SF lake

Certainly there is a lot of fog on the California coast and the "gate" is narrow and easily overlooked. It's still an amazing oversight, assuming the Bay did exist from 6000 BCE or so and thus back in the 16th century.:confused:
There's also the fact that the islands in the Bay, from most vantage points, can blend in with the hills and make the Gate look like an unremarkable stretch of coast.
 
Sure, as long as average sea levels, averaging out tides and other fluctuations and surges, remain as they are.

I'm talking about worrying about lots of polar glacial ice melting and raising sea levels significantly. By meters. It's some help that Greenland can't instantly all melt at once, and that according to geological history it takes centuries for sea levels to rise by meters. But perhaps we are in a situation unprecedented in recent geological history and the rise might be somewhat faster than in previous cycles?

Unfortunately if the greenland & antarctic icecaps start melting we have bigger problems than the SF area. the greenland ice can raise sealevels by 7m (24.3ft) and the antarctic in total could cause another 75m(250ft) if melting totally. Most coastal areas would be in deep trouble.

There's also the fact that the islands in the Bay, from most vantage points, can blend in with the hills and make the Gate look like an unremarkable stretch of coast.
And add some of the fog that is often around, and its not recognizable indeed.
 

Cook

Banned
1: Somehow the IJsselmeer became fresh and AFAIK the only thing the Dutch did was to sluice out superfluous water at low tide. (and yes, it's fresh, not brackish, it's even used as a water reservoir)
2: Plenty of cities get their water from sources at similar or lower height as themselves, mostly due to a lack of high ground to get water from. Said cities manage just fine with water towers and pumps.

Do you see any large hills in the Netherlands? It’s Flat; they don’t have a choice, the get their water from the Rhine and store it. San Francisco is defined by a range of bloody great mountains nearby, which is where the rivers run down off and where you want to catch the water.
 
Unfortunately if the greenland & antarctic icecaps start melting we have bigger problems than the SF area. the greenland ice can raise sealevels by 7m (24.3ft) and the antarctic in total could cause another 75m(250ft) if melting totally. Most coastal areas would be in deep trouble.

Well, sure. Look at what that same 6 meter rise does to the Shanghai region for instance:
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=37.9095,-122.0526&z=9&m=6

It's just that
1) this happens to be a thread about damming the Golden Gate, so I have offered the only reason I can imagine sane people considering to try it.

2) the payoff in terms of land saved versus miles that have to be dammed is unusually high in the Central California case. If you just take these flood maps and scroll around, you'll see that some regions of coastline suffer remarkably little damage (on a 6-7 meter scale rise; the picture keeps changing the higher the water goes of course) while others suffer dramatic flooding. But rarely can a large tract of land be saved by merely damming one small bottleneck.

So actually doing it might be within the means of local Californian finance and engineering, while larger entities are melting down in panic.

Scrolling down to the Los Angeles area, a 7 meter rise does remarkably little to most of that megacity's beachfront. But the map shows a huge tract of the Imperial Valley (down by the Mexican border) already submerged--the Salton Sea of course is already below sea level--the flood map can't distinguish low-lying land that is cut off from the ocean from terrain that would indeed be flooded. But at 7 meters, the ridges dividing the huge potential Imperial Sea from the Sea of Cortez are already getting mighty thin--the Sea of Cortez is already a fair number of miles north of its current shore, and meanwhile a large arm of it that doesn't exist OTL is reaching northwest, then arcing to the northeast, and threatening to pour water into the Imperial Valley by another route entirely.

So that would be another place for a strategic dam or rather two--unless perhaps someone decides to evacuate and see if letting the Sea of Cortez extend that far north doesn't do good things for the inland desert.

Which is an option that might get considered at several other such dramatic breakthrough sites--such as in the northern Sahara or in central Australia. These deserts might benefit from a part of them getting flooded.

So that makes situations like damming the Golden Gate all the rarer, since sometimes one would not want to stop the flooding even if one could.


...And add some of the fog that is often around, and its not recognizable indeed.

Um, yes. Again. I actually did say that.
 
Do you see any large hills in the Netherlands? It’s Flat; they don’t have a choice, the get their water from the Rhine and store it. San Francisco is defined by a range of bloody great mountains nearby, which is where the rivers run down off and where you want to catch the water.
No shit Sherlock:rolleyes: The point was that it is perfectly doable with pumps and not insanely expensive or anything, never said anything about it being a good idea or not in the SF area. Which it isn't, BTW, not unless the sea levels rise, just like the Dutch didn't dam the Zuiderzee because they could, but to stop flooding and to gain land, of which CA has plenty.
 

Cook

Banned
No shit Sherlock:rolleyes: The point was that it is perfectly doable with pumps and not insanely expensive or anything, never said anything about it being a good idea or not in the SF area. Which it isn't, BTW, not unless the sea levels rise, just like the Dutch didn't dam the Zuiderzee because they could, but to stop flooding and to gain land, of which CA has plenty.

So you didn’t actually bother to read what I’d written, you just felt like being a pratt and say, ‘well the Dutch can do it!’.

As I pointed out before, the only way you could make San Francisco Bay fresh water is by letting the water run down from the hills, where you actually want to catch it, through San Fran, picking up a whole lot of shit along the way and pooling in the Bay, only to be pumped back up to the high ground where it started so you could use it.

It is stating the fucking obvious to say that this would be an exercise in stupidity beyond the wildest dreams of even the most deranged politician.
 
So you didn’t actually bother to read what I’d written, you just felt like being a pratt and say, ‘well the Dutch can do it!’.

As I pointed out before, the only way you could make San Francisco Bay fresh water is by letting the water run down from the hills, where you actually want to catch it, through San Fran, picking up a whole lot of shit along the way and pooling in the Bay, only to be pumped back up to the high ground where it started so you could use it.

It is stating the fucking obvious to say that this would be an exercise in stupidity beyond the wildest dreams of even the most deranged politician.

I would point out that:

1: The use is mostly going to be in the lower areas, regardless of where the reservoirs are, since that's where most of the people are;

2: That use is going to produce a lot of waste water, which has to go somewhere. Unless you think Sacramento and other cities and areas in the San Francisco watershed will go to the trouble of purifying it and then pumping it back up into the hills?;

3: Unlike the Colorado river, there is not 100% interception of downwards flowing water in this particular drainage basin.

Since there is actually water which flows down from the hills into the bay today, perhaps you should take a chill pill and contemplate why someone might let that happen instead of diverting every milliliter of fresh water and then letting it evaporate or, hell, I don't know, pumping it underground like you seem to think they do with waste water?

IOW, this objection doesn't make any sense, since it argues that something does not happen which actually happens continually, and it argues that allowing that to happen is stupid, which it clearly is not, since people everywhere allow it to happen.
 

Cook

Banned
IOW, this objection doesn't make any sense, since it argues that something does not happen which actually happens continually, and it argues that allowing that to happen is stupid, which it clearly is not, since people everywhere allow it to happen.

If you are going to go to the absolutely massive expense of damming the San Fran Bay you would first consider whether there are cheaper, more effective solutions, which there are, lots.

So we’re back to Civil Engineering for Dummies: Don’t do something hard when you can do something easy.
 
If you are going to go to the absolutely massive expense of damming the San Fran Bay you would first consider whether there are cheaper, more effective solutions, which there are, lots.

So we’re back to Civil Engineering for Dummies: Don’t do something hard when you can do something easy.

Well, yes. I'm just saying that it would not really take a deliberate effort to make SF Bay brackish (at least), and over a (very long) time fresh if it were dammed. The question is whether it should be dammed, which only Shevek gives a good reason for doing.
 

FDW

Banned
Sorry for the Nerc-bump. I saw this thread while I was out, and I wanted to contribute. There actually was an OTL plan to dam the bay in the 1940's, you can see it here. (Though it doesn't involve the Golden Gate) I'd also like to point out that a better place to dam for flood control in the Central Vallley would be the Carquinez strait, which would allow for easy flood protection for the central valley while also not ruining the San Francisco Bay as a port, though the environmental consequences would still be nasty.
 
One thing that could make it economically feasible would be to use it as a massive hydroelectric dam, similar to the Gibralter Dam in the Atlantropa project.
 
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