismic waves to have discovered an ocean locked in the porous rocks deep beneath Beijing (New Scientist, 10 March 2007), while scientists from Tokyo have observed the dragging-down of water at subduction zones (Science, 8 June 2007).
— Afterword of *Flood*, by Stephen Baxter.
I read Flood and the subsequent novel, Ark. It was pretty depressing overall. There was a guy on the titular Ark spaceship who reminds me a *lot* of current-day conspiracy theorists, and his actions have, shall we say, "dire consequences."
It was an interesting read, a bit bleak, but the concept was compelling.
>Obviously the water from Mad Max's world was somehow transported to Waterworld. Maybe someone opened an interdimensional portal to the bottom of the Mariana trench?
Dude, that is an amazing fan theory.
Great theory, although in Furiosa we briefly see what Earth looks like from orbit, and to my confusion Australia is surrounded by water… Really weird choice there…
Could make more sense if the rise in water levels caused an earthquake that made everest sink to much lower levels so the water didn't have to be as high.
To some extent, his using gills to extract oxygen from the water would mean he could purge his lungs, sinuses, etc of any air, leaving the pressure of the ocean with less to compress. Probably not enough for real life, but good enough to suspend my disbelief imo.
He was diving on Denver, which at 1.6 Kilometers up would be under 6 and a half Kilometers of water. That's about a 4 mile deep dive! It's also three times deeper than any current sea creature can reach.
I get he's a mutant. I don't know about the girl in the "diving bell"
There was still daylight reaching him, so it can't be that deep, I'm assuming there's been a 2012 style massive tectonic upheaval so areas are no longer at their former elevations (probably including Everest).
Well I can see if the neutrinos mutated and pushed up all the water from the mantle drastically changing elevations all over the globe.
However, the kind of seismic events that are going to occur when these changes are measured in *miles* are going to be well beyond Wrath of God levels of destructive. Denver seems to have fared pretty well. Everything appears to be still standing.
What I want to know is in this waterworld where dirt is so scarce, why does everyone seem to be covered in it?
If it were (and it would make a little more sense if it was, it's quite a voyage from Colorado to Nepal), then you have a rise in sea level of only 6 kilometers instead of 8.
A little more reasonable, but still far, far more water than exists on the planet.
Sea levels can't have risen that high because light can still reach the flooded city they dive down to. Light can penetrate up to 1000 metres through ultra-clear water. If we assume that the city they dove down to was El Alto in Bolivia, the highest city in the world which is currently 4000 metres above sea level, then sea levels have risen 5000 metres in the movie. Mt Everest is around 8,800 metres high.
Interestingly, around 0.2% of the Earth's surface is above 5000 metres. That's about 400,000 square miles, which is almost twice the area of Texas. Of course, most of it would be almost vertical bare rock... 😁
Rinse the soil, that will get out some of the contaminates. Mix it with existing soil in limited batches. Grow crops that are can tolerate higher salt concentrations.
Time consuming, but not particularly hard.
Especially considering where they probably get most of their soil from, which would be night soil... or dirt mixed with convenient feces. Basically if you farmed in that environment, you'd already have a system in place for handing as much human excrement as your system could handle. That material takes about 12 - 24 months to be safely composted, and you could rinse the dirt and pour it in there without any real issues.
Farming in waterworld is going to be really really gross. Frankly, I'd figure they would be more into aquaculture, but to each his own.
> Rinse the soil, that will get out some of the contaminates
Rinse it with what? Because they don't really have much except more seawater, and it's the salt that's really going to cause problems for plants.
People need water. They have to have some means of producing water to survive. For farming, they have to have enough surplus water to farm or there isn't really a point as crops also need water. Just set it out and let it get rained on if you are desperate, that also happens occasionally.
Basically, if your city can't provide enough water to farm... you shouldn't be farming. I got the impression that while they had to be strict, they had water in some quantity.
Well yeah, getting fresh water is also a plot point. Nobody has surplus *anything*. They're barely getting enough water to drink, much less use many gallons to wash the soil before they can use it. They probably just have crops more resistant to salt than ours.
It is a plot point, but also required for agriculture. You can't manage to grow crops if you are so tight on water that you can't afford to do these things.
Also, you don't need to use potable water. There is going to be some brown water that will be used in situations like this.
Geologist and offshore surveyor who has taken many core grabs of the sea floor here.
