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If the ice caps got nuked
I'm working on the story for a comic I want to start which is set after world war three in a world somewhat like our own.
One of the things I wanted was to have people living on water which is slowly eroding the remainder of human civilization.
This lead to the idea of, during the war, the ice caps getting nuked, as a way of insuring that any survivors would never be able to recover.
My problem is that after thinking about it, the artificial melting of the ice caps has a myriad of consequences. The two big ones would be massive flooding and the poisoning of the sea (and flood areas) due to mass algae blooming in the much diluted salt water but things like increased cloud cover and huge change in local climates would also play a big part.
I know it may be a lot of thinking for just a starting comic but such things do interest me.
Anyway, what I'd like to know is, what other consequences of the sea rising somewhere between 20 and 60 meters (65 to 200 feet) could you foresee?
How would you personally live in a world after massive flooding and nuclear war?
One of the things I wanted was to have people living on water which is slowly eroding the remainder of human civilization.
This lead to the idea of, during the war, the ice caps getting nuked, as a way of insuring that any survivors would never be able to recover.
My problem is that after thinking about it, the artificial melting of the ice caps has a myriad of consequences. The two big ones would be massive flooding and the poisoning of the sea (and flood areas) due to mass algae blooming in the much diluted salt water but things like increased cloud cover and huge change in local climates would also play a big part.
I know it may be a lot of thinking for just a starting comic but such things do interest me.
Anyway, what I'd like to know is, what other consequences of the sea rising somewhere between 20 and 60 meters (65 to 200 feet) could you foresee?
How would you personally live in a world after massive flooding and nuclear war?
Comments
I suspect nuking the ice caps would actually not do all that much. A nuke would produce enough heat to vaporize or melt a chunk of ice, but it would re-freeze quickly. Plus, there's a problem of scale: it would take a very large number of nukes to actually melt, say, all of the Antarctic ice shelf at once. If you used, say, a sustained nuclear barrage to melt the entire ice cap, it would still start to reform once the explosions stopped. Plus, you'd have set off enough nuclear blasts in atmosphere that, really, flooding is the least of your worries.
In order to have the ice caps melt *and stay melted*, you need a long-term increase in temperature. A nuclear holocaust would have the opposite effect: nuclear winter would set in, lowering the temperature on average and again contributing to the re-freezing of the poles.
Again, this is just off the top of my head and has absolutely no proof.
I agree with the others here that nuking the ice caps wouldn't do much. But of course this story will be fiction, so you could just do it and screw science. You could try a comet impact on Antartica. There's a 300 meter wide one passing us in July at a distance of what was it? Several earths? Skeptics Guide to the Universe talked about this one. That one could potentially create a really fucked situation if it hit Antartica, and, since it's a comet, it can contain all sorts of gasses that will fuck with the ozone enough to heat the earth up rapidly to making all the polar caps melt. Not talking about CO2 here, I mean the worse one, methane I think it was, but don't hang me on that. *searches*
One minute research on Wikipedia shows it's indeed Methane. Just let a comet crash on an underground methane field releasing said methane in the atmosphere fucking the world.
More research: Take your pick.
Comet might work but could it get through the sea and the amount of rock to get to a natural gas deposit?
Could use a seismic weapon to set off a volcano under Antarctica. I'm thinking of having one of the major characters be part of a war in Antarctica for aforementioned satellite.
Good luck.
Here are two big things I need to happen: Around 1994 a city in england gets blown off the map (or some other large explosion which can turn out to be the effects of an alien psychic super weapon) and at the same time something happens that causes the sea levels to rise a several meters. Also, some long standing military conflict between first world countries would be a bonus.
Why 1994?
I am sort of aiming for the cold war intrigue kind of things. One big problem is that logically Russia and America are closest to the north pole. That said, there isn't much close to the south pole.
How about.. The world agrees that the Antarctic would be a good place to bury all nuclear waste as no humans live there and there is no chance of the ice melting and entering the sea water. In the background the governments of the world are messing around with an alien nuclear resonance device which accidentally causes all processed uranium to unexplainable go critical across the world. The device was designed as a way of making earth hospitable for said aliens (who sent it long before life on earth was established) who then turn up later on.
Ok, scratch the bit about the nuclear explosions. The artifacts activation causes the major explosion in England and maintains the melting of polar ice. Hows that?
Here is what I would do:
Russia and the US engage in nuclear testing. The testing sets of a massive chain of volcanic eruptions that belch greenhouse gases into the air on a scale never before seen. This in turn melts all of the ice.
If you wanted to take it to the extreme (factoring in a large temperature rise), I could see the only inhabitable land in the southern hemisphere being high in the southern Andes mountains. They would struggle with finding land suitable for agriculture.
Africa would be pretty much toast, maybe with one small pocket of humanity on top of mountains such as Kilamanjaro.
Nepal and the surrounding areas would do well.
Russia, Scandanavia (except Denmark) and Canada would do very well.
The president and US military would retreat to Alaska, at least what's still above water. They also might invade Canada. The Soviets would then look to finish the US off with an attack from Siberia or over the pole.
The problem is that both countries will be struggling to get the resources they need to attack the other.
Hmm... I'm getting into this now!
Such a device, sent far in advance of a colonization fleet, would require an AI capable of determining indigenous lifeforms, their threat to the future colonists, and the strategic and tactical planning and operational capability to eliminate any and all threats to its creators.
The satellite you mentioned could be part of this colonization system. In addition to the town in England that was destroyed, several other components could have landed on Earth. These devices would burrow down to the mantle at key points and cause increased volcanic activity and the release of major methane deposits both underground and the frozen fields on the seabed. The resulting spike in the Greenhouse Effect would destroy crops, raise sea levels as ice melts, and reduce the humans' ability to resist.
That plot was used for an episode of StarGate a few years back.
Still, that doesn't automatically disqualify it as a valid story idea. And if you want a war to be triggered, just have the ballistic trajectory of the probe which hit that English town lead back to an orbit above the Russian motherland.