Sea Tanks – Austin Bunton Designs

Our city’s aquarium has tanks large enough to be called little seas.

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Table of Contents:

Introduction
Vocabulary
Dimensions
Viewing Areas
Advisory
Assignments; Tanks/Sections Directory
Novels Excerpt
Location & Overall (Images Begin)
Design
The Highway Tunnel Concept
The Window-walls
Giant Tank 1: Whales & Plankton
Giant Tank 2: Squids
Giant Tank 3: Dolphins & Porpoises
Giant Tank 4: Turtles
Large Tank 1: Stingrays & Manta-rays
Large Tank 2: Fish
Lion Fish
Large Tank 3: Jellyfish
Large Tank 4: Sea-snakes
Large Tank 5: Anemones, Crabs, Lobsters, & Urchins
2023 Update: 2022 Scale-model in Minecraft
2023 October/+ Updates

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Introduction:

Lake-sized aquarium sections are what you will find here. These titanic-sized aquariums allow sea creatures up to the size of whales and giant squid enough room to swim for almost 1 full mile back and forth; the largest ‘lap pools’ in the world. This construct is sometimes called the Oceanarium, and includes a mile-long tunnel allowing 16 lanes of superhighway (G.A.H.) traffic to drive right through its sea-bed.

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Vocabulary:

Ponds are the 2nd smallest body of water; a puddle is the smallest. All the water in a pond is in the photic zone, meaning ponds are shallow enough to allow sunlight to reach the bottom. A pond is a body of water less than 0.5 acres (<2,023.43 square meters) in surface-area, or less than 20 feet (6.096 meters) in depth.

Lakes are normally much deeper than ponds and have a larger surface area. Not all the surface/sunlight reaches the bottom of a lake. A lake is defined as a body of water bigger than 1 acre (4,046.86 m²).

one of the smallest lakes on Earth: Spring Hole, near Markham, Minnesota (1.2 acres; 4,856.23 m²)
largest freshwater lake on Earth: Lake Superior (31,700 mi²; 82,103,000,000 m²)
largest inland body of water on Earth: Caspian Sea (143,244 mi²; 371,000,000,000 m²)
deepest lake on Earth: Lake Baikal (5,387′; 1,700 m)

Seas are larger than lakes but smaller than oceans, and are usually located where the land and ocean meet. Typically, seas are partially enclosed by land. On Earth, the smallest sea is <5,000 square miles (<12,949.94 square kilometers).

smallest sea on Earth: Sea of Marmara (4,382 mi²; 11.350.000.000 m²)
largest sea on Earth: South China Sea (1,351,000 mi²; 3,500,000,000,000 m²)
deepest sea on Earth: Caribbean Sea (22,788′; 2,647 m)

The sea-tanks facility in our city/ies (meaning there is 1 sea-tanks facility in Inisfree, and 1 identical facility in each of our Inisfree-like cities) has a total surface-area of (3,432′ along its short side/s, x 3,828′ along its long side/s); that’s 13,137,696 square feet, which is = 301.6 acres (0.47125 square miles); ~300x larger than the minimum to be classified as a lake, but >9,298 smaller than the smallest Outlands sea. This makes it bigger than most lakes on Earth, though obviously much smaller than Earth’s largest lakes. We still refer to it as the sea-tanks, not lake-tanks, because it is wider and deeper than most lakes on Earth.

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Dimensions:

surface area = 13,137,696 square feet; 301.6 acres
width of each of its 4 sections: ~924′
spillway perimeter: ~66′ wide (from the edge of the sea-tanks outer-border… out to the surrounding ground-level terrain) –under which are plenty of our Silos Network turbo-ballasts which can easily handle any flood-sized spills (though none have occurred)
depth = 1,056′ along the deep ends of its 4 sections, and 126′ along the shallow ends of those sections (with at least 100′ being below ground-level)

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Viewing Areas:

There are four distinct viewing areas from which guests may enjoy the sights of these hundreds of marine species as if they were on the bottom of the clearest, brightest oceans and seas:

topside catwalks (over the border and dividing walls)
ground-level transparent-metal window-walls (~6 stories tall, all the way around; where this facility rises up over the terrain)
drive-through aquarium tunnel (for the GAH; imagine riding the open-air trolley through this!)
bottom-side pedestrian tunnels (on the ‘ocean bed’; the floor of these ‘sea-tanks’) –and these are indestructible; they can’t crack under any pressure, and are constantly monitored by our city’s main supercomputer, as well as ICVs always on patrol in them

As of 2021, each of the four sections now has one boats-and-subs dock at its shallow end; you can take a fishing-sized boat out on the surface for whale-watching, or a mini-sub down to/past the GAH tube.

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Advisory:

While SCUBA-diving is a daily occurrence in SCUBA City, it is almost completely forbidden in these Sea-tanks. The sea creatures here are treated as people and, thereby, granted personal space which is protected by Inisfreean law enforcement personnel who patrol this facility while cloaked in their Storm Trooper suits.

You have to have permission from them to get in the water here, and that permission is almost never granted, as these tanks are a place of refuge, rest, and recovery for the aquatic people who make use of them. This facility is not for meeting them, socializing, or play.

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Assignments:

Like the zoo, this facility has paddocks;

pad·dock

/ˈpadək/

noun

noun: paddock; plural noun: paddocks

a small field or enclosure, usually where horses are kept or exercised

Tanks (Sections) Directory:

Giant (Deep) Tank 1: Whales & Plankton
Giant (Deep) Tank 2: Squids
Giant (Deep) Tank 3: Dolphins & Porpoises
Giant (Deep) Tank 4: Turtles (vs. tortoises, which are on land)
Large (Intermediate Depth) Tank 1: Stingrays & Manta-rays
Large (Intermediate Depth) Tank 2: Fish
Large (Intermediate Depth) Tank 3: Jellyfish
Large (Intermediate Depth) Tank 4: Sea-snakes
Large Tank 5: Anemones, Crabs, Lobsters, & Urchins

* Algae (seaweeds) and vast coral reefs are on the bottom of all of these sea-tanks.

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Novels Excerpt:

All 16 lanes of the Inisfreean super-highway began to dip down into a very wide circular opening in the meadow terrain, and their convoy maintained its heading straight ahead… until they were many stories underground and leveling out. Then the overhead and surrounding walls turned out not to be a normal opaque tunnel, but a transparent tube for the whole highway to pass through… deep within a lake-sized aquarium full of active sea life, such as dolphins and whales. There were whales swimming right overhead, and schools of fish and mammals in multiple directions.

The hologram in their limo’ showed where they were on the city’s map, heading from the airport to the welcoming square, and the co-driver in the front passenger seat musically spoke through the open window to Lucifera, explaining that strong materials such as transparent aluminum had been used to make the big highway-enclosing see-through tunnel. The idea was to let everyone in their city see some of what the mermaids and other ocean-going peoples saw, that they might fall in love with it and better understand why the Inisfreeans took keeping the oceans perfectly clean so seriously. After one mile of this underwater highway view, their convoy took the slope back up to the surface, where the meadows and perimeter wall came back into view.

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Location & Overall: