Questions tagged [water]
For questions that have to do with the liquid form of H2O.
183
questions
14
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12answers
2k views
Logistics Problem With Water Creation Magic
There's a facet of my magic system that uses a certain kind of crystal to create water out of the magic energy stored within. But, I don't want to solve the entire world's water supply issues with ...
0
votes
1answer
73 views
What kind of rock would be ideal for building a cistern? [closed]
You are forced to build cisterns on a large scale to save rainwater. You can only use hand tools. There is no electricity and no power tools. What rock are you looking for to hew the cistern out of ...
8
votes
5answers
393 views
Hydromancer's Parachute
I am a hydromancer. My magical prowess grants me two abilities:
I can breathe underwater (magically)
I can instantly summon a sphere of pure fresh water centered on myself that's up to 50 meters in ...
0
votes
0answers
32 views
Surprising octopies [duplicate]
Let's assume that an octopus can read your mind and send you ideas that make you believe they are yours. How to surprise the octopus assuming she might not be in the mood for jokes. Consider the ...
3
votes
4answers
247 views
Water in the interior of a very large continent
Consider a world that is much larger than Earth, but has Earthlike conditions on the surface. (Including gravity = 1g, by some suitable unobtainium.) Clearly, the surface could be covered in a large ...
3
votes
1answer
168 views
Long-term, what does my magical 2x2 mile raining deathtrap do to the surrounding land?
Earlier I asked a few questions about one particular part of my setting, which is an Earth in the immediate aftermath of a supernatural apocalypse that made the world a gridded globe of 2x2 mile "...
18
votes
6answers
2k views
How long would it take before the water flowing out from an encased and flooded suburb is drinkable?
One of the early events in my story involves a 2x2 mile section of a suburban town that is encased in invisible walls 100 feet (30m) high and perpetually subjected to heavy rain at a rate of about an ...
6
votes
4answers
1k views
How quickly would an inch per hour of rain flood an enclosed 2x2 mile area?
In my setting, an apocalyptic supernatural event made the earth into a gridded globe of "squares" (more like columns) that are roughly 2x2 miles at sea level, getting larger going up and ...
2
votes
2answers
696 views
What effect would water that is twice as dense, while still liquid, have if a human were to try and swim in it?
In my world there are two bodies of water. One acts as a radiation shield and is part of the atmosphere, so it needs some (undecided) force to keep it in place. The other is ideally twice as dense as ...
3
votes
1answer
218 views
How long does an iron cage remain effective underwater
I'm working on an idea similar to the one presented in the Old Guard; basically an immortal character is trapped in an iron casing from which they cannot escape, that is sent at the bottom of the sea. ...
5
votes
2answers
367 views
How would arctic travelers, in a medieval setting, keep water from freezing?
The setting is extremely cold all the time, and traveling around takes days. How would travelers bring water rations with them and keep it from freezing? There are almost no un-frozen bodies of water ...
2
votes
3answers
222 views
How to dry an ocean planet and NOT turn it into a salty desert?
So, Here's the scenario:
we start with an ocean planet, with minimal dry land. The planet stays this way for at least 400 million years. (Notably, life evolves during this time period.) Then, a magic ...
4
votes
4answers
225 views
What would an until-recently waterworld look like?
So, suppose a world that, for most of its biological history, was a water world, with minimal dry land. Starting from the Cambrian Explosion analogue, the world stays like this for roughly 460 million ...
2
votes
1answer
79 views
Could there be electricity in an ocean city?
I was wondering if a "mermaid city" (where people lived in the ocean and somehow breathed underwater) could have any means to create or use electricity. Thanks!
2
votes
2answers
63 views
Does this method of magnetic capture provide a mostly closed loop system?
The issue:
I have set up a lunar base with around 500 people. Cargo shuttles ("Bullets") regularly fly up and down from low lunar orbit. These shuttles, unfortunately, have a very high mass ...
0
votes
1answer
38 views
Giant, flying fish? [duplicate]
I have this idea of giant, literal flying fish. About the size of a megalodon (if impossible, it can be smaller, I just want them to be really big), they fly at speeds of 70 miles per hour (again, you ...
4
votes
7answers
611 views
How do I naturally keep potable, fresh water from freezing?
My planet is always very cold (I don't have an exaxt number). So cold, that most fresh water would freeze. How do I keep this from happening? Humans can't bring it about, and humans also have to be ...
4
votes
4answers
203 views
Would oceanic planet's water be drinkable?
According to Google, the sea is salty because the rainfall dissolves land minerals and salt, which then washes away to the oceans, and over billions of years that process raised the salinity of the ...
8
votes
5answers
239 views
Will water planets have ice caps?
Considering both full water worlds mostly out of water and ice, and rocky planets that just have a bit too much of it - would polar caps form on them if the conditions are roughly similar to modern ...
0
votes
0answers
22 views
Binary lung and gill breathing system [duplicate]
With my animation, one of the protagonist's abilities is that she can grow gills that allow her to breathe underwater, while retaining most of her humanoid features, such as lungs to breathe on land. ...
7
votes
3answers
980 views
How big could a water planet be and not have an ice core?
I'm imagining an artificial planet of almost pure water constructed by an advanced aquatic species. It's "almost pure" because they included enough impurities in the water for life to thrive,...
3
votes
1answer
78 views
How to get Rodinia/Pangaea to now in a year?
I was reading this article, and noticed this section:
At the opposite end of the plates, the presence of water underground changes how easy or hard it is for one plate to subduct beneath another in a ...
4
votes
1answer
130 views
Is there a scientific phenomenon allowing to repel water without using strong heat or wind?
I want to know if there is a scientific phenomena that can repel water like some kind of water magnet, outside of using heat to evaporate it, which as far as I understand can result in violent ...
6
votes
2answers
85 views
How would multicellular organisms evolve in a microgravity ocean?
How would living organisms develop/evolve in a very-low g ocean environment?
The environment would be a small radioactive core surrounded by a small mass of water, less than 100 km in diameter, in the ...
8
votes
4answers
198 views
Water-filled domes as space habitats
I have an idea for a space habitat [edit: as in, a habitat on another planet or moon, not in open space, apologies for any confusion!] which consists of two concentric domes made of tough, transparent ...
6
votes
2answers
183 views
How long would it take for water vapor from an ocean asteroid impact to rain back down?
In my story a consortium of megacorporations spot a new comet 26km wide entering the inner solar system. Earth is in dire need of water because of an already worsening climate change disaster (think ...
7
votes
2answers
920 views
What sort of concern should someone with the ability to breath underwater be aware of?
I have a character (humanoid) that has the ability to breathe underwater; either through gills or through augmented lungs but I'm not sure what starting list I should be aware of in concerning their ...
1
vote
1answer
64 views
What effects would large-scale hydraulic mining have on the landscape?
Premise/question
Hydraulic mining is the process of spraying high-pressure jets of water into the ground to dislodge sediment and rocks. The muddy water from this is directed into sluices where ...
32
votes
15answers
9k views
Are 'tree waterfalls' possible?
Something like the above (Natural Springs by Ellie Cooper) - either where the water originates from atop the tree through regular rainfall, or is directed up and into the tree via the spring (or some ...
7
votes
7answers
1k views
Where would a technologically advanced group of people forced into space by a calamity obtain water from?
The fleet in my setting are forced to leave the planet due to a volatile virus, and leave in pre-prepared spacefaring vessels capable of transporting ten million people per ship. The ships have ...
3
votes
1answer
74 views
Finding water underground, Earth is 500f on the surface
If you had a tunneling machine and wanted to tunnel towards fresh water underground, how would you find the water? I'm imagining some sort of sonar, but would you need triangulation of some kind? ...
5
votes
4answers
1k views
Could a large enough fleet generate tsunamis while moving from a place to another?
Imagine similar earth conditions of oceans and currents, and a renaissance type kind of ships of various sizes (ranging from sloops to ships-of-the-line), could a fleet consisting in 1500 (aprox.) ...
16
votes
8answers
6k views
Feasible and rational way to give food and water to a prisoner?
There is a lord who is being kept prisoner in a castle tower by a griffin who has taken over his home, but requires the lord be kept alive for political value. Naturally this requires the griffin ...
