Venice Anti-Flood Gates Could Wreck Lagoon Ecosystem | Hacker News Reader

Venice Anti-Flood Gates Could Wreck Lagoon Ecosystem

scientificamerican.com

22 pointsvaultcool23 comments

Link to original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07372-3

How much to make the buildings float? One by one floats could be added to the buildings and cross connected to prevent individual building tipping.

It will take time and money, but they are already talking about spending big bucks anyway.

If sea level rise does ever seriously get out of hand, that is my prediction for parts of Tokyo and New York. I strongly suspect that some coastal cities would rather float than move.

New York 2140 is an interesting book examining what might happen to those coastal "drowned" cities, especially those buildings caught in the new intertidal zones.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29570143-new-york-2140

That looks interesting, I might grab a copy when I have made a dent in my current pile.

Some architects are already proposing to build floating apartments off the piers in Manhattan - https://www.dezeen.com/2018/02/09/pier-40-manhattan-new-york...

One kind of nice/kind of weird part of it, is that it's mostly interconnected slices-of-life without a huge overarching plot (though that's not entirely true, either) -- that has made it quite good as a pick-up-put-down book: handy, considering it's length!

This is already happening in Amsterdam

Probably an insane amount. You would have to reinforce the buildings internally so they could withstand the additional forces. Might be cheaper to build a new Venice.

Why don't they just build the gates and add some pumps to circulate water between the lagoon and the open ocean?

1) Boats need to enter/exit Venice Laguna

2) Venice Laguna is huge, I don't think that could be feasible

The objection in TFA was ecological damage due to de-oxygenation of the water. They don't mention boats as a problem so I'd guess that's taken care of?

As for the size of the laguna, they're talking about walling the whole thing off so some circulation pumps shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Alternately they could install some kind of bubbler system (like a giant version of a fish tank air pump) to keep the water aerated in situ. Again, it's not going to be pocket change but it's an option.

Couldn't the barrier incorporate locks?

The barrier is only temporary anyway. But if extreme high tides get worse in the future, then the times that the system would get activated would also increase. That could cause the lagoon to be deprived of oxygen.

Isn't injecting cement under the city massively more damaging to the environment (carbon emissions)?

There are lots of lagoons. There's only one Venice. The city is such an important monument to learning and culture that I'd kill every living thing in that lagoon to save the city. I'm a human, and while I want to preserve the environment when possible, ultimately, I have to prefer human interests.

It would be completely disingenuous for me to say that making an exception for Venice is a "slippery slope", but I can't help thinking about the river behind my house. I live in Japan by the ocean and they are widening the river by a factor of 3 -- literally digging up the banks, rebuilding them, dredging the bottom of the river, flattening it out, fortifying the banks with concrete and stone, etc. I hope they know what they are doing, but given how the river otter is now extinct in Japan (loss of habitat) and the river eel (unagi) has been decimated (loss of habitat)... I've got to wonder if they really care one way or another.

The thing is, the town where I live will be decimated by any reasonable size tsunami that might happen. Rain fall amounts are rising and we're getting record floods pretty much every year (despite being in a rain shadow). The real answer is to move the city up on top of the nearby plateau which is about 100 m above sea level, but I guess widening the river buys them (ummm.... us....) some time.

Generally speaking, I have to wonder whether it makes sense to try to save land that is only 3 m or so above sea level. And while I can completely understand your point about making a special case for Venice, I don't think we (as humans) are making special cases. I wonder whether we have any rational plans at all for mitigating the risks in these areas. Destroying the ecosystem and also getting flooded out seems like a pretty poor "compromise".

Of course, in a pot meets kettle kind of admission, I don't currently have concrete plans to move out of my "very likely to be under water sometime in my lifetime abode". It's on my TODO list...

> There's only one Venice.

Venice became tourist theme park.

QED why we are where we are.

When will we learn that if we kill every living thing in the X, we're probably going to regret it later... Maybe the lagoon acidifies and dissolves piers, maybe algae blooms produce toxic gas, who knows.

> When will we learn that if we kill every living thing in the X, we're probably going to regret it later

Never, because it's not true. You haven't convinced me that there's anything wrong with my proposal.

From my perspective your proposal is at least valid. But it's really quite subjective. Personally I've never really cared for the value we put on landmarks and historic sites. Let it become a sunken city and sell submarine tours.

Of course that's my subjective opinion as well.

Maybe it's fine, but why do we assume it's default-fine? All over the world we see things run out of control when we steamroll an ecosystem.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I recall there was some news a year or two ago about Norway contemplating the installation of pumps to oxygenate fjords which had stagnated & began to become anoxic due to human activity, and were experiencing toxic blooms.

> There's only one Venice.

Yep and it exists in the past. Over half of the population has already left.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-death-of...

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