Friday 9 March 2012

Himalayas Water Tower


Yanko Design (The DREADCO of the design world) has this solution to the inexorable melting of the Himalayan glaciers due to global warming:  Build 900-yard tall towers, one third of which is filled with ice cubes made up with run-off from the melting glaciers.

Two problems with this.  First, the capacity of these towers compared to the volume of a single glacier is so tiny that it makes wind power look like a good idea and second, the designer has missed out on Glaciergate.

3 comments:

eon said...

I had so many thoughts on seeing that picture.

First up was that somebody had watched "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" one time too many.

Followed by thinking it was artwork for some new "alien invasion" movie.

Next up, came, terrorists would drool at the prospect of bombing those, or crashing airliners into them.

The lower half made me suspect that somebody was building office blocks according to the Necronomicon. (Those tentacles make me nervous.)

The I read the link, and realized it was another Yanko Design brainstorm. Which I should have thought of first, since its seriously impractical but oh-so-politically trendy.

Before they start trying to build these things, somebody should explain things like tunnel-wind effects in mountains to them. At a rough guess, the sail area of those upper levels means they will be losing windows almost as fast as they can install them, and when a full-on Himalayan storm system hits, the whole lot will be horizontal- or sliding down the nearest slope in pieces- in very short order.

cheers

eon

Bryan said...

It reminds me of the idea I had when I was a kid to fix the hole in the ozone. I reasoned that, since you can create ozone by arcing electricity, we should build two massive towers in the Antarctic powered by a giant nuclear reactor that would do just that on a massive scale and patch the hole.
Of course, I was ten years old at the time and a huge fan of Hugo Gernsback and Chris Foss.

Sergej said...

Wh... huh? What? That isn't even...

Well, I'll give this one a pass because their hearts are in the right place. Without ice, gin and tonics would be rather sad things. I guess they're going to be saving just about enough ice for a drink.