Of course it's not the first time man has considered using engineering to improve the climate as the report below from early last century demonstrates. We wonder what the world would have been like if the Atlantic Jetty had been constructed.
The Mercury (Hobart, Tas.) 2/1/1913
AMERICAN SCIENTIST'S IDEA.
If we may credit a deep-sea scientist, it will cost less than £38,000,000 to make Siberia a summer resort, start ice famines in Labrador, give Scotland an all-day summer with a temperature like Japan's, change the climate of the Atlantic coast to one like that of Southern California, molt all the ice on and around the North Pole, and open it to track gardening. To do so will be cheaper, much easier, and twice as quickly done as to build the Panama Canal.
All that is necessary to accomplish these results, some of which would result from tipping the old earth sideways, is to build a rip-rap jetty about 200 miles long; across the shoals extending eastwards, from Newfoundland, near Cape Race, says the ''New York Herald."
That would stop the Labrador Current, whoso cold is capable of making 2,000,000 tons of ice every second, from running right into the Gulf Stream, whose heat is equal to the burning of 2,000,000 tons of coal every minute. They meet now on the Grand Banks, where the water is only about 25l feet deep. The Gulf Stream is split up, and spreads out over millions of square leagues of the Atlantic.
If such a jetty were built, the Labrador Current coming down from the Arctic would be turned eastward, and would be sunk so far when the Gulf Stream met it that the latter warm, blue river of the ocean would pass over the great cold river from the North Pole. The warm Gulf Stream would continue in almost undiminished volume to the northward, and the Labrador Current would run a mile deep through the great depths of the Atlantic, making the torrid zone about the equator cooler, while the Gulf Stream would require only three months to melt every inch of ice around the pole.
Fantastic though this may appear, it has received the closest interest from the foremost men of practical science in the United States and other countries. Every detail of the astounding enterprise has been worked out by Mr. Carroll Livingston Riker, of Brooklyn, who has made critics swallow their scornful prophecies in other enterprises. He built the first mechanical refrigerating warehouse ever constructed, and devised and constructed the refrigerating plant on board the steamship Celtic, which carried to Liverpool the first cargo of American dressed meats ever landed there.
In the book "Power and Control of the Gulf Stream," just published by Mr. Riker, he discusses the problem of preserving to the universe the benevolent warmth of the Gulf Stream for the destruction of the sterilising cold of the Arctic.
Ocean currents, he recites control the distribution of tropical solar heat the waters heated about the equator bearing away toward the poles the heat there absorbed and modifying lands near which they run. The great warm flood of the Gulf Stream 40 miles in width and 1 200ft deep, with a temperature above 73 degrees Fahrenheit, is like a hot water pipe warming the Atlantic coast and adjoining legions as it flow northward.
The Labrador Current, 250 miles wide and 200ft deep, sweeps down from the Arctic with a temperature below zero Cent. (32deg. Fahr.). It meets and robs the Gulf Stream of its heat in the meeting on the Grand Bank. The shoal on the Great Bank where the cold and warm world arteries meet is a principal cause of their neutralisation of each others effects.
Mr Riker declares that the jetty would divert this meeting at great depths to the eastward of the Grand Bank, and by the time the Labrador Current was running there it would be taking a course with its heavy saline a file (mile?) below the surface permitting the warmer lighter and less saline Gulf Stream to sweep above it carrying a message of warmth and sunlight and fertility to the snow-.bound, ice-clad acres of the Polar Circle.
Even after its destructive conflict on the Grand Bank with the Labrador Current the Gulf Stream now survives and rolls onward giving to the British Isles mid Northern Europe the warmth
without which Scandinavia would be uninhabitable and England as sterile Labrador.
No more icebergs in the steamship lanes, no more of such fogs as now prevail about the meeting of the cold and warm currents, storms reduced to a minimum, and the whole of eastern North America a garden of paradise with no great cold or heat are some of the results Mr Riker foresees from building the jetty.
The melting of the Arctic ice cap, he estimates, would shift the equalizing balance of the globe, and the then preponderating weight of the Antarctic ice cap would make what I now the North Pole shift toward Northern Europe, with the result producing a night-less summer in the area of Scotland without a day-less winter.
