Quote:robkelk wrote:Dunno... some places here in SA are notorious for being 'shallow'. (And if you were ever to visit you'd see the evidence - some places here, roads DO NOT stay level for long and develop dips spanning the entire road that will make your head hit the ceiling if you take them at speed.) My mother attests that if her parents had wanted to, they'd only need to have drilled a shaft 75 feet down in their back yard to get the to aquifer. :p
Looking
at that first image, it seems to me that there won't be a breach if the
Mad only goes 100 feet down. Yes, a few skyscrapers would lose their
sub-basements, but the aquifer would be intact.
Quote:Rajvik wrote:I wouldn't mind the Rangers per say. Hell, were it up to Ben he'd go "All yours, boys."
Yeah
in othe words looking at the geographic layouts you would have to dam
above SA, replace the aquifer level with something of similar density
bury that then undam the aquifer again. Lets just leave SA where it is
and not have to argue with Texas Rangers wanting to "return a prisoner
of Azkaban to Texas"
As for the damage to the aquifer.... I'm trying to come up with some plausible excuse for the Mad to leave a perfectly sealed crater in his wake... maybe he wanted to ensure a clean appearance? Could only be done if the bowl was double-layered - one being the 'skin of the ship' and the other being the layer left behind, which would have the fortunate bonus of keeping the aquifer plugged.
This would be interesting in other ways because the River Walk would drain into it and fill it. And then you have your lake. Wonder how long until they'd set up a marina? Although, I don't think it would make a difference in local ambient temperatures - it's warm enough around here that after a long hot day, pavement stays warm to the touch all hours of the night. (Things that annoy me when delivering pizza at night: stray dogs that sleep out on the rural roads because the pavement is warm.) If anything, the lake would keep the downtown area WARMER in the winter time!
An excuse for going that deep in the first place? Water treatment. As mentioned before, the Edwards Aquifer has the bizarre ability, unlike other Karst Aquifers, to filter and treat its own water - even to the point where we don't even have to treat the stuff we get here in SA. (Though our water is hard as hell.) That would memetically play into the handwavium down at that depth, and so you would have the still functioning plumbing, much to everyone's pleasantly surprised relief.
Possible quirk: Hard Water - leaving water running for an extended period of time will cause it to form a stalagmite formation from your faucet until it is fully occluded. It's almost like the city itself is telling you not to waste water.
Quote:Dartz wrote:Yeah, the entire city council plus the mayor would probably wind up getting impeached/recalled.
Well.... dip.
From a meta standpoint, a cock-up and disaster of that magnitude probably shouldn't be blamed on one person.
I don't think there's any natural historical precedent for blasting a
quarter-mile with hole through a pressuriesed aquifer. (The size of the
cut ring depending on how deep down it is.) It'd be interesting to see
Quote:Dartz wrote:Yeah, difference with ours is that it has a solid slab of younger limestone on top, sealing the whole thing in except at the exposed Karst formations (which form what we refer to as the 'recharge zone') and at the springs. Other than that, the sudden floods that quickly disperse are a thing here as well.
Most of Ireland has a similar geology - mothe West especially with the
burren especially being obvious where the topsoil has just been blasted
off. The result could be something of a massive inland Turlough, that
floods and empties with the changing level and pressure of water in the
aquifer. One other effect that can happen is, if it does rapidly erode a
riverbed, is the river can drain back down into the limestone or bore
its own swallowhole right down and vanish. A small scale version of that
happened here too, when someone built a canal in a limestone area,
flooded the canal, and was promptly embarrassed when it all drained down
into the limestone bedrock.
All that water's got to go somewhere, and will keep going there.
But yeah... that solid limestone will keep the water on the surface until it flows out into the Gulf of Mexico. More likely than not, it will probably wind up contributing into the San Antonio River and flooding that.