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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] 40acres|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scribu|6 years ago|reply
I wonder why. Do slight changes in irrigation patterns have a significant effect on crops?
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxcl|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] srameshc|6 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/28-000-riv...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rivers...
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Why would anyone care about saving water when it's so dirt cheap? "Awareness" seems like a waste of time in comparison.
[+] [-] stunt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quotemstr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjevans|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|6 years ago|reply
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-calif...
[+] [-] commandlinefan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcmeyrignac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobby451|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] quotemstr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cardamomo|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] et-al|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scblock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jschwartzi|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skunkpocalypse|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ajross|6 years ago|reply
(I felt the same way about "peak oil" 20 years ago, but alas fracking messed that guess up.)
[+] [-] rabidrat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aaronstotle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hairytrog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
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.”
[+] [-] rhcom2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 6c696e7578|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggg3|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] padseeker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knz|6 years ago|reply
https://www.usgs.gov/news/widespread-plastic-pollution-found..., https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/the-great-... etc.
[+] [-] yardie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romaaeterna|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] halfeatenpie|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] downrightmike|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergothus|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|6 years ago|reply