The Northwest Passage and the Panama Canal
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With the advent of global warming, the possibility of opening up a NW Passage for shipping may become more than just history. Far from being thrilled by the discovery of the New World in 1492, European mariners considered it a stop across the road to Asia around South America. They would always say the US and Latin America and Canada are what makes the old world go round!
If the N may warm up anyway we may be able to speed up the process if it's of value. (Global warming may be actually caused by the sun burning hotter, the solar cycles are at their most heat in all the known science, and when the solar heat increases so does the heat on mars and worlds like Neptune, so solar warming may be safe because the sun hasn't overheated in the history of life more about this.. For a link about the atmospheric changes of the earth, Click here..) Using combinations (or a combination of just the cosmos!) of mirrors, inflatable lenses, refracting shades, or magnetic bubbles, heat and light would be focused in a narrow 100 mile wide band ice free, this may be a way to have the NW Passage ahead of global warming, of great import for the world economy. The fourth option above, magnetic bubbles, is based on the new science that uses a machine like a magnet to make a cheap magnetic field or bubble, this is being researched to use as a giant solar sail. When the bubble is farther from the sun, it expands and this makes it go at the same speed, so it takes no extra sails at greater distances from the sun, the perfect machine to move a space satellite in and about the solar system. Because the solar sail is a round loop, it may be used if modulated in the right shape more a lense to focus the heat along the path of the NW passage. And part of the heat the field collects can be used (not sued if mom's a good lawyer!) to power the bubble generator machine also. If this plan works out well, it might in the offing be scaled up to heat Russia, Canada, and Alaska, (Canadians are cozy about global warming!)
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With the advent of global warming, the possibility of opening up a NW Passage for shipping may become more than just history. Far from being thrilled by the discovery of the New World in 1492, European mariners considered it a stop across the road to Asia around South America. They would always say the US and Latin America and Canada are what makes the old world go round!
If the N may warm up anyway we may be able to speed up the process if it's of value. (Global warming may be actually caused by the sun burning hotter, the solar cycles are at their most heat in all the known science, and when the solar heat increases so does the heat on mars and worlds like Neptune, so solar warming may be safe because the sun hasn't overheated in the history of life more about this.. For a link about the atmospheric changes of the earth, Click here..) Using combinations (or a combination of just the cosmos!) of mirrors, inflatable lenses, refracting shades, or magnetic bubbles, heat and light would be focused in a narrow 100 mile wide band ice free, this may be a way to have the NW Passage ahead of global warming, of great import for the world economy. The fourth option above, magnetic bubbles, is based on the new science that uses a machine like a magnet to make a cheap magnetic field or bubble, this is being researched to use as a giant solar sail. When the bubble is farther from the sun, it expands and this makes it go at the same speed, so it takes no extra sails at greater distances from the sun, the perfect machine to move a space satellite in and about the solar system. Because the solar sail is a round loop, it may be used if modulated in the right shape more a lense to focus the heat along the path of the NW passage. And part of the heat the field collects can be used (not sued if mom's a good lawyer!) to power the bubble generator machine also. If this plan works out well, it might in the offing be scaled up to heat Russia, Canada, and Alaska, (Canadians are cozy about global warming!)
While some would say this is bad for wildlife, the environment may be safe mostly. Biologists say life is adapting rapidly to the changes in the weather. After all there were perhaps 20 ice ages in recent time (2 million years) and we have a bit of an ice age, named Christmas. Times of warm weather aren't uncommon to life, for millions of years after the dinosaurs, there was warm weather for mammals, warmer than the ice ages and during the interglacial ages hippopotamuses were as far north as N Europe.
The Panama Canal
If the NW Passage plan is inevitable, or just for more options, the Panama canal might be improved for supertankers by a large oil pipe or pipes over the hills of the canal and using the siphon of the oil from one ship to the other. Larger ships can't go through the canal, and in the 30 years from about 1978 it's been cheaper overall to send the oil and other such goods around SA than via the canal. It would be more optimal yet if they had the pipeline because it would be faster. The ships would have to be in sets one each east and west, and without loading something in the ship they would be like me in the bus and take 5/4 of a visit, or sitting at the bus start, it's an action adventure reality show, I never miss the bus, I go by office box!) The big business could afford to have sets of ships in both shores, and this would be where there would be the most to win via the pipeline. Another possibility is to dig a tunnel the width of the inter-modal freight containers slightly above sea level. The ships with all the containers (not oil) would unload fast by machine and the containers would move by motors and a cushion of air around the containers so there would be no collisions. High speed machines on both sides could unload and load the containers. (They say about 30,000 of these are accidentally dropped into the ocean each year, often with ill results, in other science this might be solved by making each container a sort of miniature boat with it's own flotation device and propulsion to make it to the shore, or at least a gps the owners could use to find these valuable containers and retrieve them, or they might be wave powered to reach the owner just 1/3 more slowly but of worth to return. The first boats other than a few to make it through the NW Passage were actually bathtub soaps, they were dropped out of an intermodal container and they went year by year as the ice froze and thawed all the way from the N around Alaska and Greenland and then south to the East coast of the US in a few years.)
A third possibility to make passage of the Panama canal for big ships is to actually make the boats modular. The ship would arrive at the canal and divide into 10 ships and these would go through the canal one by one and then reunite on the other side. This way much larger ships could go through the canal!
A History of The NW Passage
Working for the English Henry Hudson in 1610 sailed the ship Discovery into Hudson Bay where her was frozen in for the winter. Provisions ran out and his men mutinied and cast him, his young son and seven loyal sailors adrift in a small boat. They were never seen again. Or in other words he's a sort of famous Santa Clause in a cosmic rowing machine to the stars!
In 1771 Samuel Hearne of the Hudson Bay Company left Fort Prince of Wales and marched north across the grim Canadian Barrens to the north of the Coppermine River at the northern edge of the North American continent. He proved that no northwest passage cut across the North American continent.
They looked out over the land and they knew it was him when he returned in giant fuzzy slippers!
The sea Capt. James Cook in 1771 rounded the northern shore of Alaska's W coast and reported that no passage existed on the Pacific shore S of 70 degrees, (not the heatwave!) and that the N above this is ice choked and inevitable for commerce. How can't we you feel our way around the world?
In 1845 John Franklin sailed with 130 officers and men. The ships carried china, crystal, silver, a library and an old music machine, but no Arctic wear and little understanding of Arctic survival. By 1847 a worried Royal Navy began to dispatch rescue expeditions. In the next nine years, 40 expeditions crisscrossed the Arctic looking for Franklin. Though they never found the lost party, relief expeditions mapped vast stretches of the Canadian Arctic. They found the information, and neither the information or Franklin was buried in a memorial service!
In the late 1980's a Smithsonian funded search found Franklin's body and the boats, right where his wife had always said they would find him, SOUTH IN THE HEAT!
A US based atomic submarine made the first underwater transit of the NW Passage in 1960, Why? Like Columbus, to make it to the other zhenzhou!
