[frankthetank]

Yeah... That is true. The Nile must be a very warm running river.

I think what it comes down to is that its probably too late to change anything. The exotics are in and there is probably no way to get rid of them...

Should keep an eye on this map and see how it changes as winter goes by. All that heat around Italy i bet disappears. They've been having a heck of a time with flooding and snow.

I'm fascinated by the Nile. It shows you that no matter what, freshwater is a must to sustain ourselves.

yesterday at 11Am

Late August 1PM

[Tanada]

Fascinating imagery, thank you very much for posting them! This is the kind of science I truely love, seeing something from a whole new perspective is always invigorating!

[frankthetank]

What do you think of the Israels refilling the Dead Sea with the Med Sea water? I think i've read about this before.

The amount of information out there is unbelievable. What we did 10 years ago, i'm not sure! books?

Grabbed the images above from NASA:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/ (if you go up to realtime, you can find the thermal images.

The Med Sea temps i found off:
http://earth.esa.int/ers/eeo4.10075/atsr_med.html

I use photoshop to cut/past then i tinypic everything

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('frankthetank', 'W')hat do you think of the Israels refilling the Dead Sea with the Med Sea water? I think i've read about this before.

[Tanada]

Over on another group I belong too we have been discusing the possibillity of widening and deepening the Suez canal until it replaces the Straits of Gibralter as the main water input into the Med basin. To do that the canal would have to be dug as wide as the Gulf of Suez and as deep as the shallowest spot in the Straits of Gibralter, truely a mega engineering project if there ever was one

I suppose if you really wanted to do that however and you started just using dredges to dig away the shoreline on each end and dump the extracted soil and rock into a deep area of water seaward you could probably do it. Such a wide passage would be a lot harder to close to traffic, but it would still be just as long as the current passage. It would take a huge energy input to accomplish as well. Doing so would have a definite impact on water exchange between the Med basin and the Atlantic, and some have suggested the water exchange through Gibralter is one of the drivers of Ice Age onset. When sea level was so much lower at the height (or maybe its Depth) of the last ice age the rate of water exchange between the Med and Atlantic was greatly reduced, the sill depth there is only something like 300 meters deep and mean sea level was reduced by about 130 meters, cutting the flow almost in half.

Back on topic, when the current canal deepening project is finished there will be an increase in water influx from the Red Sea via the gulf of Suez into the Med basin and this water will be both hotter and more saline than the Med basin water. In all likelyhood this water will be dense enough to sink after a small amount of cooling and mixing with the Med basin surface waters and will join the westward flowing Med basin bottom waters that travle all the way to Gibralter and pass out into the Atlantic at the 300 meter depth. Will adding Red Sea watewrs with their slightly different chemical makeup to the Atlantic bottom water have any forseeable effects?

[Tanada]

From the I can't believe my eyes file, two container ships collide at the entrance to the Suez Canal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ktwo-k-onk

[Tanada]

Egypt is celebrating the latest Suez Canal expansion project being completed, 1 years and 8 Billion dollars spent. Ship transit time reduced from 18 hours to 11 hours. That is all good as far as shipping companies are concerned, the 7 hours shorter transit time means more efficiency for every ship using the route.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')xactly one year after construction began on an expansion of the Suez canal, authoritarian-minded Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi is about to throw a party celebrating its completion, Bloomberg reports.

Despite the festivities, and the speed at which the project was completed, many experts are questioning whether the $8 billion undertaking will really bring any of its promised economic benefits.

And it might be politics, rather than economic necessity, that's driving the biggest expansion to the canal since its opening in 1869.

Sisi is a former Army general whose promises of political stability won him enough support to lead the overthrow of an elected Muslim Brotherhood-led government in July of 2013.

[Subjectivist]

Proof that when you eliminate the red tape you can get a project done quickly. The first proposal was a five year plan, then three years, then the new President cut it to one year and said get it done ASAP. That is what leadership can do.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')resident Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has ordered the new waterway to be dug in a single year, saying that the urgency of Egypt's economic situation meant the project could not wait for an originally planned three-year timetable.

The government aims to more than double annual canal revenues to some $13 billion in less than a decade, although that ambitious goal depends largely on rapid growth in world trade. The canal drew in $5.5 billion in revenues last year, its most lucrative since it was first opened in 1869.

[ROCKMAN]

And let’s factor in Egypt’s vulnerability to attacks on one of its major sources of revenue: transit fees from the Sumed Pipeline. The Sumed pipeline is an oil pipeline in Egypt, running from the Gulf of Suez to Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea. It provides an alternative to the Suez Canal for transporting oil from the Persian Gulf region to the Mediterranean. The Sumed pipeline is 200 mi long and consists of two parallel lines of 42 inches diameter. Its capacity is 900 million bbls per year. Expanding the Canal provides a bit more stability in a very unstable region.

[Tanada]

The latest expansion just completed is being blamed for increasing the speed of migration for Red Sea species into the Mediterranean basin. Personally I doubt it makes a dimes worth of difference, the invasion started close to 150 years ago so decrying it now is truly a case of closing the barn door after the horse has fled. More at link below the quote.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A') rising flood of invasive marine species flowing through the Suez Canal.
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On Aug. 6, 2015, over the objections of environmentalists and the reservations of many economists, the canal’s latest expansion opened to shipping. The new 22-mile channel will double the canal’s capacity, allowing 97 ships to pass through each day. It also opens a wider path for invasive species from the Indian and Pacific Oceans to flood through the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.

Once they’re in, there’s no way to get them out, and the changes they bring are irreversible. Israeli scientists have identified more than 450 alien species of fish, invertebrates and algae that are not part of the Mediterranean’s natural ecosystem. Several pose public health hazards, while others threaten fisheries and tourism and denude underwater ecosystems, greatly reducing biodiversity.

Egyptian authorities say the $8.5 billion project will reduce bottlenecks and increase toll revenue from $5.3 billion to $13.2 billion a year by 2023. But these benefits come at the cost of continuing environmental degradation. “The recent doubling of the canal will decimate coastal ecosystems with dire implications for the regional economy and human health. We can’t continue to overlook this threat,” warns Dr. Bella Galil, a senior scientist at Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography.

It can take generations, she says, for an alien species to expand its range. The presence of Red Sea fish in the Levant Basin, for example, was not recorded until 1902, more than three decades after the canal first opened in 1869. Subsequent waves have followed major canal expansions in 1980 and in 2010. The eastern Mediterranean, mere miles from the canal’s mouth, has been hardest hit, and experts from Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, Israel and Lebanon say this invasion has drastically altered fisheries.

[vtsnowedin]

SO lets see!! In 2016 they will have 13 Billion in revenues and 105 million people so that comes out to $125/ capita and that is before operating expenses get deducted. I think they need a better plan.