181–190 of 222 posts
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By act of Congress, not Constitutional amendment. It could be repealed in a matter of weeks if Congress saw fit.
I know many people who would oppose removal of water from the region with weaponry. People deeply care about them, more than outsiders know
"They hold more than a fifth of Earth’s unfrozen fresh water" I read quite a few stories about the horrible drought in the west, and here I am sitting on a good part of all the usable water in the entire world. I can't help but think at some point a bunch of people are going to come for that water, in one way or another. Either by moving here, or trying to move it there. Some ideas have been floating around about tha…
Water from the Great Lakes cannot leave the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Compact prevents construction of any water withdrawal that will move water outside of the watershed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
The article links to another Atlas Obscura article about how the Red Sea is debatably a sea or an ocean, because it fills part of the East African Rift System. If we're going to refer to that distinction, then please also mention that the glaciers could scour out a lakebed because ancient geology created it!
It is indeed mostly semantics. Interestingly (to me anyway) I was just following the news about Lake Powell being at a very low level, and noticed on a map just how "non-lake like" its shape is (even when at full capacity).... it just looks like a river and tributaries that are somewhat wider than they were before a dam was built. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Powell/@37.0518007,-1... Meanwhile, why is Green…
> You have to draw a line somewhere. You don’t have to. We could just call them all islands. Greenland? Island. Eurasia? Island. Rhode Island? Not an island, strangely. There are only between four and seven of these so called “continents” (we didn’t draw a line, we drew like five). They’re not popping up very quickly, either. I say we just forget the whole business came up.
BTW, the state of Rhode Island was originally "the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" which made sense but was unwieldy. Now the actual island of Rhode Island is called Aquidneck Island.
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With how quickly, on-time, and within-budget California is managing to build the few-hundred miles of its touted High-Speed Rail system - that "no hard tasks" engineering project might take a century or few to become operational. Also, you note "water added to the west would revive it from the death spiral it is now in". Ah... 100% of the average discharge rate from the entire Great Lakes system - including Lake Onta…
I am not sure of your Hoover discharge figures. St Lawrence is about 17,000 cubic meters per second. Hoover is far far smaller about 3,300 cubic meters per second. St Lawrence is over 5 times as large. You may have mixed up cubic meters/feet?
I used the spillway capacity of Hoover Dam, rather than try to add up the total (diverted & un-diverted) flows of the Colorado, Columbia, Missouri, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Red, Sacramento, etc., etc. The point being that 10-20% of the Great Lakes water flow would be far, far too little to revive the west from its death spiral (to paraphrase user aurizon).
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You just went to the wrong beaches. There's plenty of sand or pebble beaches with very clear water and little organic matter, especially along Huron where the water is alkaline. It's just cold.
I always felt that if you want big sandy beaches you go to Lake Michigan, somewhere like Grand Haven or Ludington.
"They hold more than a fifth of Earth’s unfrozen fresh water" I read quite a few stories about the horrible drought in the west, and here I am sitting on a good part of all the usable water in the entire world. I can't help but think at some point a bunch of people are going to come for that water, in one way or another. Either by moving here, or trying to move it there. Some ideas have been floating around about tha…
I live in Arizona. Most of our Colorado River water goes to agricultural irrigation. The drought is bad, but bringing in even more water from out of state wouldn't be an actual solution.
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Australia has 3x the land area as Greenland so the line is probably somewhere in between there.
True but it is all arbitrary. If there was an island twice as big as Greenland, what would it be called? And why is Europe considered a continent when it is more accurately just a peninsula off of Asia? And if we are talking seas, why is the Caribbean a sea when it is just a region of the Atlantic ocean? Even moreso for the Sargasso sea, which is a region right out in the middle of the Atlantic (it doesn't even have…
Europe, Asia, and Africa are names people gave to the major regions surrounding the Mediterranean long ago. Later generations generalized the idea. First by using the same names for lands far behind the Europe, Asia, and Africa they were familiar with, and later by giving new names to separate landmasses. Whatever a continent is, Europe, Asia, and Africa are continents.
The main difference between a sea and a lake is that a sea is a part of the ocean. The Black Sea and the Baltic Sea are seas, while the Caspian Sea and the Great Lakes are lakes. The Caribbean Sea and the Sargasso Sea have names because people needed names for those regions. And because they consist of water connected to the ocean, calling them seas seemed appropriate.
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> You have to draw a line somewhere. You don’t have to. We could just call them all islands. Greenland? Island. Eurasia? Island. Rhode Island? Not an island, strangely. There are only between four and seven of these so called “continents” (we didn’t draw a line, we drew like five). They’re not popping up very quickly, either. I say we just forget the whole business came up.
And even if you just call them islands, you'll run into ambiguous territory somewhere. Is Manhattan really an island? If so, then is Harlem River really a river? (and there are also islands which become part of the mainland at low tide) BTW, the state of Rhode Island was originally "the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" which made sense but was unwieldy. Now the actual island of Rhode Island is called…
