In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/wells-are-getting-deeper-as-groundwater-gets-depleted/

by jseliger • 7 years ago

169 179 7 years ago

padseeker• 7 years ago

On the flipside the great lakes are nearly at an all time high. Maybe the growth in those places requiring deeper wells have exceeded what they can support?

yardie• 7 years ago

The Great Lakes sources their water from glaciers melting. Too little and too much of a thing it’s still worrying.

theluketaylor• 7 years ago

The great lakes watershed isn't within 1000 km of a glacier. It's a snowpack and rainfall watershed.

The great lakes were created by receding glaciers, but it's been more than 10,000 years since they were glacier fed.

omosubi• 7 years ago

Do you have a source for this? I thought they were sourced was almost all rainfall both directly into the lake and from the streams and rivers that surround them

knz• 7 years ago

The Great Lakes aren't exactly the same as pristine aquifers suitable for drinking water...

https://www.usgs.gov/news/widespread-plastic-pollution-found..., https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/the-great-... etc.

jxcl• 7 years ago

When some aquifers are drained, they take many thousands of years to replenish, a heavy rain season doesn't really help with these depleted aquifers.

Here's a great video on Cody'sLab that explains how confined aquifers work and why they take so long to replenish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4iCgxsZX4

madez• 7 years ago

It even shows why some aquifers may never replenish. The layer of the aquifer is not tightly compressed and can hold water. When the water is released and the layer starts to compress from the weight from above, its ability to hold water is permanently diminished.

aksss• 7 years ago

The sinkhole above it can hold houses though!

Haga• 7 years ago

Happens to Teheran and many Indian cities. Viewable via satellite.

Balgair• 7 years ago

Cody! I love that guy. His vids are so refreshingly insane and hackery. I'd suggest nearly all his vids.

That said, the guy seems like he has some psychological issues. I hope he gets the help that he deserves, if he isn't already.

Cody, if you are out there, you rock man! Keep being Cody!

romaaeterna3• 7 years ago

If this were actually a serious issue, we would be discussing NAWPA again for real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...

The original blueprint used nukes to dig the trenches, but conventional explosives work just fine.

ergothus• 7 years ago

If this were actually a serious issue, we would

I fail to see how the choice of response (or not) determines seriousness of the issue. We've seen plenty of people stick their head in the sand in the past.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 7 years ago

It also sounds like a false dichotomy.

SuoDuanDao• 7 years ago

Is that the origin of the villain's name in 'Tank Girl'?

halfeatenpie4• 7 years ago

Actual water resources researcher focusing on climate change here. My job is focused on what can we do to continue to deliver water to society under future scenarios (and what steps we can take to get there) from policy to infrastructure investments. The article doesn't present anything new for us but the problem is that the general public isn't informed.

While we're the oldest engineering discipline, remember that even until around the 80s people didn't think or know about groundwater contamination. They've always thought that sticking contaminated water back into the ground would filter it naturally like magic. In the late 80s more and more people started to understand that's not how it works. Even then, these policies and ideas are still in the process of being accepted in developing countries almost 40 years later and even then "what else can we do? My son needs water now and he could get hit by a car tomorrow so this is a problem I'll deal with later."

The problem (as the article states) is that the issue is so distributed. We're talking about traditionally individualized solutions for a problem that needs a more coordinated solution. However, noone is willing to pay for that or considers other investments as "more critical" than major water projects (also many environmental groups aren't as risk averse as water utilities). I mean the biggest cost in water isn't the actual product but the transportation costs. We have water, we just don't have enough funds to deliver them everywhere in a sustainable manner at a price that people are willing to pay.

NAWPA idea was conceived even before we understood our environment. It's the wrong solution. I mean even 10 years ago we had a landmark article that changed the paradigm of how we decide policy and build infrastructure[0]. I'd never take NAWPA for anything now than the "grandiose-ness of the 50s", especially since that was during a "water resources renaissance" in the United States where even crazy ideas were taken seriously.

