'Alarming' Scale of Marine Sand Dredging Laid Bare by New Data … – Slashdot

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Please stick to standard units – e.g. Football Fields or Libraries of Congress.
I knew a Lorrie once… she was a bit promiscuous. But I don’t understand how to convert average penises encountered per year to containers of sand. Is there an inches to cubic meters factor I can use?

I knew a Lorrie once… she was a bit promiscuous. But I don’t understand how to convert average penises encountered per year to containers of sand. Is there an inches to cubic meters factor I can use?

I knew a Lorrie once… she was a bit promiscuous. But I don’t understand how to convert average penises encountered per year to containers of sand. Is there an inches to cubic meters factor I can use?
After sex on the beach, how much sand was Lorrie carrying, internally and externally? That’s the standard Laurie sand unit.

At least football fields and Libraries of Congress are consistent.

At least football fields and Libraries of Congress are consistent.
Football fields is not consistent. Where the word “lorry” is commonly used, a “Football field” is a different size (and different sport) than an American Football field. Down Under, it isn’t even one size.

Please stick to standard units – e.g. Football Fields or Libraries of Congress.

Please stick to standard units – e.g. Football Fields or Libraries of Congress.
A lorry holds about 21,000 kg.
Therefore 1e6 * 2.1e4 / .118 = 1.78e+11 or 178 billion bananas per day worth of sand.
It means truck in British.
What you really care about it its unladen speed though…
And in this case, it’d be about 7-10 cubic meters of sand per truck/lorrie.

And in this case, it’d be about 7-10 cubic meters of sand per truck/lorrie.

And in this case, it’d be about 7-10 cubic meters of sand per truck/lorrie.
Are they all a standard size? There are so many different sizes of what we call dump trucks here in the states. It’s like a football field or soccer pitch can be visualized, but a road legal dum truck would fit inside one of the the big ones. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8N9… [blogspot.com]
Anyhow, thanks for the measurement. I can conceptualize that.
No, they’re not all a standard size over there either. That’s why there’s like a 30% range between the two amounts.
I just did a common range for road legal ones. If you’re involving dump trucks big enough to have small offices as cabs… The numbers vary.
I’m not sure you could call a Caterpillar 797F to be a “lorry” any more.
Sweet.
Now are we talking about a compact consumer pickup truck like a Ford Ranger? Or maybe a full-size pickup truck such as an F150 or Chevy Silverado? Or a heavy duty pickup truck like a F350? Bigger like an F550? 2.5 ton flat-bed truck? 5 ton dump truck? Huge mining loader that is the size of a house?
I’m pretty sure anyone could do the slang translation in about 4 seconds with Google. What was missing is context.

It means truck in British.

It means truck in British.
European or African truck?
Yes, you’re right that actually digging no sand out of the ocean would and has over the long term become problematic. A certain amount of erosion leads directly to sand being displaced from land and rivers into the ocean, and we do definitely need to have some plan to reverse that if we want to maintain our coastlines and waterways. I think the issue is that if you dig too much back out in one place though, and just leave a giant sub-oceanic pit somewhere, it can disrupt oceanic currents in an environmental
Wouldn’t removing lots of sand from the seabed, _counteract_ rising sea levels? That sand displaces water, or stops displacing it when removed, right? Wouldn’t that have roughly the *opposite* effect or rising sea levels?
Note that I’m not suggesting we should deliberately screw up one thing in order to offset something else. That kind of approach tends to have unintended consequences.
But I do fail to see how the rising sea levels are contributing to or exacerbating how bad the amount of sand being remove
No, taking sand out of the oceans is not a good solution. Some of the other posters have calculated the amount of sand we’re removing is something like 1% of the added volume from melting ice. There’s no practical way to remove enough stuff from the ocean to make space for all that melting water.
Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we’re most worried about.

Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we’re most worried about.

Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we’re most worried about.
Exactly correct. There is a lighthouse in North Carolina that has been used for coastal navigation since the ships had sails on them (finished in 1870), and not too long ago (1999) they had to undergo a project to lift the thing onto rails and move it 2900 feet inland [nps.gov] to it’s current position on a new foundation, because the coastline has shifted about 1500 feet since it was built to where it was threatening the original historic foundation of the structure. I can’t imagine that undergoing a project to li
Unless you are loading the sand into a rocket and firing it up out of the gravity well, that sand will end up back in the ocean someday. And even if we do start sending chunks of the sea bed into space, other sand will end up there to replace it because erosion of mountains is still a thing. And do you realize just how much sand you would have to dredge out in order to effect sea level rise? It would be the biggest engineering project ever undertaken by man, as you would have to remove enough sand to disp

Why are they mentioned here? It feels like a non sequitur.

