Are there enough applied scientists in this group to advance the following idea into a feasible project?

It's been proposed before with variations, but the main idea is to use natural forces and some clever engineering to provide abundant quantities of fresh water to inland Australia... hopefully producing a small inland sea in the Lake Eyre area that would, over sufficient time, produce a local climate change over the region and make it attractive for human development.

Apparently Lake Eyre is below sea level, so if a  pipeline could be run from somewhere in Spencer's Gulf through to Lake Eyre, costs of pumping water through it should be minimal. We need fresh water at Lake Eyre, not more salt, so at a suitable place along the length of pipeline a big desalination plant will be needed. Hopefully the salt it produces can be sold to offset the costs of this plant and it's continual operation.

Careful thought needs to be given to the matter of how big to make the project initially. It's possible to imagine an enormous scale producing the maximum benefits (for humans),  but that is likely to destroy the habitat of numerous species adapted to the desert that exist in the region at present.  Better I think, would be to start at the opposite end of the scale, with a demonstration  or pilot project no bigger than the minimum that can be expected to produce observable benefits.   A project of that size will no doubt show up problems that need overcoming before considering expansion of the scheme.  Furthermore, if the demonstration size project  is successful it will commence generating income from which future expansion can be financed.

Anyone interested in discussing this scheme further?i

fawkes - This is an idea I have looked at also.

my preference would be some of the monsoonal rainfall waters.
So it'ld be seasonal rainwater.
Whatever we can use by use of dredging to make one continuous riverbed as far as we can go.

pumping water is a LOT of energy.

The centre is lower than where the rain falls, help gravity.

Well we obviously should be bringing it from the gulf of carpentaria, not spencer gulf, because it is uphill that way.

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I'm not into reinventing the wheel.

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Note true. If the pipe goes over approximately 7m above the level of the water it is sucking from, gravity can't do it. Even if it could, you would end up with a trillion dollar pipeline that delivers a trickle.

i'ld opt for diverting or boring through.

it's so isolated, any pumping would give problems

Thanks for noticing Grendel.
It is a bit of a fanciful notion though, and not something I think we need to consider as likely to happen in any of our lifetimes.

I think that Gough's scheme for twin pipelines from the North West Cape, for water and gas to be piped to the whole eastern seaboard of australia was a more worthy scheme, and proposing that got him kicked out of office.

So making Desalination plants to provide water for cities is one thing, and something I am not a fan of either, but desal plants to make an inland lake, is pretty unjustifiable in my opinion.

I think cost is the barrier, not technology.

freediver wrote on Mar 31^st, 2010 at 9:11pm:


I agree. Some artificial irrigation canals were build thousands of years ago like in ancient Mesopotamia and they did not have much technology then.

"Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong"  

Goodness me lets do it.   A grand public works scheme, with 100% backing from the private sector.  I would love to ask Gina to fund a big fat canal, the Rinehart Canal, to envy Panama and Suez.  I want so badly to open up an inland sea and terraform this great country of ours.   This is one of my enduring dreams.   

I can't link being new to the forum  ... but I found terraform Australia at hassell studio. com.    Just imagine what we could do for the planet and for Australia.

Once we've done that, maybe we should introduce cane toads there too. They could come in handy for the cane beetles.

It is something that we should give consideration to.

The Burdekin River at times floods 14m over the 800m dam—just colossal quantities of water. Some works to turn it west, to run down the Cooper etc will give some water to Lake Eyre.

Filling L Eyre from Spencers Gulf will require prohibitively expensive earthworks.

As well as Eyre there are lakes Torrens and Gairdner.

I did contact the BuMet about this, got told some BS about a high being centred over the lakes. Never seen that yet on any weather chart.

Could be a goer.

If global warming continues and all the world's ice melts, the sea level will rise by over 200 feet and Australia will have a new inland sea.



http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map

muso wrote on Nov 19^th, 2013 at 12:28pm:


I can only guess that westerly winds won't be as dry for all parts east, the same for easterly winds on the parts west of the inland sea, perhaps a little more rain as there is more moisture being evaporated, ... it has to come down somewhere ...

trying to figure out how it may change the climate is out of my league ..

St George of the Garden wrote on Nov 18^th, 2013 at 3:33pm:


The BOM is correct. High pressure systems march across the globe at 30 degrees latitude (north and south) and that is why areas with this latitude are often deserts.

There is no justification to pump water into lake Eire only to watch it evaporate. The evaporation rate in that part of Australia is huge, that is why so many of the "lakes" there are just salt pans.

Lake Argyle in the North of Western Australia is the closest we have to an inland sea. There are places on it where if you are sailing on it the water stretches to the horizon in all directions. It is fresh water too. Unfortunately only a fraction of it's potential has been used

http://www.lakeargyle.com/