Mongolia Wants To Use Artificial Glaciers To Cool Capital 97
phaedrus5001 wrote in with a story about an unusual plan to regulate the temperature of Ulan Bator, the capital city of Mongolia. The article reads: "The city of Ulan Bator will attempt to capture some of the cool winter temperatures in huge ice blocks that will slowly melt over the summer and cool down the city. The aim is to build artificial ice shields — or 'naleds' — that occur naturally in far northern climates and can grow to be more than seven meters thick. They grow when river water pushes through cracks in the surface of the ice during the day and then freezes to add an extra layer of ice when night falls. Engineering consortium EMI-ECOS will try to replicate this process by creating holes in the ice that is forming over the Tuul river. This will be repeated over and over again until the ice is much thicker than it would be if left alone."
With an average high of about 70 degrees... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:With an average high of about 70 degrees... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, if their summers are that mild, it doesn't seem necessary. But then again, as a proof of concept, it has to happen somewhere the winters get very cold but the summers could stand to loose a little bit of heat. If they're too cold during the summer, they can break up the ice.
Can't cite a source, but I do believe our bodies become accustomed to the cycles of a climate. Spending most of winter, for most of my life in colder climes I visited Athens, Greece a couple times in Winter. After a few days of 70 F/ 20 C I was miserable and felt overburdened by the heat. I booked flight for Geneva and when I stepped onto the tarmac in Switzerland, I opened my jacket to let the cool 10 F / -10 C air in. It felt good. I believe it was an example of a metabolism which was accustomed to generating body heat couldn't cope well with warmer weather in the middle of Winter.
With glaciers and Winter in decline across the world perhaps cities are noticing an increase in heat.
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There is no such thing as bad weather, only improper clothing. If you feel hot at 20C you're wearing too much.
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Or are morbidly obese.
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Only if you figure out how to shed 100lbs with a zipper.
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Dance Dance Revolution (Score:2)
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Sure. So long as ice vests count as clothing. When it's pushing 50C it doesn't matter how little you're wearing, it's still bloody hot!
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Depends on the humidity. 50C dry is tolerable, 50C at high humidity will kill you.
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Because only douchbags care who got first post.
I'm only answering this question because you asked, not that I care.
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You can just set the filter to 1 so that you don't see any 0 or -1 comments which would take care of the majority of the anon posts for you.
If someone does up-mod an anon post it usually means he did actually contribute something to the discussion so you'll still see some anon posts, but they should at least be worth a read.
Re:With an average high of about 70 degrees... (Score:5, Interesting)
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By contrast, although my home in the Southeast never gets really cold, we had 61 straight days this summer in which the temperature never fell below 20 C.
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In Dallas many of the older homes that had central AC added after the 1960's simply have their windows painted shut as a way to seal the house from the heat. We measure "days over 100" (that's 42c roughly) in double digits, the record being 42. The total number of days over 100 in any given year ranges from 30 to 70. For example my last two houses were built in 1914 and 1945, single pane windows and wood floors. Sealing the windows by painting them shut is a last ditch effort to keep my electric bill under
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I can overcome this to some extent with a powerful fan but I have to live with a lot of noise at night...
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I live in Minnesota in a house built in the 1950s without central air (it was actually added to the house in the 1970s, and we have a modern compressor, etc).
I'm not sure how they lived in the house in the summer before A/C. Any day with a daytime temperature over 80 degrees the house will generally be at least 3 degrees warmer than the outside ambient air temperature, my (master) bedroom, at least 5 degrees warmer. Strangely, even after the sun sets, the house remains warm and retains the heat long after
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If you have fireplaces with chimneys, you could try opening the flue (without the fire) to see if it would draw air in.
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They did suffer, but they also built dwellings (especially the better ones) to ventilate -- high ceilings, floor plans that allowed for cross-ventilation, transoms above doors, and attics with windows to better vent the heat.
Some even had "sleeping porches" -- large screen porches people slept on during extreme hot spells.
All these things were less common in MN because it generally is less brutal than more southern states, but I have seen plenty of old photographs and written descriptions of heat spells whe
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Actually, it's not really the same climate... just similar latitude. A lot of Mongolia is in the Gobi desert, so the temperature variation is more like -40 to 40+ (and commonly hits those extremes rather than being a rare event).
