Related papers: Floating Cities, Islands and States
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
We consider super-Earth sized planets which have a water mass fraction that is large enough to form an external mantle composed of high pressure water ice polymorphs and that lack a substantial H/He atmosphere. We consider such planets in…
Theory and computations are provided for building of optimal (minimum weight) solid space towers (mast) up to one hundred kilometers in height. These towers can be used for tourism; scientific observation of space, observation of the Earth…
A balanced ratio of ocean to land is believed to be essential for an Earth-like biosphere and one may conjecture that plate-tectonics planets should be similar in geological properties. After all, the volume of continental crust evolves…
City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from…
The oceans cover the vast majority of the Earth. Therefore, their simulation has many scientific, industrial and military interests, including computer graphics domain. By fully exploiting the multi-threading power of GPU and CPU, current…
Terrestrial planets, with silicate mantles and metallic cores, are likely to obtain water and carbon compounds during accretion. Here I examine the conditions that allow early formation of a surface water ocean (simultaneous with cooling to…
Scaling of geographic space refers to the fact that for a large geographic area its small constituents or units are much more common than the large ones. This paper develops a novel perspective to the scaling of geographic space using large…
Wind energy has become increasingly important for meeting Europe's energy needs. While onshore wind expansion faces public acceptance problems, for offshore wind the European Commission has introduced ambitious goals to increase capacity…
We need enough new carbon sinks to 1) cancel out any continuing use of fossil fuels, 2) overcome the delayed effect of earlier excesses, and then 3) lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations to the old maximum value of 280 ppm. We need to sink…
Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are…
The author suggests a cheap closed AB-Dome which protects the densely populated cities from nuclear, chemical, biological weapon (bombs) delivered by warheads, strategic missiles, rockets, and various incarnations of aviation technology.…
When particles of a few tens of microns are spread on the surface of water, they aggregate under the action of capillary forces and form a thin floating membrane, a particle raft. In a tank with a raft made of graphite powder, we generate…
Floods affected more than 2 billion people worldwide from 1998 to 2017 and their occurrence is expected to increase due to climate warming, population growth and rapid urbanization. Recent approaches for understanding the resilience of…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
A figure, taken from a science literacy test, illustrates the distribution of water across various locations on Earth, represented as though the entire volume is contained in 100 buckets. Using this figure , and other basic, readily…
Global climate evolution models for habitable earthlike planets do not consider the effect of ocean salinity on land ice formation through the hydrological cycle. We consider two categories of such planets: planets with deep oceans, but…
Approximately two-thirds of the Earth, the only known inhabited planet, is covered in ocean. Why not 0.01% or 99.99%? It has been previously suggested that this may represent a certain degree of fine-tuning, and thus perhaps observers are…
In a series of previous articles (see references) the author offered to cover a city or other important large installations or subregions by a transparent thin film supported by a small additional air overpressure under the form of an AB…
There are four different stable climate states for pure water atmospheres, as might exist on so-called "waterworlds". I map these as a function of solar constant for planets ranging in size from Mars size to 10 Earth-mass. The states are:…