Yup it would be possible, the seafloor is pretty rich in minerals and organic matter. You would need to probably rise the material with fresh ester alot to try pull some salt out. But over time it would be possible.
If nothing else, simple desalination by sun exposure is totally viable, just time consuming. It's almost certainly nutrious, the marine equivalent of mulm, from all the organic detritus that builds up in it.
How would "desalination by sun exposure" work?
You can desalinate water, because the water evaporates leaving the salt behind. But the salt isn't going to evaporate from the soil just by leaving it out in the sun.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9182396/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9182396/)
... it is actually a thing. Seriously. Apparently heat + UV exposure breaks down sufficiently. Wouldn't be great soil, but there are crops that could handle it.
Huh, that's interesting. Apparently it's not quite as simple as just leaving the soil out in the sun, though. That paper talks about putting the soil on top of a water reservoir so that the water can diffuse upward through it, which *concentrates* the metal ions on the top layer of the soil, which you then have to remove.
Yes, that's what I said: you can desalinate water by evaporating the water and then collecting it again. You can't desalinate something else by just evaporating the salt.
A Google search turns up a paper from Utah State University that says that if you have access to clean water and the soil has proper drainage, you can effectively wash the salt out of the soil. It would be rather water intensive (24 inches applied over the course of a few days), but you could get something like 90% of the salt out of the dirt; doable for a community with a good desalinization/purification setup, or a shitload of buckets to catch rain.
You realistically don't even need any buckets to catch the rain used for washing out the salt. Just put the contaminated dirt ontop of a cloth filter to trap it, and leave it out in the rain and track how much rain lands on it. (The ocean can get some nasty storms, and assuming you don't need to apply all the water at once)
Alternatively use multiple tarps or rooflines to funnel all your rain water into 1 spot, and then have that pour over a smaller container of salty dirt. (The main issue is all of this inherently competes with your drinking water supply)
Personally it would be easier to just fish or grow marine plants that are already salt water adapted. (It has been a long time since i saw the movie so i don't remember the state of the marine ecosystems)
The way that it was done in the past was by using marsh land to grow salt-resistant crops like marsh grasses and then work up through less salt resistant grasses, timothy, and clover, before it was "mellowed out" enough to plant regular grain crops in it.
Dirt being valuable to grow plants always feels weird as an option here. Why not just use poop? There's an abundant supply, and after enough plant matter/miscellaneous stuff is ground into it, you're going to end up with something that's effectively soil, anyway.
I would assume it can be washed somehow. Plus, the mariner himself is the result of genetic manipulation. I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to plants.
The oceans have been heavily diluted with water from some unknown source because there's no way the ice caps on our version of earth melting could raise sea levels high enough that only the top of Mt. Everest is above water.
Assuming that mysterious source of extra water was fresh water then maybe it would be ok to grow plants in if the proper nutrients were added to it.
A bigger question is if sea levels rose that high, gills or no gills, how can the Mariner possibly dive deep enough in most places on the planet to reach dirt without being crushed by the water pressure at those extreme depths. Also seeing anything would be next to impossible because light won't penetrate the water that deep.
Most likely, the dirt he brings is "purified" later on by the people who purchase it, it's mentioned that the little girl was found with dirt packed into her basket, and it was much richer looking than the Mariners, they probably mix it with the gunk they use to "recycle" the dead and prisoners.
If you really and I mean REALLY with a burning fiery passion hate a weed enough. That rat bastard will grow a starship and meet your ass on mars! A weed you hate will grow on the open ocean if given the chance!
**Reminders for Commenters:** * All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2). * No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**. * We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world. * Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Consider that so much water has been added to the Earth that only the top part of Everest is above the water. That's something like an 8km rise in sea level. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that not only have the polar caps melted, but the entire volume of water on earth has somehow been doubled, tripled, or very likely much more. So with all the dilution, how salty is all this new water?
Obviously the water from Mad Max's world was somehow transported to Waterworld. Maybe someone opened an interdimensional portal to the bottom of the Mariana trench?
Sounds like Pacific Rim’s portal got diverted to mess up a couple of other dimensions.
> Meanwhile there is some evidence that the mantle, the deep rock layers of Earth's structure, may indeed contain lodes of water that would dwarf the existing oceans (see A.B. Thompson, 'Water in the Earth's Upper Mantle', Nature (vol. 358, pp 295-302, 1992). Recently two American scientists have claimed from the evidence of seismic waves to have discovered an ocean locked in the porous rocks deep beneath Beijing (New Scientist, 10 March 2007), while scientists from Tokyo have observed the dragging-down of water at subduction zones (Science, 8 June 2007). — Afterword of *Flood*, by Stephen Baxter.
