Architect Jakob Tigges developed the plan for the Berg, a 1,000 meter man-made mountain that would sit on the site of Tempelhof. Tigges believes that building the mountain would attract tourist skiers, and add green spaces and wildlife to the city. He doesn't outline what the ecological impact of building such a massive structure would be, but Inhabitat notes that the Berg has captured a lot of people's imaginations. Several German outlets have republished Tigges' mountainous plans.

The Berg [via Inhabitat]

Luzhkov's plan is to spray clouds with a chemical mist — made of cement powder, dry ice, or silver iodide — before they reach the city, causing the clouds to dump their snow loads on the surrounding suburbs. The advantages, he claims, are numerous: Moscow residents won't have to contend with congested streets, the agricultural regions will receive more precipitation, and the whole project is considerably less expensive than the current cost of clearing Moscow's streets.

The plan is only to keep blizzards out and allow smaller snowfalls to occur inside the city, but environmentalists aren't pleased with the project's rapid approval by the City Council. Also less than thrilled are the residents of Moscow's suburbs, who will now be enjoying all the snow that Moscow turns away.

This is hardly Moscow's first foray into climate hacking. Each year on Victory Day and City Day, Moscow pays the air force to prevent rain falling on the city's celebrations. And several years ago, Luzhkov spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate other Central Asian regions, a plan that met with limited success.

[Yahoo! News]

In next month's issue of Climate Change, cell biologist Leonard Ornstein of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and David Rind and Igor Aleinov of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies outline their plan to plant a forest in the Sahara Desert. They propose desalinating seawater from the desert's nearby oceans, and using aquaducts and pumps to bring it inland. The idea is to plant Eucalyptus Grandis, which survives well in heat, which would be watered using drip irrigation. The trio claim the trees would lower the Sahara's temperature by up to 8°C Celsius in some areas, bring clouds to reflect the sun's rays back into space, and capture eight billion tons of carbon each year.

But the plan is not without its downsides. Aside from the $2 trillion a year price tag, the forest would also likely prevent iron-rich dust from the sands from blowing into the Atlantic Ocean, iron that nourishes marine life. And the increased moisture could bring a plague of locusts down on not just the Sahara, but the rest of Africa as well.

Forest a Desert, Cool the World [ScienceNOW via Popular Science]

One big reason why the Earth isn't much warmer already is the fact that the planet has the ability to shed carbon dioxide, say scientists Joseph Kirschvink, Yuk Yung, King-Fai Li and Kaveh Pahlevan. But the bad news is, the planet has nearly exhausted its ability to shed carbon dioxide, hence the risk of cataclysmic overheating. So we need another way to cool the planet, and scientists say the best way is to reduce the atmospheric pressure by eliminating nitrogen from the amosphere.

Yung and Li tell Scientific Blogging:

In the "blanket" analogy for greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide would be represented by the cotton fibers making up the blanket. "The cotton weave may have holes, which allow heat to leak out," explains Li, the lead author of the paper.

"The size of the holes is controlled by pressure," Yung says. "Squeeze the blanket," by increasing the atmospheric pressure, "and the holes become smaller, so less heat can escape. With less pressure, the holes become larger, and more heat can escape," he says, helping the planet to shed the extra heat generated by a more luminous sun.

Nitrogen, after all, makes up the vast proportion of the Earth's atmosphere, so the elimination of nitrogen would help the Earth regulate its surface temperature.

And the best part is that we're already doing it!

Strikingly, no external influence would be necessary to take nitrogen out of the air, the scientists say. Instead, the biosphere itself would accomplish this, because nitrogen is incorporated into the cells of organisms as they grow, and is buried with them when they die.

Since nitrogen is bonded to other elements in the body, when organisms (like humans) die, it isn't released back into the atmosphere. Thus, the more humans are born and then die, the better off it is for global warming, supposedly.