Why are they mentioned here? It feels like a non sequitur.
it is. tbf that mention it’s not in the article or original headline, but in msmash’s editing. i guess it is somehow related inasmuch as coastal erosion impacts directly the same collective as rising sea levels, but yeah, it’s foggy at best. not sure if it is there for added dramatism or else for added dramatism 😉

One million lorries of sand a day are being extracted from the world’s oceans, posing a “significant” threat to marine life and coastal communities facing rising sea levels and storms,

One million lorries of sand a day are being extracted from the world’s oceans, posing a “significant” threat to marine life and coastal communities facing rising sea levels and storms,
Unless this sand is being dumped back into the ocean elsewhere, doesn’t that just make the ocean deeper, meaning it’ll take longer for sea-level to rise on land? 🙂 [ie: If I have a deeper/bigger bathtub, it can hold more water before if overflows…] Sounds like a win-win for coastal communities. (I can heard it now: “Dredge-baby-dredge …”)
Okay, it looks like it’d be around 8 cubic meters of sand per lorrie, assuming the lorries are what those of us in the US call “dump trucks”. So around 8 million cubic meters/day. Around 3 billion cubic meters/year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/scien… [bbc.com]
270 billion tonnes of ice melting per year. It’s around 1 metric ton of water per cubic meter(depends on temperature, you see).
So 270-3 = 267B more tons of sand we need to extract.
Or, if we want to solve global warming by simply extracting enough sand/ocean bed
What are you even trying to say? “heavier” isn’t a distance measurement, and what’s a “residense”?
While yes, this would increase the average height of the land, the problem is that existing locations will end up flooding too often. So unless we put that sand towards lifting them up, it isn’t that helpful. So the primary effect would still be by removing the sand to increase the volume available for the water at given heights.

Greenland ice sheet lost 84Gt of ice over the 12 months from September 2021 to August 2022

Greenland ice sheet lost 84Gt of ice over the 12 months from September 2021 to August 2022
Since sand is about 60% denser, you’d need to remove about 135Gt of sand to offset the that year’s melt (the figure above from https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu… [carbonbrief.org] is the *net* loss of ice). With the Antarctic ice shelf roughly 10x bigger than that and experiencing roughly similar melting rates, you’d need to remove almost 1.5 *tera*tons of sand yearly, or about 250 times what the OP report indicates, just to keep things on an even keel. Unfortunately, even that figure is going to be increasing.
Why aren’t all companies required to explain what they do today? At least when they impact shared resources (land, water, air, etc). The “cost” to report should be borne by the people trying to “profit” from the actions.
Sure… we didn’t used to. It’s a new day. We realize how useful this information is, and how most companies would already be tracking similar information. You don’t want to run out suddenly, or have spikes and troughs of production if you can help it. So you track it…
How low is the
Good quality sand for concrete and glass is the next major black market. According to television.

From the summary, it seems clear that the sand is being extracted for industrial purposes. The most obvious one would be to mix with cement to make concrete.

From the summary, it seems clear that the sand is being extracted for industrial purposes. The most obvious one would be to mix with cement to make concrete.
It most definitely is not being used for concrete. Ocean sand is so rounded off that it makes exceedingly weak concrete. There was a scandal about it in China, and some collapsed buildings. River and ocean sand is wholly unsuitable for structural cement.
The vast majority of dredging is to keep shipping lanes open. Barge traffic on the Mississippi river accounts for half a billion tons of freight every single year and it’s neither the largest nor the busiest river in the world. The streams and smaller rivers that make up the Mississippi river basin carry tons and tons of silt and sand into the river every year. The Army Corps of Engineers is in a constant battle with the silt accumulation. More beavers on small streams would help with that, to slow down the water farther upstream and allow the silt to fall out on the bottom of tributaries, but the North American beaver is an indiscriminate, if persistent, engineer, who will flood roads if not supervised.
“the North American beaver is an indiscriminate, if persistent, engineer, who will flood roads if not supervised.”
You can get them to build dams where you want them with audio recordings of running water.
But but, what about all the reactionary benefit from big numbers and vague reporting! We have to focus on man-caused climate change, and without a clickbait article like this, we won’t have much.
Exactly.
I say the same thing about “over-fishing”.
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