[0] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/CLEE/Milly_2008_Science_S...

quotemstr6• 7 years ago

Why are so many water researchers opposed to letting the price of water vary and drive market-based conservation?

romaaeterna3• 7 years ago

I'm sure that your job is very wonderful, but the NAWPA post was not entirely serious, and I hope that a water resources researcher would realize that first of all. For one thing, it's not a municipal drinking water project, it's an irrigation project to deliver large amounts of water to (potential) cropland in the American Southwest.

It's really about (massively) increasing US (and therefore world) food production. If first world municipalities run out of water, people can always move. If the third world runs out of food due to price increases, they die in very large quantities. And I promise you, human beings will certainly decide to destroy a very great deal of habitat before letting a few billion people starve in the face of climate change.

downrightmike• 7 years ago

Any nukes proved too dirty to be feasible, which is why we never used them in this manner. There were a lot of good ideas that sounded good in the 60's, but they had no real idea how much of a pain contamination, cleanup and thousands of years of storage of that material would be. Then they finally did and these ideas went away.

cardamomo2• 7 years ago

For those interested in exploring the political and social consequences of this in a near-term (albeit fictional) world, I highly recommend reading "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi. From the Goodreads description:

In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, leg-breaker, assassin, and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her luxurious developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get dust.

scblock• 7 years ago

Bacigalupi's near-future fiction is all too believable.

et-al• 7 years ago

And if anyone prefers non-fiction, Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner describes the (completely fucked) water supply situation out in California.

hyperbovine• 7 years ago

One of my all-time favorite non-fiction books, perhaps even more topical today than it was when it came out in 1986. It's a shame that the author died in 2000 at the young age of 51; the book deserves a sequel or two.

cardamomo2• 7 years ago

Cadillac Desert figures prominently in the plot of Bacigalupi's novel.

avip4• 7 years ago

Or just read about Syria and Turkey.

srameshc• 7 years ago

The same phenomenon is happening is happening in China & India and probably many other parts of he world as well. As we become more a more affluent society, our on water consumption increases. We need to raise awareness at a global level about preserving and saving water.

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/28-000-riv...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rivers...

quotemstr6• 7 years ago

That, and build lots of desalination plants. We can engineer our way out of this problem without compromising our quality of life.

VBprogrammer4• 7 years ago

At what cost? Desalination is not cheap in terms of the energy it uses or even the environmental cost of what to do with the left over brine.

We can certainly be less wasteful at home. Flushing toilet waste with potable water and even to some extent using potable water to bath in are incredible wastes of a precious resource.

raincom• 7 years ago

desal may work for 10M people, as Israel has shown. That won't help 300M people in India, another 300M in China.

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

Why not just price water to reflect supply realities?

Why would anyone care about saving water when it's so dirt cheap? "Awareness" seems like a waste of time in comparison.

wrong_variable• 7 years ago

Being able to "price" something requires existence of a functional market.

Markets can only exist when contracts can be enforced.

Being able to enforce a contract requires monitoring and ability to issue fines, you also needs appropriate laws.

All of the above does not exist when it comes to ground water harvesting - especially in India and even in a police state like China.

r00fus3• 7 years ago

Does market economics work if there's no way to prevent the tragedy of the commons?

Amezarak• 7 years ago

A lot of people outside of cities have their own groundwater wells, which is at least part of what the article is talking about. How do you price water people are pulling directly from the ground with their own equipment?

dsfyu404ed4• 7 years ago

Because we as a society have decided that we are all better off if it's cheap enough that poor people can still use it on a whim. Of course this results in some people over-using but we think that's less of a problem.

plutonorm• 7 years ago

Great idea. Then when the air gets dirty we can just charge people for purified air.

beachy3• 7 years ago

Exactly. My father in law lives in a town that has no water metering (and usually, but not always, plenty of water). In the summer he puts his sprinklers in 2 or 3 times a day, even when dire warnings are issued about water consumption. Human behavior is all about the impact on the back pocket (particularly if you are a pensioner).

avip4• 7 years ago

Do you care about saving petrol?

yummypaint• 7 years ago

Doing so would probably make poor people die of dehydration as scarcity increases. Those with the means to drill their own wells will do so, especially if there is a strong commercial incentive. We already saw this play out in past years in california as individual humans faced onerous water restrictions while big agro continued to grow almonds using the same water supply. Bringing symmetry to regulations should be the first priority before any further burden is placed on individuals.

stunt• 7 years ago

It’s happening everywhere and one of the reasons is probably population. Earth was never crowded as it’s today.

blaser-waffle2• 7 years ago

Everybody is thinking it, but no one is saying it: "too many people".

