Tides are caused by gravity pulling water from one part of the Earth to another, so you'd need to link your sea to the world's big bodies of water to do that. And you'd need a big link to the oceans to get large tides; even a large sea such as the Mediterranean only has small tides because it's almost cut-off.
When I envision your navigable lake I think of…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_TiticacaAnd I would use a proven method of the earth collapsing after a magma shift to create a large envelope to hold it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera
Yeow! Imagine them literally marching through Hell. I like the idea of collapse, like a cenote or underground cavity. Sedimentary formations can be fractured or liquefied by lesser strikes. I have a vision of a Class 3 hit vaporizing the salt at GSL and causing rain to flood the Southwest. How about our overuse of SW aquifers causing a widespread collapse? Irony is our friend. I know there's supposed to be some kind of cavity re-forming under Death Valley, but any volcanic activity is absolutely out of the question. They have enough to face. Maybe some kind of further sinking in the region. I have to research the geology, but not get carried away. Hmmm
Maybe the impact cases an earthquake that drops California into the sea, then the water doesn't have as far to migrate?
There is evidence of activity from as little as 800 years ago around Ubehebe Crater. The trench area is along a slip-fault. The volcanic activity in the region is hydrovolcanic (steam explosion). The entire Southwest is being stretched apart and is still sinking - a continuing trend. There is 9000 feet of sedimentary deposits over the bedrock of Death Valley. The good news is that millions of light surface impacts would liquify the area and it would absorb the shock while flattening and subsuming a large region. This activity would not propagate eastward, due to solid geology. Thus, the sea can be larger and would be shallower, and the river systems in the surrounding area are SAVED! SLC, your ass is TOAST!
I would love a scenario of small Astereod hitting off the coast of southern california and causing a mini Tsunami . Due the depression of death valley all the sea water will be trap and you will transform death valley zone into another death sea like one in Israel and there will be multiple islands between this inland sea and the pacific ocean.
Couldn't we just hit San Feansisco and leave San Diego alone. It's a straight path from SanFran to Death Valley.
Aww. Tsunamis really need to be on the East Coast to work believably. But local disaster is the same for everywhere on the globe. I can't bring water through mountains, so Baja is so hosed. It's the end of the world as we know it!
I hate to break it to you but the only semi-plausible entry point for a fragmenting incursion that could produce a channel to the Mojave Basin area is going to be coming through the Wagner Basin through the Gulf of California, which is most likely going to disrupt at least part of the Colorado River. I jumped onto https://terrain.party/ and grabbed some heightmap data from this area and threw it into 3ds Max real quick. I thought this would only take about twenty minutes but here I am thirty minutes later. Anyway, below is a possible fragmenting impact scenario I whipped up that could produce a channel to the desired area. I didn't extend the terrain past the Salton Sea because Terrain Party only lets me grab 60 km chunks at a time and after a dozen samples I kind of gave up on taking it further . Anyway, top left shows the area of impact in question from Google Earth. The top right image shows my heightmap data in Max. The water levels are a bit funky because I hacked in a simple water plane rather than actually filling in the lower elevations like they would naturally occur but I think it's close enough to convey the idea. The bottom left is the selection mask for my proposed impact field, which would overlay on top of the terrain. The bottom right is the resulting inlet into your inland sea. You'd probably want to extend the impact field just a bit northwest of the Salton Sea to get the full connectivity you're looking for but I think you get the idea. After looking at Google Earth and the raw height data this appears to be the most plausible point of entry. However, as others have mentioned if something like this actually happened this would be an extinction level event. However as this is fiction I'm sure you won't mind hand-waving some creative justifications for this . Hope this helps. I just realized I can't embed images from my computer drive in this post. I'm uploading the image as an attachment instead. Edit: I just added another version with smaller impact fragments (still using the same impact pattern), which yields a little more interest in the resulting coastline.
Yes, my original 'evil plan' was to bring water in from Sea of Corteth. It turns out that bedrock is much lower than sediment and alluvium. My millions of small impacts will liquify the area all the way through Salt Lake, and plenty of water will fill as large an area as I want. I walked the area in Google Earth until my tablet overheated! It turns out the Colorado River is not necessarily at risk. So, I claim the right of Suspension of Plausablilty It seems the best approach would be to have scene one describe what already happened, then piece the event together. Thoughts?
I'd buy this depending on how you have it set up. Looks like you've already done a bit of research on this and after more thoroughly reading every response in the entire thread I think I have a better idea of what you're trying to achieve. My initial impression was that you were pretty focused on only one possible event type that could produce the effect you're looking for. Also, I think we're both visualizing the same end result, which is a channel that could open up to a more expansive inland sea once it hits the lower and more open regions of the Mojave Basin. In my renders I was only showing the connective channel that would lead to the larger inland see in the basin because that seemed to be the most important element to figure out. The only thing I'm not sure you're going to be able to solve convincingly is the notion of large tides if that's important to you. Any time you have a protected sea or sound you're not going to get very strong tides unless you're at the poles. I actually had to create an inland sea for a post-modern setting in a video game I worked on, which is actually about to be released in the near future. The levels in the game take place in a newly built but abandoned urban zone built on the edge of the sea. The game is pretty ambiguous about the actual location and never specifies where the city is located but the destination is based on the Sutter Buttes, which would lie at the north end of an inland sea in the Sacramento Valley. One thing I really like about the geographic location your suggesting is that it has more interesting topology than something like the Sacramento Valley, which is really flat and doesn't have a lot of definition to it.
Yes, tides are not as important as storms. I had a notion of using TBMs to create a waterway/tidal generator system between LA and Mojave (without locks) to replace the destroyed Interstates 40, 10, 15, and 8. A 21st century Panama Canal. I wonder how many would be required for a container ship!
The cool thing about a canal system like the one you're describing is that large portions of it would be tunnels beneath the mountainous regions in between. I don't think there are currently any TBM's that could create a channel/tunnel big enough for container ships but I could easily imagine larger versions in the future or employing a fleet of them to get the job done. After all this is fiction. I thought this idea you have is kind of interesting so I took the liberty of mocking up a version of what one of these canal tunnels might look like entering a mountain range. I already had a 3d whiteboard available that I sketched out for a work, which I'm pretty sure will never get used now so it wasn't too difficult to modify to show the concept. The images are crude but hopefully it conveys the idea. The little red dots are cars for scale and I threw in a bridge to help with this as well. I'm still not sure if this is big enough if you want container ships passing by each other in opposite directions. I guess it depends on their size class. I'm interested to see what comes of this story you're working on. Best of luck.
Very cool. I was going to use Minecraft to model it! LOL I had a spartan vision of four (Boston style) TBMs abreast cutting the upper, then the lower tier, but it might be four tiers before adequate depth. Perhaps a conveyor model would serve better. It does require a heavy rail line, regardless. Maybe even an underwater 'Hog' line that pulled barges through? There's no automobiles ever again after the shard strike.