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As a desert rat myself, who goes jogging in 50C (120F) weather, I feel compelled to remind everyone that YOU CAN HANDLE HIGH TEMPERATURES. Is everyone unaware that 35C (95F) is BELOW normal body temperature? And when it gets warmer than that, a little perspiration kicks in and keeps your temperature well regulated. I realize in many places like Los Angeles a h
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In fact humans are among the animals most highly evolved to handle high temperatures.
Some of us wilt in the heat. Some people do very well. Some of us do well in the cold. Mexicans wear their hoodies until it's like 80 out. I think you are overgeneralizing.
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I am not overgeneralizing at all. I'm stating a biological fact, which is rather universally accepted.
Another one you'll hate... All healthy adults are capable of running marathons.
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Another one you'll hate... All healthy adults are capable of running marathons.
Haha, you're funny. But the first guy to run a marathon died, and he was a runner, so he was probably in excellent health.
I'm not a healthy adult anyway, I have Asthma, probably because my mom smoked until she found out she was pregnant (thanks for quitting when you decided to try to have a kid, bitch) and my dad smoked throughout the pregnancy and then with me in the car and shit like that.
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NARRATOR: Steve's embrace of endurance running raises the question, are we all born to run?
Some human features seem just right for the job like the springy arch of the human foot. Hairless skin and abundant sweat glands provide exceptional cooling. We also have large muscular butts which prevent us from tipping too far forward.
Humans don't run fast. Sometimes even squirrels can outrace us. But in a warm climate, over distance, we can outrun dogs, antelope, and even horses, which will all overheat.
In our evo
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MALISSA WOOD: If the individual has not trained their heart adequately, the heart really starts getting tired. In people that have trained adequately for the marathon, their hearts look fine.
So far we're still not talking about average individuals; in fact, we're now talking about a subset (marathon trainers) of a subset (runners).
Keep trying! You'll never get there, but it's fun to watch! We're better evolved for walking than for running. Other animals have stuff we don't for that. But what we're really evolved for is adaptation. We adapt to new environments very rapidly. In fact, we even pass some of this adaptation on to our offspring. If you're born at high altitude then your lungs will gro
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No, we aren't. The quote doesn't say anything like that, so you just pulled that one entirely out of your ass. And your assertion is directly refuted by the source I already cited.
Is this your utter misunderstanding of evolution on display here? Nothing mag
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I didn't forget that at all. Humans are warm-blooded, but it's not as if you're always generating the same amount of heat. Your body cuts down on its less necessary heat-generating activities as temperatures increase, which is a big part of the reason why I find myself eating next to nothing, day after day, through the summer. More importantly, your body heat isn't confined, internally. Increased blood flood brings heat close to your skin, where it can be cooled by the air (and sweat, if it's a bit hotte
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It's basically the same climate as Winnipeg, and we use air conditioning for a good chunk of the summer. the average high is around 20C, but that's because it alternates between 10C and 30C through most of the summer.
Your air conditioning sounds like overkill. It gets hotter than 30C ni the UK sometimes in summer and air conditioning is almost unheard-of outside of big commercial buildings.
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In a landscape that far from large water bodies the nightly/daily temperatures differ much more than here. That can perfectly give them pretty annoying 110F during day and 40F every night.
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In a landscape that far from large water bodies the nightly/daily temperatures differ much more than here. That can perfectly give them pretty annoying 110F during day and 40F every night.
Sounds like Sacramento, or even Mountain View, California. The humidity of the surrounding air has an insulative effect. Drier air, like you'll find in Nevada, Arizona and California can have similar daily temperature swings. You'll feel the heat much less in dry surroundings. Ulan Bator has relative humidity around 60% during the Summer months, so wide swings are likely.
I still think they would benefit more found creating some parks with broad shallow ponds, with some fountains. If they have the water
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Airco's are unnessecary if the outside temp varies around the perfect temp
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Perhaps they are trying to lure Google/Yahoo/Microsoft data centres to Ulan Bator with a surfeit of coolness?
Very Interesting (Score:1)
Re:Very Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
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Louisiana is already too humid. Additionally, you wouldn't be able to place an iceberg there to cool things off without it A) melting too fast to actually help, or B) hindering the local wildlife. Mold wasn't an issue because of several factors, mainly the fact that you had flowing water dispersing from central points over large spaces, as well as having buildings that were regularly scrubbed clean.
I can argue that there were far fewer allergies to everything back then vs now. The proliferation of modern m
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Re:Very Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
They use a similar technique to cool the Kidd Creek mine: http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2011/08/01/9800-feet/
"We learned during the mine briefing video that part of the cooling system actually involves opening up huge caverns near the surface during the winter and forcing the bitter cold air through while spraying water. This coats the tunnels in thick layers of ice. Then, during the summer, air is passed through these cavernous iceboxes before being sent down to the bottom of the mine."
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Re:Very Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose we could compare this to Ice Hotel in northern Sweden where they take 10 000 cubic meters of ice from the Torne River [wikipedia.org], since the flow of the river is about 370 cubic meters per second this means a disruption of slightly less than 30 seconds that melts back over the course of a few months. Tuul River [wikipedia.org] that will be used for this seems like a river of comparable size (longer, but likely a slower flow). If the Ulan Bator experiment will produce use ten times as much ice (100 000 cubic meters) and it will take about 120 days for it to melt back into the river it would be at a rate of: about 833 cubic meters per day, or about 34 cubic meters per hour,> or less than 600 liters per second.
Now, for that to be a significant difference compared to normal flow during these months average flow must be if we say that anything less than 5% change is no big deal (I do not know what changes the river can actually deal with before botched migrations or flooding becomes a risk) for the river 12 cubic meters per second.
If the river is flowing at 30 cubic meters per second and 5% change as a threshold then Ulan Bator could conceivably take 300 000 cubic meters of ice, let it melt during 150 days (april, may, june, july, august) and still not make a difference in the normal water flow.
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They might simply be further ahead with creating several shallow fountains around the city. Evaporation could cool day temperatures, too.
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The warm air of a power plant leaves mostly through a huge cooling tower upwards consuming enormous quantities of water, the local effect is extra rainfall. Where cold air sticks to the ground.
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Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
"But..."
"Once and for all!"
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City sized stillsuit? (Score:1)
The Ice Must Flow
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The Ice Must Floe
I fixed your post for you.
This is very cool... (Score:3)
A smaller scale version of the idea has been kicking around in the renewable energy area for many years - see ice ponds [wikipedia.org].
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Smaller Scale Prescedent (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a story a few years back about a university (Scandinavia?) that spends the winter pumping water to freeze into a giant block on one part of campus, and then come summer, they just pump coolant through the block as it melts.
Pumping water is apparently much cheaper than traditional cooling.
Re:Smaller Scale Prescedent (Score:5, Interesting)
ice pond (Score:2, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pond
An ice pond is a large volume of ice or snow produced and stored in the winter to be used for cooling/air conditioning in the summer. The best known experiment is the 'Princeton ice pond' by Ted Taylor in 1981. He then convinced the Prudential Insurance Company to use a bigger pond to provide air conditioning for a larger building.
Two Birds With One Stone (Score:2)
You Damn Mongorians!!! (Score:1)
Testing to protect future permafrost melt? (Score:1)
If done on a large enough scale, could it help reduce the threat of methane gas escape from permafrost melt?
Or perhaps are they just testing to help sustain ice flow reliant communities?
Flood (Score:1)
They are building an artifical flooding. In spring the ice will block the water and create a flood (which will then wash aways the ice).
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That depends entirely on where they choose to put the ice block.
I don't know about you, but I suspect that the Mongolians are just as capable of thinking about this as you are, and working to avoid such problems. (It's even just about possible that one of them reads Slashdot, and is striking their forehead and saying "Doh!" at this very moment.)
Acclimatisation (Score:1)
I have lived several years in Canary Islands and Seville with up to 45 C and several years in Poland and Germany with down to - 30 C. After about 3 month your body gets used to the temperature and everything is OK, but during that acclimatisation period for example I was sweating when it was cold or felt terrible with anything over 20 degrees after getting used to cold weather.
Siberia is just next door (Score:1)