I feel like that's why the apocalypse, post-apoc, and zombie movies are so popular. They catch that subconscious zeitgeist of loathing their neighbors and feeling like they're surrounded by the "NPC" meme.

jschwartzi• 7 years ago

When I was a kid, we owned a house out in a small farming community in western Washington State. One of the things we had to do is drill the well a solid 100 feet below the water table, because the upper 60 feet had measurable levels of fecal coliform bacteria. This was fairly rural. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile up the road, and we were surrounded by livestock pastures with cattle herds.

I would imagine the current owners of the property have had to re-drill the well at least once as population density in the area increased.

mjevans• 7 years ago

Lets stop wastefully watering lawns as a starting point. Some places are probably already doing that, but the use of native landscaping needs to spread further.

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

Don't forget - in a lot of places, you'll lose your home (to the HOA) if you _don't_ water your lawn.

panzagl• 7 years ago

In order to buy that home you signed a contract saying you would maintain your lawn. If you don't want to water there are other alternatives.

ccffph2• 7 years ago

well then why did you move in there, lol

Johnny555• 7 years ago

Federal, State or local laws can avoid that problem. Like the law that prohibits HOA's from preventing you from installing a TV antenna.

https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule

quotemstr6• 7 years ago

I like lawns. So do lots of other people. It's okay to expend resources on things that aren't bare essentials. The price mechanism, not social control, is what allows for efficient allocation of scarce resources. Let people who want to pay for the water water their lawns.

chewz4• 7 years ago

Lawns in US take 41 million acres. That figure makes lawn the most widespread plant under irrigation in the contiguous US.

https://healthylandethic.com/2013/11/17/why-prairies-matter-...

Pretty wasteful use of limited resource - water.

ip268• 7 years ago

Yes, although for that to work water needs to be priced differently from today.

driverdan3• 7 years ago

You're right but water is not priced properly. Everything above the minimum requirement to survive should be at least 10x more expensive.

jcmeyrignac• 7 years ago

I believe the amount of water used for lawns is an order of magnitude smaller than the water used for fracking. The water for fracking is definitely lost, while the water we use even for bathing is recycled infinitely.

r00fus3• 7 years ago

In many places graywater is not recycled. So we have improvements that can be done there.

However, industrial uses of water definitely outpace consumer usage.

LargeWu2• 7 years ago

I think it takes something on the order of 2+ million gallons of water to frack a single well, once. Some wells need multiple fracks.

I will say, though, that in North Dakota, they get a significant amount of their fracking water from Lake Sakakawea, i.e. Missouri River. The amount of water used for fracking is a rounding error compared to how big that lake is. Might be more of a concern in more arid areas, though.

codingdave• 7 years ago

I'm not going to keep a green lawn just because I can name things that are even more wasteful. We need to solve all our problems, not just the biggest ones.

As far as "recycled infinitely", that may be true, but out here in the West that is a yearly timeline. We get most of our water from the melting snowpack. Once we use it, it is gone until it snows again next winter, and melts again next spring.

PhantomGremlin• 7 years ago

The largest water user, at least in California, is agriculture. Fortunately they're now planting fewer acres of low-value crops such as cotton. But other crops use an insane amount:

   1 walnut     4.9  gallons
   1 almond     1.1  gallons
   1 pistachio  0.75 gallons

And it looks like Palm Springs is a big water user. Must be all those golf courses?

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-calif...

r00fus3• 7 years ago

I heard meat/milk production uses a significantly larger amount of water (in addition to the crops eaten by the animals).

avip4• 7 years ago

Dates not mentioned? Date palms can drink cube a day!

LargeWu2• 7 years ago

When I was in the Palm Springs area about 10 years ago they were watering their sand to keep the amount of dust down.

bobby451• 7 years ago

For arid locales, I completely agree. I live in Denver, which gets something like 20” of precipitation a year. It’s basically a desert.