The scientists speculate that by continuing to overpopulate the Earth and then killing one another off, we could extend the life of the Earth by up to 1.3 billion years, which might allow us to make contact with other life forms who could teach us how not to overpopulate the Earth and keep killing each other.

Human Presence May Be Increasing The Lifespan Of Earth [Scientific Blogging]

[Image via "An Inconvenient Truth"]

1) Earthquake Towers

In 2005, scientists discovered that a new skyscraper in Taiwan might be causing earthquakes. Called Taipei 101, it was temporarily the tallest building in the world, before towers like the Al Burj were anything but rumors. "At more than 500 metres," we read back then, "Taipei 101 in Taiwan is the world's tallest building. But now geologists fear that its size and weight may have transformed a stable area into one susceptible to earthquake activity."

The building is so heavy, exerting such "exceptional downward stress" on the earth beneath it, that it might have "reopened" an ancient tectonic fault. If true, this discovery "may have far-reaching implications for the construction of other buildings and man-made megastructures."

At the very least, we should ask: What would happen if we built more of them? Could we build fourteen of these things in San Francisco, in an act of long-term tectonic warfare, and destroy the whole city within a decade?

Conversely, could we build just the right number of these, at just the right spots, throughout the greater Los Angeles basin and thus nail the tectonic plates in place — weighing southern California down and zipping the San Andreas Fault up tight? It'd be seismic acupuncture, a new form of therapy against continental drift. Perhaps one gigantic tower exactly placed in outer Tokyo could make the whole Pacific Rim freeze up. That is, till a rogue group of German terrorists arrives and wreaks havoc... Directed by John McTiernan. It's geology as a military campaign, enacted through architectural design.

2) Tectonic Warfare

In the wildly under-appreciated 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill, Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) likes to ride boats with Grace Jones and grin a lot. He likes blimps and he has blonde hair. He has a plan. He wants to blow up the San Andreas fault, cause some sort of catastrophic earthquake, and thus flood Silicon Valley. Which is just a bunch of car dealerships and seafood restaurants, in any case. But this flood will make Zorin's own microchip business go through the roof... or something. He'll then rule the planet.

Needless to say, Zorin's plan fails. Bond makes it with a geologist and the world goes back to sleep. But the central idea is worth pursuing: Could we bomb faultlines all over the earth, causing earthquakes? If not, why not? I'm reminded of a TV show I watched last weekend, about Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens is supposedly going to erupt any year now — but today it just sits there, sort of steaming. It's bit boring, frankly. So why don't we bomb it? Let's see what that thing is capable of! Unmanned drones from a nearby air base climb to 25,000 feet. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. They open fire. They hack the earth, in other words, applying the landscape theories of Max Zorin. Think of it as Zorinism: tectonic warfare.

3) Igneous Printheads

Inkjet printers require small, spongy reservoirs of liquid ink to operate. But there are alternatives to ink.
There is magma.

A magma chamber is a "reservoir of molten rock material beneath the earth's surface." It "is connected to the earth's surface by a vent." So what if we took control of the vent? What if we could print new landforms, selectively directing and solidifying liquid rock where we want? Could we attach a kind of igneous printhead, guiding magma into new forms? I'm thinking here of the concrete-printing machines of Behrokh Khoshnevis, or even just 3D printing. In other words, could we rapid-prototype experimental mountain forms, attaching igneous printheads to reservoirs of liquid rock and printing landscapes on the earth above?

4) Colored Magma

Could we dye these magmatic streams using metals - injecting huge amounts of copper, or iron, into a domesticated magma well, extruding colored rocks only a few days later? And could we print cathedrals with it, spraying their vaults and buttresses into place with a deep liquid mixture of green and red?

5) Slow Sculpture

In his novel Iron Council, China Miéville proposes something called slow sculpture. Miéville describes an artist who creates literally geological works of art on a time scale that exceeds any individual human life.

Huge sedimentary stones... each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

And what long-term geological hacks might have been left for us someday to discover?

[Note: The last two photos were taken by Paraflyer]