Keywords: floating island city, global warming, rising seas, composites, concrete, ANSYS, Pro-Engineer.

The paper presents a conceptual design for a floating island city for the first time. The authors believe that by the year 2050, floating islands will be used as a means of housing the rapidly growing population of the world, while other floating islands will be used for growing food. The paper shows that apart from providing extra space, the floating islands can produce enough energy to supply their needs and to sell the surplus energy to the mainland, and not to require environmentally un-friendly methods of producing energy. The authors found this particularly encouraging, because some 71% of the Earth's surface is covered in water. The paper shows that if these floating islands are not built, humankind is likely to suffer a disaster of biblical proportions. The authors believe that humankind must colonise the oceans and that if the scientist and the technologist 'are given the tools, they can finish the job'. In 1925, according to Attenborough [1], the world's population was about 2 billion, but according to the United Nations, in the year 2009, it grew to a staggering 6.8 billion; virtually quadrupling, in about a century. Moreover, the 'United Nations' estimates that by the year 2050, the world's population will grow to about 10.5 billion. Additionally, if the world's population quadruples during the next century, we will have a world population of about 28 billion. How are we going to house and feed such a large world population? The problem is worsened by the detrimental effects of global warming. Scientists estimate that the Arctic floating ice-pack will melt in from five to fifteen years from now. Now if the floating ice-pack melts, it will not cause a rise in sea levels, if thermal expansion is ignored; because according to Archimedes's principle, a floating ice-pack displaces its own mass of water. However, if the floating ice-pack melts, it will cause a darkening of the Arctic Ocean, so that the value of the Arctic Ocean's albedo will be decreased by circa 70%. This will cause the seas to warm up even faster, through positive feedback and cause the ice mountains on Greenland to melt. Now it must be realised that Greenland is the second largest island in the world; its surface area is nearly nine times of that of the United Kingdom and if the ice mountains on Greenland melt, there will be a rise in sea levels of about 6.7 m (22 ft.), possibly, by the turn of the present century. This will worsen the problem of housing and feeding the world's population. One way to house and feed a burgeoning world population, worsened by the concomitant loss of dry land due to climate change, will be to build floating island cities and farms, all over the world. It must be remembered that water covers some 71% of the Earth's surface, or nearly three times the Earth's dry land area; so it is common sense to colonise the oceans. In the present study, a conceptual design of a floating island city is presented. The design of this city is aided by the use of the well-known commercial computer packages, namely Pro-Engineer and the ANSYS finite element computer package.

1

D. Attenborough, "The One Show", BBC 1, May 13th, 2009.

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