As far as I know, most of the tap water here is extracted from the Denver basin aquifer. There was a Denver post article a while back that claimed this aquifer would be depleted by something like 2050, and that some communities on the western edge of the metro had already gone dry.

While projections like that are difficult and a newspaper isn’t a journal, this is still pretty terrifying. But everybody has a green lawn. It’s part of my lease that I have to water the lawn. I really think we ought to follow Albuquerque and have gravel and cactus everywhere...

hairytrog• 7 years ago

This is poor reporting and possibly poor science. It's not enough to say that it will vanish. We need to know on what timescale it will vanish. I suspect that it will last at least several centuries at current extraction rates. Several hundred years from now, the climate may be completely different, energy might extremely cheap, new continental water distribution might be constructed, etc.

rhcom2• 7 years ago

Both science and journalism are iterative processes, you report the facts you have so others can take it further.

chewz4• 7 years ago

Read this

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-o...

Local farmers had watched over the last decade and a half as waves of industrial farms arrived, tilling so much land that dust storms began darkening the sky. These enormous corporations were descending on the valley for the same reason homesteaders had a century ago: the year-round growing season and the lax regulation.
In 2014, a Saudi Arabian-owned company, the Almarai Corporation, bought 10,000 acres in the town of Vicksburg, northwest of Sulphur Springs Valley, planting alfalfa to ship halfway around the world to feed Saudi cattle. Then, a United Arab Emirates farming corporation, Al Dahra, bought several thousand-acre farms along both sides of the Arizona-California border. These purchases were perfectly legal, but many residents felt these newcomers were essentially “exporting water.”

jcrawfordor• 7 years ago

Aquifers are a local resource, you can think of them as somewhat like lakes that rest in depressions in geological strata rather than in depressions in the ground. There is not one large aquifer which spans the US. As a result, the details of the situation depend greatly on the area. In the Southwest, where aquifer depletion has been a major concern, there are concerns that some aquifers may deteriorate in quality due to overextraction to the point that expensive water processing is necessary over a scale of one to two decades (e.g. along the Mexico border). It's also somewhat difficult to give a year range because there is generally not actually a cut-off point where you completely "run out" - instead, the cost of extracting and processing the water increases as overextraction continues, due to a lower water table and, worse, increased salinity. Alamogordo, NM has already initiated the construction of a desalination plant because of this problem - a very expensive proposition, and one the public rarely thinks of inland.

Concern about aquifer depletion is increasing across the nation, not just in the desert southwest, but the severity of the problem varies. What is reasonably consistent is that the situation is getting worse in most places.

The USGS has general information here: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/

40acres• 7 years ago

A local groundwater management agency in Ventura County, CA recently started a pilot program that established a groundwater market among farmers in the county.

Following the early 2010s drought in California, laws were enacted to cap and eventually reduce the amount of groundwater that can be extracted. Recent advancements in water usage tracking infrastructure, combined with the law has led to a natural environment to create a cap and trade system.

Interestingly, farmers view water usage as a trade secret, and so the pilot marketplace is using block-chain to provide an anonymous marketplace. Groundwater management in California (and I assume across the nation) is regulated by a patchwork of different local government agencies and laws, but there is an awesome opportunity to provide a unified software based marketplace to establish a groundwater commodity market.

A market also facilities conservation as farmers now have incentive to lower their water usage and sell excess water on the market. A big challenge however is transportation of water across vast distances.

heavenlyblue2• 7 years ago

What does it use _“block-chain”_ for?

streb-lo• 7 years ago

hype

mikepurvis2• 7 years ago

Anonymity, presumably. That said, you'd think there would be no reason that whatever real-world authority is ensuring no one extracts more than their purchased credits allow would already have all the secret information and could just be the clearing house for the transactions.

scribu• 7 years ago

Interestingly, farmers view water usage as a trade secret

I wonder why. Do slight changes in irrigation patterns have a significant effect on crops?

TheHegemon• 7 years ago

Definitely! If someone is able to figure out how to use less water to grow the same amount of crops they could totally outcompete and undercut other producers.

