*In my last blog post, I highlighted some
of my research for Oceania: The
Underwater City. It covered bathymetry, underwater submersibles and
structures, ROVs, and the deep sea. If you missed it, you can read it here.
As I stated in my last post, NASA gave me some of the
best information needed to make my novel as realistic as possible. In addition
to the research I obtained from NASA’s website, I also looked into hydraulics,
future predictions of global climate change, sea ice melt, how solar panels
work, and even firsthand accounts of expeditions to the ocean floor. In this
second research installment, I’ll be covering a bit of each, starting with how
waste and water are treated.
Waste
and Water Treatment
The best information I read about how to re-use water,
air, and treat waste was from my research on the ISS. Any liquid added to the
air from breathing, perspiration, or anything else is condensed and returned to
the general water supply. And yes, it does include urine. On the ISS, urine,
water from oral hygiene, hand washing, and humidity in the air are all used.
Due to the fact that distilling seawater takes a lot of energy and doing so for
millions of people could become a problem, I treated
Oceania as a space station in the way that water should be recycled and never
taken for granted. Just like on the ISS, the atmosphere of Oceania has to be
regulated at a certain pressure, temperature, and humidity.
As far as waste treatment goes, the 2004 article I
read on the NASA site I found stated that all the human waste was returned to
Earth. Well, for Oceania that wouldn’t be possible and I had already come up with a bacteria that could not only eat
the waste, but also give off energy in the process. However, I was excited to
find out from the NASA article that a real such bacterium does exist, which I
explained all about in my blog post on the 20th of January. If you
haven’t read it yet, you can read it here.
If you’re interested in reading more about waste and
water treatment on the ISS, check out these links:
Hydraulics
Not knowing much about hydraulics, but knowing that
the city would have need of them, I looked into hydraulic systems. I found out
that water is rarely used as hydraulic fluid because of corrosion and
turbulence. Petroleum oil is used to power today’s hydraulic systems, which
would not be possible for a green city in a world post-oil. Water would be a
renewable source for the city and is more energy efficient than oil, so I
wanted it to be used. I discovered an article about a lawn mower that students
at Purdue University made. In order to work, the systems would have to be perfectly
engineered for water. Although it seems unlikely to happen in the near future,
I went with it.
If you’re interested in reading about the lawn mower
or about hydraulics, you can check out the following two links:
Sea
Ice Melting and the Above World in 2276
After determining how the city of Oceania would work
and run, I wanted to get a feel for the world that Allie would be coming from. I
read various articles on the predictions of the effects of climate change in
the next 200 plus years. I took anything and everything into account to build
the world of the Land Dwellers. Of course, not every prediction was the same,
so I paid attention to where they overlapped and even did some math to find the
average change in temperature or sea level rises.
As for the new level of the oceans, I’d learned about
the potential catastrophic rise in sea levels through a class I’d taken on
Environmental Science and by reading National Geographic. I used their handy
map in their September 2013 issue to find out where Allie could be from that
would be near the ocean. For San Francisco, I found a map that showed what San
Francisco would look like if all the ice caps
melted. In the end, I decided to exaggerate the projections of ice melt by the
year 2276. It’s highly unlikely that the sea levels will rise 100 feet in the
next 260 years, but who knows what the future will hold.
If you’d like to see the world map if all the ice melted
from National Geographic, you can click here:
Firsthand
Accounts
Since I’ve never been one of the lucky few to go in a
submersible to the bottom of the ocean floor, I wanted to read someone’s firsthand account. I’d seen the documentary
Deepsea Challenge, and even though it was helpful, it still wasn’t good enough
for my novel’s purpose. Although, if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly
recommend it. Anyway, I found some articles in National Geographic from two
people who’d traveled to the ocean floor in the 1950s. The two men were Jacques
Cousteau and Georges S. Houot. The only problem was that both didn’t go as deep
as the city. However, between the Deepsea Challenge documentary and the
firsthand accounts from the ‘50s, I got an idea of what Allie might be feeling
as she’s alone surrounded by blackness in the bathypelagic zone.
If you’re interested in reading the articles from the
1950s, you’d have to get access to National Geographic’s digital archives or
have The Complete National Geographic on your computer. The one with Jacques
Cousteau is in the July 1954 issue, pages 66-79. There were two from Georges S.
Houot that I read and they were in the same issue as the Jacques Cousteau one
(pages 80-86) and in the May 1958 issue, pages 714-731.
Solar
Panels and Additional Research
Another topic that I researched included how solar
panels work. In the end, it wound up being a lot of information useless for my
purposes, but now I know a lot about solar panels that I didn’t know before!
The same goes for how materials are recycled. I looked into what could and
couldn’t be recycled as well as what it takes to recycle materials. Most of it
didn’t make it into the novel, but I’m more knowledgeable for it. At the least, they helped me to
describe a few of the scenes with Dylan and Allie in the city.
In addition to all of the above, I even researched
small things that I’m sure most of you never even considered such as the time
of the attack on Fort Sumter and the phase of the moon in the sky that early
morning, the exact pressure at both 10,500ft (the depth of the apex of
Oceania’s dome) and 12,000ft (the base of the city). I used paintings of the
signing of the Declaration of Independence to describe the scene and images of
the real Declaration of Independence itself to describe how the title was
written. There are more topics I researched, but it would take longer than it
took you to read the book to describe them.
Conclusion
During my research, I considered the issues that
currently impede ocean colonization and realistically tried to reason what
could be invented by 2276. To make Oceania as believable as possible, I came up
with inventions to fill the holes in our current knowledge. Some of them may
exist someday, others may not. In the end, I came up with several of my own
inventions to compensate for the gaps in technology. All in all, I spent weeks’
worth of research and I loved every moment of it. There are so many amazing things to discover and learn about in our
world. So, if you have the time and the desire, look up some of the research
links mentioned above. Every bit of it is fascinating (at least to me anyway).
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and if you
have any comments, you can leave them here on my blog or email me directly at elizataye@gmail.com.
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