Drowning the world?

[olelia]

So if a character/villian made/bought 10 decanters of endless waters give or take and turned them on geyser mode and threw them into the ocean...would pumping 4320000 a day into the ocean have any noticeable effect over time? If yes then how fast would it be...if no...then how much would it take to actually have an effect.

[Solo]

It'd take a few years, and all your cleverness would be undone by a Sphere of Annihilation.

[Emperor Tippy]

What time period are we talking about?

Over several thousand years it would most assuredly have an impact. Over a year or 2, it depends on the world.

[XiaoTie]

It depends mostly on the size of the world and/or the oceans on said world. But on average I think it would take a very long time to cover a world with water.

[bosssmiley]

Nekocide answer:
1 cubic mile = 1.10111714 × 10^12 US gallons
The volume of the Earth's oceans is approximately 3.28 × 10^8 cubic miles.
Do the math. :smallwink:

GM's answer:
The gods/elemental lords/djinn/powers that be have dealt with that kind of prankery since the most ancient days (1st Ed.). Measures are in place. Shame about that portal to the Plane of Water that opened up on the other side of the world to maintain the balance, eh? :smallwink:

[kamikasei]

It would take about 10,100 years to raise the sea level of earth by one meter.

This is based on some abuse of Google's calculator function. I didn't double check as I went so there may be a hideous error in there. But if you take 3,000 gallons per minute and render that in cubic kilometers per day, then take the surface area of the earth in km^2 and divide by 1000 to get an approximate volume of a one-meter-deep layer of water covering the planet... that's what you get. Of course that's actually to give you a uniform one-meter covering over the entire planet, which may be overkill.

[Diego]

To first order, no.

Using numbers for Earth, and approximating the whole thing as covered by water, then a single decanter would raise the water level by 1 nanometer per year.... or that it would take 1 billion years to raise the water level by 1 meter.

1 decanter - 30 gallon/rd = 5 gallons/second = 40 lb/second = 18 kg/s = 0.018 m^3/s
Surface area of the earth is 4*PI*R^2. Using 6.4*10^6 m for radius of Earth.
dVolume/dt=A*dR/dt.

A=5.14*10^14 m^2
dR/dt=3.5*10^(-17)m/s ~ 1*10^-9 m/yr

If you want more decanters, a smaller planet, or less surface area of water that you are raising, the math is pretty trivial.

[Gig_Complex]

Well 1 Gallon is roughly 3.785 Liters so 30 Gallons is roughly 113.55 Liters every six seconds, there are 86,400 seconds every day which comes to 14,400 rounds a day which is 1,635,120 liters a day which I can tell you probably already know.

1 Liter is equal to .0001 Cubic Meters so that means roughly 163.512 Cubic Meters will be filled every day by one Decanter so for ten Decanters it would fill on a daily basis 1635.12 Cubic meters which comes to 596818.8 Cubic Meters every year.

For a comparison, Lake Michigan has an estimated volume of 4,920 Cubic Kilometers where as the ten decanters are producing 596.8818 Cubic Kilometers so you are filling roughly 2% of Lake Michigan a year.

Edit: So in order to make a difference you're going to need a lot more Decanters to have an effect by the end of the year, like a total of 500 or so.

Nother Edit: You'd be better off opening a portal to the elemental plane of water above sea level/whatever level you want to flood.

[UglyPanda]

I'd like to think when it gets to the point where the planet starts to flood that decanters in other universes start draining your water.

A level twenty character can afford up to 84 decanters if they were truly insane, but that won't work anywhere near quickly enough.