3
votes
2answers
223 views
How Could People Utilize a Hypereutrophic Sea?
In a previous post I asked about the feasibility of connecting the ocean to a dried sea bed with hand tools and it was pointed out how environmentally disastrous this would be.
So the bronze age ...
2
votes
1answer
100 views
Extracting all water from Ganymede?
Is it theoretically possible to extract all ice and water from moons with subsurface oceans like Ganymede or Enceladus?
What would the consequences of isostatic rebounding be if this was done on a ...
2
votes
1answer
212 views
zora armor, and how it could actually be made to swim up water falls?
so in the game's legend of Zelda, there is the Zora armor. it helps you swim faster (which is shown by having flippers on the feet so obviously that would help, and it's skin-tight to fit whoever it ...
2
votes
3answers
249 views
How can a salty ocean be turned purple?
On my Conworld, the oceans are purple. This is mostly for aesthetic purposes and my current explanation is an abundance of cyanobacteria. I'm not sure that this explains it correctly, so what could ...
3
votes
4answers
172 views
How to make a viable aquatic mount
Just as in the real world where horses were tamed to travel long distances quickly across land, would it be realistic for an animal to be tamed and used as an aquatic mount for quick transport around ...
5
votes
1answer
150 views
How would much smaller heat capacity of water affect the life on Earth?
Water, as is, with its physical and chemical properties, is the base of any living being on Earth.
Water has a rather high specific heat capacity of 4.184 J/gC, which in itself has a great effect on ...
5
votes
3answers
125 views
Type of feet for large creature in shallow freshwater
A quadruped creature, similar in size to a small cow has found its niche in shallow freshwaters in a tropical climate.
What type of feet would be suitable for this environment?
I speculate that the ...
5
votes
5answers
1k views
Fight a biblical flood apart from building barriers [closed]
In a medieval setting, which methods of fighting a rising sea level exist apart from building barriers? The idea is that a civilization has to fight the flood just long enough to finish their ark.
...
3
votes
1answer
120 views
Earth like planet, more surface area under water?
Planet: earth like, half the radius of earth, gravity is .7g.
Assuming this is possible and humans live on this planet, would it be possible to have 90% of the planets surface area be under water? ...
9
votes
7answers
4k views
Would this system work to purify water?
This is part of my generation ship worldbuilding. I mentioned my water purification system in a different question, but I never directly asked about it. Here, I will directly ask about it. I think it ...
6
votes
1answer
131 views
Ecological implications of osmotic portals
Suppose some magical civilization on Earth-like planet can create portals. Any given portal entrances are spherical surfaces of the same radius. Any particle enters one sphere and exits another in the ...
18
votes
5answers
4k views
Getting fresh water in the middle of hypersaline lake in the Bronze Age
An ancient kingdom covers a several rivers in a desert basin all converging on a central, hypersaline, lake. Because of its central location, and the importance of the salt, the lake has important ...
3
votes
3answers
298 views
Is a confluence of more than two rivers plausible?
Two rivers converging into one is obviously extremely common, most often when one is clearly dominant over the other (whereby the lesser one is the 'tributary' of the greater) but also sometimes where ...
10
votes
16answers
5k views
How to supply water to a coastal desert town with no rain and no freshwater aquifers?
Think Tatooine in climate, but with oceans. Here are a few restrictions due to setting:
There is modern technology, but not too much electricity ie no super high amperage machines.
Population is ...
1
vote
5answers
525 views
Does a character being allergic to water (specifically the $H_2O$ molecule) make rational sense?
I'm writing a drama book and it's meant to be taken 100% seriously, and the main character was born with an allergy to $H_2O$. She does not have Aquagenic Urticaria, as that only affects the skin. She ...
18
votes
3answers
3k views
Closest Proximity of Oceans to Freshwater Springs
I am trying to wrap my head around the geography of a settlement in my world.
The settlement is situated along the coast, along a river roughly 500m wide with temperate mixed forests surrounding it, ...
4
votes
1answer
144 views
What construction and physics implications would there be for life in an underwater “high rise building?” [closed]
I'm working on a project in which part of the story takes place on a planet that is mostly ocean. There is a small continent with some manufacturing and refinery structures, but the rest of the planet'...
