Climate-Systems

Dreamtime Spine: A Continental Restoration Synthesis Summary Australia is not naturally a desert continent. It is a continent whose internal water redistribution system was progressively broken — by tectonic uplift redirecting river flows, by 15 million years of aridification, and finally by the megafauna collapse that removed the biological machinery sustaining what remained. The continent has been trying to restore itself ever since. It lacks only the missing components. The Dreamtime Spine is the proposal to supply those components. Not by imposing something foreign on the landscape — but by completing what the continent’s own geology began and what Aboriginal land management sustained for 60,000 years. ...

Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre) Summary Lake Eyre: Northern basin reservoir (dark blue). Kati Thanda — known to most Australians as Lake Eyre — is Australia’s largest lake. The famous empty lake at the heart of the continent, filling rarely enough that each event makes national news. This synthesis proposes the permanent freshwater impoundment of the northern basin’s upper reach: a managed reservoir of approximately 1,500 km² surface area and 100 km³ volume — more freshwater storage than all of Australia’s existing dams and reservoirs combined, in a single basin, at the centre of the continent. At approximately 468 Panama Canal equivalents of excavation, it would rank as the largest civil engineering project in human history. The technology exists. The engineering is solved. The only thing missing is the political will to authorise it. ...