Hydrospheric mesh

This is about as of time of writing (2025) still purely hypothetical
planetary scale mesh networks spanning all parts of Earths hydrosphere.
Much like the idea of atmospheric meshes but potentially easier due to
lower overall density than air not being a requirement here.

Wear and tear

The challenge

Open ocean is one of the harshest environments for technological artifacts with …

• huge wave causing high forces and many cycles of load quickly,
• thunderstorms causing gist of corrosive salt water and lightning.
• aggressive biology like barnacles forming crusts

Current (2015) technology has a hard time putting anything of larger scale there
such that it will survive for a very long time without maintenance.

• Highly alloyed steel (like adding a lot of chromium) is too expensive for larger scales.
• Metal coated and painted steel has limited lifetime.
• Iron rebared concrete has limited lifetime as the rebar rusts eventually.
• Plastic polymers UV bleach and crumble to micro and nanoplastics.
• Geopolymers and basalt rebar might work for very long times but they are still more expensive than other means.
  And it is only one single material class.
• Wood rots.

Gem-gum-tech resilience to conditions on the high seas

Gemstone based metamaterials being based on fully oxidized like sapphire
or highly unreactive like diamond will not corrode from exposure to salt water and air.

Integrates electrically conductive and UV reflective materials such as titanium nonmetallides
can can keep out UV for deeper more UV sensitive structures.

Highly conductive nanotube bundle conductors may capture and neutralize lightning strikes.

Emulated elasticity atop crystolecule superelasticity makes for extremely low rate of wear if any at all.

Mokel run in reverse can as generators and can convert all the harsh wave kneading motion to energy. This energy can by used …

• to counteract drift and stetching motion thereby preventing forces and tensions adding up to levels that no physical material could withstand
• for automated active repair for the little damage that actually does accumulate, by one way or another

Transport

Ships (containerships, oiltankers, …) have a fundamental efficiency problem.

• They need to push the water in front of them apart to move through.
• They need to plow through the waves and can't go in a perfectly straight line.

Now imagine we could actually build sort of roads on the water for our ships.
Roads that took care of pushing the water aside in advance. Once and for all.
The initial picture coming to mind of ships with thousands of wheels added on their hull
rolling through a humongous size swimming U shaped groove water streets that are thousands of kilometers long
is obviously silly and naive (though quite funny) but a staring point to find an actual perhaps sensible system.

Scale of the ship-street:
First in most cases the scale can be shrunk to say e.g. the scale of a standard container or a bus/train.
For the global microcomponent redistribution system even thinner.
But for that a deep sea cable might be better than a floating one.

Waves for propulsion, directly as motion or indirectly as wave energy:
Up on the water surface one has still the problem of the waves to deal with.
Using the waves motion directly and sort of ratcheting along is an option.
But weather dependent and inconvenient for passenger transport.
Better to convert the wave energy to electrical or chemical or another form of energy
and use it to drive the cargo more noncontinuous.

Slightly under the waves:
The circular wave motion of the water decreases with depth.
So going slightly submarine is likely a good choice.
A surface part could be connected with an undersea part.
Internal active wave motion compensation in the lower part could make for
an effectively perfectly straight track thus
allowing for very high speed transport.
The external surface of the subsurface part would still move with the water as
internal bearings can have much lower friction than the friction due to contact with water.

Crossings:
Solutions for conventional ships crossing will be needed for on water surface parts.

Deep sea:
Transport on the deep sea floor would be an alternate possibility.
But likely with more quantity of material effort.
Gem-gum materials with enough thickness could reliably withstand
the extreme pressures in the typical ~4000m depth.
Without airlocks air pressure would rise to about 2atm,
(rule of thumb: half air pressure every 5.5km up)
this would be tolerable by human passengers but likely not healthy in long time exposure.
Also the temperature would rise from adiabatic compression.
Then making a nigh vacuum would make for more efficient high speed travel.

Deep sea research

Much like gem-gum-tec based non-invasive observation access for nature reserves
The deep sea floor could be made highly accessible fro observation and research too.
(Perhaps giving more awareness to the need for protection of so far non visible parts of our environment too.)
Here though significant more design and material effort will be needed
for an appropriate extension of hydrospheric meshes.

Either gradually leading down the coast and continental shelf following the seabed.
Or the afore described near surface level meshes could at many points connect down vertically to deep sea floor meshes.
vertically or diagonally. Many options. Eventually crossing intermediate depth meshes.

Geoengineering

Hydrospheric meshes could tie in with distributed carbon sequestration.
making for a more stationary approach than e.g. the
mobile carbon dioxide collector buoys in the carbon capture buoy scenario
(See also: Mobile carbon dioxide collector)

Given enough meshes(an absurd amount from today's perspective)
And given enormous energy sources (e.g. extensive sea coverage with solar cells)
for better or worse ocean currents could eventually be influenced.
Muted or amplified.

Connection to other geoengineering meshes

(wiki-TODO: Add details.)

Related

• Geoengineering mesh