Advantages of Blowing Up the Isthmus of Panama
As many of you know, I often think on a big scale. Consider this posts to be another one in that line. Today I am going to talk about a type of geo-engineering that is both feasible and revolutionary- specifically, destroying parts of the Isthmus of Panama to create a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific ocean that is at least 5 km wide and 1 km deep. As some of you might know- we already have a very small connection between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans through Panama called the Panama Canal. It is however too small to allow those two oceans to mix and change ocean circulation.
So how did I come up with this somewhat bizarre sounding idea? Well, as you know I have a broad series of interests in everything from nuclear weapons to geology and that led me, many years ago, to something that most of you might not know about the Isthmus of Panama. The land at its narrowest part of the isthmus is rather new on a geological time scale and was fully formed only about 3 million years ago. Prior to that the Atlantic Ocean was connected to the Pacific Ocean at both the equator and the poles. Consequently the circulation of water and currents in the world's oceans were quite different from today. To make a long story short, the earth was much warmer, wetter and greener than it is today.
Prior to the narrowing and final closure of the gap between North and South America about 3 million years ago, ice ages did not occur. In fact, ice ages as we know them, started around 2.6 million years ago. Similarly whales were plentiful even in tropical oceans and were the main food item for large sharks such as the Megalodon who also flourished in those waters. Similarly there used to be forests in parts of Antarctica as recently as 3 million year ago. Even the Sahara desert was a grassland before the most recent ice ages began and caused it to periodically transform into a desert. In other words, formation of the Isthmus of Panama made the world much drier, colder and susceptible to periodic ice ages. While you can partially explain ice ages by plotting long-term periodicities in earth’s orbit around the sun- this is insufficient to explain why these orbital peculiarities did not cause ice ages for previous 300 millions years until the Isthmus of Panama closed up.
So how can we reopen this connection between the Pacific and the Atlantic? While there are many options to do so, the easiest involves using large low-fallout nuclear weapons. Why spend decades digging when you can the same in a few minutes with properly placed high-yield thermonuclear devices? A few dozen of these babies could easily create a canal about 5 km wide by 1 km deep and about 80-100 km long. In any case- the areas which such canals would go through are uninhabited due to the their unpleasant climate, topography and dense jungle growth. Moreover, the technology to do it is tried and tested, and large high-yield devices can easily be built from currently available nuclear weapons components. While there might be some small issues such as relocating people in nearby Panama, the increased productivity of the biosphere all around the the world would be many thousands of times larger that what has to be destroyed recreate the connection between those two oceans.
What do you think? Comments?