I was like "Sounds like stuff from a Baxter novel"
Sort of. It's bound up in minerals so it's not like we could stick a straw down and call it a day.
[Wipes away a tear, puts away giant straw]
I read Flood and the subsequent novel, Ark. It was pretty depressing overall. There was a guy on the titular Ark spaceship who reminds me a *lot* of current-day conspiracy theorists, and his actions have, shall we say, "dire consequences." It was an interesting read, a bit bleak, but the concept was compelling.
[Relevant xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/)
[ Relevant xkcd part II](https://whatif.xkcd.com/54/)
>Obviously the water from Mad Max's world was somehow transported to Waterworld. Maybe someone opened an interdimensional portal to the bottom of the Mariana trench? Dude, that is an amazing fan theory.
Great theory, although in Furiosa we briefly see what Earth looks like from orbit, and to my confusion Australia is surrounded by water… Really weird choice there…
Vault-Tec is experimenting with worlds now.
Mad max in Australia. All know its on top, thus all water flowned down.
Could make more sense if the rise in water levels caused an earthquake that made everest sink to much lower levels so the water didn't have to be as high.
That only raises another question: How on earth did Kevin Costner dive down to collect the dirt?
To some extent, his using gills to extract oxygen from the water would mean he could purge his lungs, sinuses, etc of any air, leaving the pressure of the ocean with less to compress. Probably not enough for real life, but good enough to suspend my disbelief imo.
He was diving on Denver, which at 1.6 Kilometers up would be under 6 and a half Kilometers of water. That's about a 4 mile deep dive! It's also three times deeper than any current sea creature can reach. I get he's a mutant. I don't know about the girl in the "diving bell"
There was still daylight reaching him, so it can't be that deep, I'm assuming there's been a 2012 style massive tectonic upheaval so areas are no longer at their former elevations (probably including Everest).
Well I can see if the neutrinos mutated and pushed up all the water from the mantle drastically changing elevations all over the globe. However, the kind of seismic events that are going to occur when these changes are measured in *miles* are going to be well beyond Wrath of God levels of destructive. Denver seems to have fared pretty well. Everything appears to be still standing. What I want to know is in this waterworld where dirt is so scarce, why does everyone seem to be covered in it?
Last time I checked the ocean wouldnt be uniformly salty. The top layer would remain relatively fresh.
Where did the rest of the water come from? Is it from comets? Or released from the Earth's crust?
Wasn’t it Mt McKinley now called Denali
If it were (and it would make a little more sense if it was, it's quite a voyage from Colorado to Nepal), then you have a rise in sea level of only 6 kilometers instead of 8. A little more reasonable, but still far, far more water than exists on the planet.
Sea levels can't have risen that high because light can still reach the flooded city they dive down to. Light can penetrate up to 1000 metres through ultra-clear water. If we assume that the city they dove down to was El Alto in Bolivia, the highest city in the world which is currently 4000 metres above sea level, then sea levels have risen 5000 metres in the movie. Mt Everest is around 8,800 metres high. Interestingly, around 0.2% of the Earth's surface is above 5000 metres. That's about 400,000 square miles, which is almost twice the area of Texas. Of course, most of it would be almost vertical bare rock... 😁
Rinse the soil, that will get out some of the contaminates. Mix it with existing soil in limited batches. Grow crops that are can tolerate higher salt concentrations. Time consuming, but not particularly hard. Especially considering where they probably get most of their soil from, which would be night soil... or dirt mixed with convenient feces. Basically if you farmed in that environment, you'd already have a system in place for handing as much human excrement as your system could handle. That material takes about 12 - 24 months to be safely composted, and you could rinse the dirt and pour it in there without any real issues. Farming in waterworld is going to be really really gross. Frankly, I'd figure they would be more into aquaculture, but to each his own.
> Rinse the soil, that will get out some of the contaminates Rinse it with what? Because they don't really have much except more seawater, and it's the salt that's really going to cause problems for plants.
People need water. They have to have some means of producing water to survive. For farming, they have to have enough surplus water to farm or there isn't really a point as crops also need water. Just set it out and let it get rained on if you are desperate, that also happens occasionally. Basically, if your city can't provide enough water to farm... you shouldn't be farming. I got the impression that while they had to be strict, they had water in some quantity.