There's an interesting Planet Money episode about it: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/732147345/the-water-marketpla...

mentat• 7 years ago

Water usage combined with weather information likely gives competitive advantage is futures markets.

LinuxBender3• 7 years ago

Have any more improvements been made in the process of removing salt from ocean water in large volume? Is anyone actively still working on this?

Aaronstotle• 7 years ago

Did a quick google search and found that Israel launched a large desalination plant back in 2015 (uses reverse osmosis). Here's the source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalina...

LinuxBender3• 7 years ago

Thankyou. That would suggest it is feasible on a large scale. Hopefully more countries will start to invest in desalination plants. With ocean levels rising, now should be a good time to optimize that process even further.

6c696e7578• 7 years ago

It hasn't "vanished", it is just hiding in the ocean and the atmosphere. Same as the (vanished) water at the icecaps.

As the Earth heats, the water evaporates. When that happens it adds to heat retention. Expect the water to make a bold reappearance as we experience tropical storms.

jedberg4• 7 years ago

The groundwater has vanished and become skywater, which is much less useful to a farmer.

rb808• 7 years ago

Its just amazing to look at population growth in the desert states, Nevada, Arizona, Utah should be barren wasteland, not with rapidly growing cities of millions. Running out of water seems inevitable.

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

It doesn't have to be this way.

Off the top of my head:

Fresno County, California is a quiet and overlooked pioneer in water rights and water development. They are a modern "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" in that about 150 years ago or so, it was essentially desert with greenery growing only near the rivers. That changed drastically when they built canals.

After building canals, they found that some low-lying areas turned into ponds. It was a side effect of the canals raising the groundwater level.

From there, they actively created groundwater recharge systems. In the last 100 years, while most aquifers in the US only went down, groundwater levels in Fresno actually improved at times, helping to protect the area's water supply.

I lived in Fresno for over two years while homeless. I considered staying in part because I expect it to be a quiet haven of secure water supplies in coming decades as our water supply issues spiral into ever deepening crises globally. I bet some systems could borrow best practices from them and at least slow the problem.

Water for a thirsty land: the Consolidated Irrigation District and its canal development history is a history of water development in Fresno. It's a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/water-for-a-thirsty-land-the-...

Earthships can provide adequate residential water supplies via rain catchment in areas with as little as 8" of annual rainfall.

One of the arguments for eating vegetarian is that beef uses a lot of water to produce. You don't have to go full on vegan to reduce the amount of water burden your diet represents. Just cutting back on your consumption of beef can have an impact.

As a child, I grew up with a set of encyclopedias at home. One article that really stuck in my mind was about successfully growing trees in the desert for agricultural purposes by shaping the ground to be a local catchment system to extend the usefulness of natural rainfall.

You make a square or rectangular catchment area with one corner being the low point. It's not very different from designing a shower with a low point for the drain.

You plant your tree in the low point corner so it is downhill from the rest of the catchment area. When it rains, the catchment fills up and the tree has its own personal water supply for at least a few days.

The interesting and technical part is that you need to develop standards for how large of a catchment to build based on plant species and rainfall levels. Too large of a catchment can cause root rot and kill the tree. Too small and it won't get enough water to thrive.

There are many ways we can work on maintaining a high quality of life while reducing our use of water. We don't have to throw our hands in the air and accept that it is inevitable that we will just hurtle towards some doomsday scenario until we get some mass die-off event for humans, in essence.

ajross• 7 years ago

Unpopular (or at least unconventional) opinion: depleted aquifers are a good thing, because it's turns one of the externalities of outrageously exploited agriculture into a true cost. More expensive food means less land use and less energy spent irrigating what we do grow.

(I felt the same way about "peak oil" 20 years ago, but alas fracking messed that guess up.)

rabidrat• 7 years ago

That's the issue, I've found, with hoping that calamity will make the problems visible enough to shock us into making systemic changes. Humans are very good at inventing clever short-term "solutions" that ameliorate the symptoms but wind up making the long-term problem worse. I have no doubt that if/when global civilization fails due to global warming, we'll wind up burning everything in sight to power our air conditioners for a few minutes of respite.

Moru• 7 years ago

GMO is supposed to save us this time, if we have to pay for it some other way is still being discussed.

In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes

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