140
votes
Accepted
How could pirates reasonably transport dinosaurs in captivity, some of them enormous, across oceans?
In eggs
As in, a fertile dinosaur egg, not the adult. Moving livestock is always tricky, even more so when said livestock is composed of strong and dangerous creatures, which have a tendency to die ...
- 40.4k
70
votes
Accepted
How could a natural road form across a sea?
Your bridge is an atoll like Kwajalein
The Kwajalein Atoll is one of the largest in the world.
Following the curve of the land, I estimate that the distance from the upper left to bottom right ...
- 85.7k
69
votes
If the Black Sea was disconnected from the Mediterranean, how long would it take to become freshwater?
It would overflow...
As of right now, the Black sea is overflowing with water, leading it to push more water out to the Mediterranean than it receives. This was not necessarily the case during the ...
- 85.7k
59
votes
How can the Sea of Japan be drained?
Floating city.
There is a lot of it, but the water is fine. Build on top of it.
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/04/04/oceanix-city-floating-big-mit-united-nations/
Modular cities can be expanded as the ...
- 305k
51
votes
How could a natural road form across a sea?
As long as your local geography/geology permits sand deposition:
a large sand bar/spit
would fulfill all your requirements.
Since I'm the most familiar with the geography of the Baltic, here are three ...
- 661
46
votes
Accepted
What if the ocean's salt level decreased by 50%?
Phase 1: The Extinction
Most life in the sea would die out almost immediately. Saltwater fish, invertebrates, and most importantly plants and microbes are finely-tuned for a particular level of ...
- 29.1k
38
votes
Accepted
How can the Sea of Japan be drained?
Draining a sea is not an easy job. The Dutch know something about it. And here you are not talking about a shallow sea, but of something with an average depth of 1300 m. Moreover you will have ...
- 296k
34
votes
How could a natural road form across a sea?
You could use a large mid-ocean ridge, like the Mid-Atlantic ridge, and then play around with sea levels. Mid-ocean ridges occur at (divergent) plate boundaries, and can be thousands of kilometers ...
- 102k
32
votes
How could a natural road form across a sea?
All the answers seem to be focusing on using geological methods.
For a completely different natural methodology consider the possibility of long chains of floating colonial sea life forming your ...
- 25k
31
votes
What could cause humanity to migrate from land to water?
1. Irregular geological / tectonic plate activity - Perhaps at some point mantle became unstable resulting in frequent earthquakes. These earthquakes were small scale but unnaturally damaging to the ...
- 1,451
25
votes
What would happen at the core of a water world?
For planets the approximate size of Earth You would find Ice VII, X, or XI. Possibly even liquid water existing as a supercritical fluid.
This is a surprisingly hard question, and depends on the ...
- 3,332
23
votes
Accepted
Replace sea salt with sugar, what happens?
Having so much sugar diluted in water will trigger a massive fermentation: the sugar will turn into alcohol and $CO_2$ thanks to the action of yeast. The alcohol will kill all the living organism into ...
- 296k
23
votes
How can the Sea of Japan be drained?
Behold! The Engineering Caisson!
I'll let you worry about the inconvenient details like the depth of the ocean, the amount of material you'd need to bring in, keeping surprised neighbors like Korea ...
- 128k
22
votes
How could a natural road form across a sea?
Your bridge could have been caused by a pre-historic meteor impact like the Chicxulub crater. Meteors push earth up around the point of impact. Depending on the type of dirt involved in the impact, ...
- 128k
22
votes
Accepted
Planet with a surface area that’s 90% water or more?
It is worth noting that the difference between the deepest ocean trenches an highest mountains on Earth (less than 20 km) amounts to almost nothing compared to the planet's radius (6731 km). It is ...
- 16.4k
21
votes
How could a natural road form across a sea?
Try a subduction zone induced island arc combined with a coral reef
They can create long thin islands and chains of islands. They can be massive and they solve several other problems.
Just look at the ...
- 81.9k
21
votes
Is It Possible to Have Different Sea Levels, Eventually Causing New Landforms to Appear?
Absolutely. During the Messinian Salinity Crisis the 'sea level' in the Mediterranean Sea was THOUSANDS of meters lower than that of the Atlantic ocean, for thousands of years.
The important thing ...
- 16.9k
20
votes
How could a natural road form across a sea?
Prehuman ruins.
source
One of my favorite things in the Lovecraft stories is when they come across prehuman ruins. Mountains of Madness is one of the best but it is a recurring theme: cyclopean, ...
- 305k
19
votes
If the Black Sea was disconnected from the Mediterranean, how long would it take to become freshwater?
A model for this situation is nearly provided by the Baltic Sea. An alternative model is provided by the Dead Sea.
Numerous rivers, accounting for most of the rain catchment areas of Eastern and ...
- 569
18
votes
What if the ocean's salt level decreased by 50%?
Life would not be able to evolve in this short amount of time. Organisms able to survive the lower salt concentrations (of which there would be some in the ocean) would survive, organisms not able to ...
- 4,848
18
votes
Accepted
Passive distancekeeping for sea platforms
Yes one that has been used for hundreds of years, anchors.
A set of anchors/mooring lines is already a known solution to this, if you use multiple anchors drift is very limited. This is the solutions ...
- 81.9k
16
votes
What could cause humanity to migrate from land to water?
Land is barren while the seas are bountiful
Desertification spreads across the lands while the seas remain untouched by the scourge of the Gods. Those who make it to the shores are pushed out to the ...
- 2,403
16
votes
How can the Sea of Japan be drained?
Don't drain it - displace it.
Draining it will require sea walls to be built. Those sea walls would be susceptible to flooding during storms, and this region gets strong typhoons with insane storm ...
- 44.3k
14
votes
Could nuclear fallout melt the ice caps and cause an accelerated sea level rise?
No. There's nothing like enough energy in nuclear fallout to melt the ice caps.
- 20.3k
14
votes
Is It Possible to Have Different Sea Levels, Eventually Causing New Landforms to Appear?
The Great Lakes, Lake Baikal, the Caspian Sea, and the Dead Sea are all reasonably large bodies of water that are not at global sea level.
The Great Lakes are hundreds of feet above the global sea ...
- 4,311
14
votes
Is It Possible to Have Different Sea Levels, Eventually Causing New Landforms to Appear?
An example: the Pannonian Sea
The Pannonian Sea was an inland sea which existed for about 10 million years; during the last part of its existence it was isolated from the ocean. It covered most of ...
- 93.9k
14
votes
How could pirates reasonably transport dinosaurs in captivity, some of them enormous, across oceans?
There are a number of questions here, let's take them one at a time.
How to capture / sedate the animal, and keep it alive?
Through its food, what the pirates need is some plant or drug that will keep ...
- 14.6k
13
votes
What could cause humanity to migrate from land to water?
Disease
It's going to be the wealthy and the already mobile who lead the way. They're going to try to stay safe in sealed enclaves but once a plague goes global the only way to truly quarantine ...
- 118k
13
votes
Natural pearl factory
Pearls form naturally at a rate significantly smaller than that of farms, so tweaking all those environmental factors will help, but not enough to get you to where you want to be. If you want ...
- 2,252
13
votes
Is It Possible to Have Different Sea Levels, Eventually Causing New Landforms to Appear?
Not an original starting point, I recognize it, but Randall Munroe already covered this answer in one of his What if.
What you see above here is how Earth would look like once you drained the oceans (...
- 296k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible