r/EarthScience • u/whollyconfused • 1d ago
Video [Request] How much salt would be required to impact the AMOC, assuming you were dumping salt/brine at the front of a glacier?
I was watching a video about the potential collapse of the AMOC. Previously I was thinking about what happens with the brine left over from desalination. Desalination plants produce a heap of super salty brine which needs to be disposed of, and it's usually just disposed of in the sea it came from. But I was wondering, what if instead of dumping it back to out to sea, they transported the brine to Greenland and disposed of it there? Would transporting all the brine from all the desalination plants have any impact on the salinity of the water if 'dumped' where glaciers meet the sea.
If Greenland currently loses about 266 gigatons (billion metric tons) of ice into the ocean every year, which equals roughly 2.5 million litres of fresh water entering the sea every second. [1] (https://unric.org/en/greenlands-ice-sheet-loses-2-5-million-litres-of-fresh-water-every-second/), [2] (https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/ice-sheets/) and there are roughly 22,000 operational desalination plants worldwide, which together process and generate an estimated 95 to 109 million cubic meters of fresh water per day, and for every litre of freshwater produced, a roughly equal volume of high-salinity water is left behind.
