Draining and Storing Water to gain more Land?

What about draining water from the oceans and storing it elsewhere to gain more land? What about trapping water in the form of ice, for instance? But how could one practically do this?

(Microsoft Media)

Optimistically speaking, one might say, let's install something, much like water reservoirs for drinking water, that holds water as ice in huge blocks or mountains, icebergs, so that the oceans' water levels can drop.

Or let's secure the existing land-based ice masses of places like Antarctica and Greenland, and make these ice masses grow further by keeping them cold enough for rain to top them up. But then, what if the installations that freeze and hold all this frozen water together lose the energy to keep it all cold enough to remain solid?

That doesn't sound overly reassuring, or does it? Though the energy could in fact be taken from the sun via an array of solar panels. Yet still these, too, could fail, or couldn't they. Or could the whole system be so failsafe that it could never stop working in its entirety while the faulty parts are being attended to, repaired, maintained, overhauled? Enormous inundations would be the consequence of such a system failing completely.

(Microsoft Media)

Or what about digging enormous cavities and heaping up mountains with the soil and rock that has to be removed for this purpose? Surely, there's space somewhere for cavities and mountains, and if that is in the world's deserts, these mountains would be made of sand, oops.

If this worked, it would result in additional surface to do something with, such as growing vegetables and fruit, or to construct buildings, much like Singapore's and Hong Kong's land reclamations, and the huge hollow spaces could then store surplus water, which would have to be desalinated first, of course, and that could make the world's ocean levels fall. But is this feasible?

There's a bit of "lateral thinking". And this isn't the end of it. The six-thinking-hat approach gives us optimism, drive and creativity, but also the tool of cautious criticism, such as taking into consideration the desalinity point or the consistency of sand, in particular when it's heaped up...

(Microsoft Media)

And it's not the ultimate solution to work against climate change, though it may counter the rising sea levels to some extent, yet it won't do anything about the mess resulting from the changing climate such as a shift in climate zones, rising temperatures and stronger winds, the oceans' warming etc. And land gained from displacing seawater would be under constant threat from further melting ice in places that are not artificially cooled.

It's a complex scenario, but with a bit of creativity one might be able to get somewhere...