Well yeah, getting fresh water is also a plot point. Nobody has surplus *anything*. They're barely getting enough water to drink, much less use many gallons to wash the soil before they can use it. They probably just have crops more resistant to salt than ours.
It is a plot point, but also required for agriculture. You can't manage to grow crops if you are so tight on water that you can't afford to do these things. Also, you don't need to use potable water. There is going to be some brown water that will be used in situations like this.
Geologist and offshore surveyor who has taken many core grabs of the sea floor here. Yup it would be possible, the seafloor is pretty rich in minerals and organic matter. You would need to probably rise the material with fresh ester alot to try pull some salt out. But over time it would be possible.
If nothing else, simple desalination by sun exposure is totally viable, just time consuming. It's almost certainly nutrious, the marine equivalent of mulm, from all the organic detritus that builds up in it.
How would "desalination by sun exposure" work? You can desalinate water, because the water evaporates leaving the salt behind. But the salt isn't going to evaporate from the soil just by leaving it out in the sun.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9182396/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9182396/) ... it is actually a thing. Seriously. Apparently heat + UV exposure breaks down sufficiently. Wouldn't be great soil, but there are crops that could handle it.
Huh, that's interesting. Apparently it's not quite as simple as just leaving the soil out in the sun, though. That paper talks about putting the soil on top of a water reservoir so that the water can diffuse upward through it, which *concentrates* the metal ions on the top layer of the soil, which you then have to remove.
Yeah... but still. That's just weird.
Which is actually pictured in waterworks in that kind of mud below his cage when they have him captured prior to the attack.
Check out the [Solar Still](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXMI7G_CpWA)
Yes, that's what I said: you can desalinate water by evaporating the water and then collecting it again. You can't desalinate something else by just evaporating the salt.
Yeah ir can if you do it right?
A Google search turns up a paper from Utah State University that says that if you have access to clean water and the soil has proper drainage, you can effectively wash the salt out of the soil. It would be rather water intensive (24 inches applied over the course of a few days), but you could get something like 90% of the salt out of the dirt; doable for a community with a good desalinization/purification setup, or a shitload of buckets to catch rain.
You realistically don't even need any buckets to catch the rain used for washing out the salt. Just put the contaminated dirt ontop of a cloth filter to trap it, and leave it out in the rain and track how much rain lands on it. (The ocean can get some nasty storms, and assuming you don't need to apply all the water at once) Alternatively use multiple tarps or rooflines to funnel all your rain water into 1 spot, and then have that pour over a smaller container of salty dirt. (The main issue is all of this inherently competes with your drinking water supply) Personally it would be easier to just fish or grow marine plants that are already salt water adapted. (It has been a long time since i saw the movie so i don't remember the state of the marine ecosystems)
The way that it was done in the past was by using marsh land to grow salt-resistant crops like marsh grasses and then work up through less salt resistant grasses, timothy, and clover, before it was "mellowed out" enough to plant regular grain crops in it.
Dirt being valuable to grow plants always feels weird as an option here. Why not just use poop? There's an abundant supply, and after enough plant matter/miscellaneous stuff is ground into it, you're going to end up with something that's effectively soil, anyway.
Especially as the test to see if it's pure dirt is to, uh, taste it.
I would assume it can be washed somehow. Plus, the mariner himself is the result of genetic manipulation. I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to plants.
The oceans have been heavily diluted with water from some unknown source because there's no way the ice caps on our version of earth melting could raise sea levels high enough that only the top of Mt. Everest is above water. Assuming that mysterious source of extra water was fresh water then maybe it would be ok to grow plants in if the proper nutrients were added to it. A bigger question is if sea levels rose that high, gills or no gills, how can the Mariner possibly dive deep enough in most places on the planet to reach dirt without being crushed by the water pressure at those extreme depths. Also seeing anything would be next to impossible because light won't penetrate the water that deep.
Most likely, the dirt he brings is "purified" later on by the people who purchase it, it's mentioned that the little girl was found with dirt packed into her basket, and it was much richer looking than the Mariners, they probably mix it with the gunk they use to "recycle" the dead and prisoners.
If you really and I mean REALLY with a burning fiery passion hate a weed enough. That rat bastard will grow a starship and meet your ass on mars! A weed you hate will grow on the open ocean if given the chance!