Global Warming. What would happen if sea water was pumped into Death Valley?

Question

So lets say you wanted to add water to the atmosphere. Pump water from the sea to DV and it would evaporate hopefully loading the atmosphere with water encouraging it to rain. The water would be distilled, so pure. And the salt left behind to wreck the land where no one wants to go. What would happen???????????? Enviroment, weather wise and all that. Please be factual and also imaginable as possible. Also any other solutions to WHERE IS ALL THE FRESHWATER GOING.

Answer 1

Two points. Major and minor.

If you want to set up a solar powered desalinization plant for converting ocean water to fresh water, there are lots more efficient ways than pumping salt water over mountains to Death Valley, and randomly getting more rain, most of which will fall in the desert and be wasted. By the way, pumping salt water is not easy, it corrodes everything. It's one reason why Ocean Thermal Energy Plants haven't been built wide scale.

Second, by passing the fresh water through the atmosphere (instead of pumping it to where it's needed from a desalinization plant), you'll actually increase global warming just a little, since water is a potent greenhouse gas.

Answer 2

Global warming accelerates the water cycle. By this I mean that water is evapourated more quickly from seas, oceans, lakes etc and the time between evapouration and the water subsequently falling as precipitation is reduced. The consequence of which is that there has been an average global increase in levels of precipitation.

Death Valley, as you know, gets very hot and any water here would rapidly evapourate. If it were feasible to fill the valley with water it would add to the water vapour in the atmopshere and so lead to an increase in precipitation.

Water vapour remains in the atmosphere typically for 4 to 12 days, the evapouration from Death Valley would most likely fall as rain several thousand miles away.

In the larger scheme of things this would be such a small contribution that the effects would be negligible. If the valley were to be flooded it would create a lake with a surface area of approx 1200 sqaure miles, the seas and oceans have a surface area more than 100,000 times this big (141 million square miles).

The greatest environmental impact would probably be the huge pipeline that would run across the Mojave Desert to bring water from the Pacific, along with the massive pumping stations that would be needed to move the water.

Answer 3

Even though it is considered barren there is still an ecosystem there that is important and that would destroy it.

Answer 4

That is a good idea. You might have something. start researching that.