[freebeard]

Late to the thread.

Originally Posted by Permalink #9

I like freebeard's idea to tunnel to the ocean from Death Valley and throw a turbine in between to generate electricity. Let Death Valley become the Dead Sea, which always looked like fun. The evaporation will drive a continuous need to backfill from the ocean. Perhaps the evaporation will produce more rainfall, a natural desalination process.

Algae!

Actually, the proposal was to use the seawater to grow algae. The inline turbines and OTEC would be secondary.

The Columbia fascinates me. The average flow rate is 264,900 ft^3/s... or nearly 2 million gallons per second. 3 olympic size swimming pools, every second. It has been measured at almost 5x that rate. The Amazon discharges 28x more than that.

Imagine when it was filled to the brim!

The generally accepted theory as to the cause of the Missoula Flood, or floods, is that a dam of glacial ice, moving out of Canada, filled the mouth of the Clark Fork River just east of its present day confluence with Lake Pend Oreille, near the Idaho-Montana state line. This glacial dam blocked the westward flow of the Clark Fork River causing it to rise against the dam until it eventually reached a depth of close to 2,100 feet, all the while backing up hundreds of miles into the mountain valleys of western Montana. Eventually the lake held over 500 cubic miles of water. At this point, so the theory goes, the dam gave way, allowing the impounded water to flow out across the Idaho Panhandle, through the valley in which the city of Spokane is now located, then to spill out over the great Columbia Basalt Plateau of eastern Washington, carving a series of branching erosional scars and canyons, flowing south until it reached Wallula Gap, a topographic bottleneck at the southwestern margin of the plateau, from whence it entered the Columbia River Valley to begin the final leg of its journey to the sea. Finally, having traversed the gorge from Wallula Gap, the waters crossed the area where Portland is now located, then flowed north and west into the Pacific Ocean. But so great was the volume of flood water that the valley north of Portland could not convey all of it, causing the excess to back-flood far south into the Willamette Valley of Oregon, forming a temporary ponding of water 400 feet deep.