Water - People, we have a huge problem!

Dry wells
The water that lies beneath the earth’s surface — known as groundwater — has been a vital resource for thousands of years. Communities that are far away from lakes and rivers use groundwater to irrigate crops and provide drinking water.

For most of human history, groundwater has existed in a convenient equilibrium. The pockets of water under the surface need years or decades to replenish as rainwater and other moisture seep into the earth. Fortunately, though, people have used groundwater slowly, allowing replenishment to happen.

Now that equilibrium is at risk.

Several of my colleagues — led by Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle — have spent months compiling data on groundwater levels across the U.S., based on more than 80,000 monitoring stations. Chris and Mira did so after discovering that no comprehensive database existed. The statistics tended to be local and fragmented, making it difficult to understand national patterns.

The trends in this new database are alarming. Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.

The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, told The Times.

Already, there are consequences. In parts of Kansas, the shortage of water has reduced the amount of corn that an average acre can produce.



In Norfolk, Va., officials have resorted to pumping treated wastewater into underground rock layers that store groundwater — known as aquifers — to replenish them. On Long Island, the depletion of aquifers has allowed saltwater to seep in and threatened the groundwater that remains.

“We’ve built whole parts of the country and whole parts of the economy on groundwater, which is fine so long as you have groundwater,” Chris told me. “I don’t think people realize quite how quickly we’re burning through it.”

Giant wells
Unlike many other environmental trends, this story is not primarily about climate change, although the warming planet plays an aggravating role. There are three main reasons for the groundwater declines:

Pumping technology has improved, allowing communities to draw water out of the earth much more quickly than in the past. Some wells can pump more than 100,000 gallons a day.
Economic growth and urban sprawl have increased the demand for water. Although the U.S. economy has not been growing rapidly in recent decades, American farms help feed other countries where the economy and population have been growing faster.
Climate change has reduced the amount of water that comes from alternative sources, like rivers: A warmer planet leads to less rainfall and faster evaporation of the rain that does fall. These declines have led communities to increase groundwater use.
These forces are not unique to the U.S. Other countries are coping with groundwater declines that are sometimes worse. This summer, my colleagues Vivian Yee and Leily Nikounazar reported on the dire shortages in parts of Iran, while Alissa Rubin and Bryan Denton did so in Iraq. The photographs and videos from Iraq are especially jarring.

Protecting the commons
Is there any solution?

Slowing climate change, by reducing carbon emissions, would help in the long term — and the long term is obviously important. More immediately, the answer may need to involve stricter rules on how much water towns, farms and companies can remove from the ground. “In many places,” Chris said, “the rules are weak or nonexistent.”

The federal government neither tracks the situation nor does much to regulate it. Some state and local governments — in parts of Arizona, for instance, and Texas — also have lax rules.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons. The ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized that term in a 1968 essay based on a 19th-century pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd, an English economist. In the pamphlet, Lloyd explained that any individual farmer had an incentive for his cattle to eat as much grass as possible in any field that the community shared. But if all the farmers did so, the field would be ruined. The solution is for the farmers to agree on a set of rules that benefit all of them in the long run.

You can read The Times’s groundwater investigation here. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html

Trapper Gus wrote:From t New York Times:

Dry wells
The water that lies beneath the earth’s surface — known as groundwater — has been a vital resource for thousands of years. Communities that are far away from lakes and rivers use groundwater to irrigate crops and provide drinking water.

For most of human history, groundwater has existed in a convenient equilibrium. The pockets of water under the surface need years or decades to replenish as rainwater and other moisture seep into the earth. Fortunately, though, people have used groundwater slowly, allowing replenishment to happen.

Now that equilibrium is at risk.

Several of my colleagues — led by Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle — have spent months compiling data on groundwater levels across the U.S., based on more than 80,000 monitoring stations. Chris and Mira did so after discovering that no comprehensive database existed. The statistics tended to be local and fragmented, making it difficult to understand national patterns.

The trends in this new database are alarming. Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.

The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, told The Times.

Already, there are consequences. In parts of Kansas, the shortage of water has reduced the amount of corn that an average acre can produce.



In Norfolk, Va., officials have resorted to pumping treated wastewater into underground rock layers that store groundwater — known as aquifers — to replenish them. On Long Island, the depletion of aquifers has allowed saltwater to seep in and threatened the groundwater that remains.

“We’ve built whole parts of the country and whole parts of the economy on groundwater, which is fine so long as you have groundwater,” Chris told me. “I don’t think people realize quite how quickly we’re burning through it.”

Giant wells
Unlike many other environmental trends, this story is not primarily about climate change, although the warming planet plays an aggravating role. There are three main reasons for the groundwater declines:

Pumping technology has improved, allowing communities to draw water out of the earth much more quickly than in the past. Some wells can pump more than 100,000 gallons a day.
Economic growth and urban sprawl have increased the demand for water. Although the U.S. economy has not been growing rapidly in recent decades, American farms help feed other countries where the economy and population have been growing faster.
Climate change has reduced the amount of water that comes from alternative sources, like rivers: A warmer planet leads to less rainfall and faster evaporation of the rain that does fall. These declines have led communities to increase groundwater use.
These forces are not unique to the U.S. Other countries are coping with groundwater declines that are sometimes worse. This summer, my colleagues Vivian Yee and Leily Nikounazar reported on the dire shortages in parts of Iran, while Alissa Rubin and Bryan Denton did so in Iraq. The photographs and videos from Iraq are especially jarring.

Protecting the commons
Is there any solution?

Slowing climate change, by reducing carbon emissions, would help in the long term — and the long term is obviously important. More immediately, the answer may need to involve stricter rules on how much water towns, farms and companies can remove from the ground. “In many places,” Chris said, “the rules are weak or nonexistent.”

The federal government neither tracks the situation nor does much to regulate it. Some state and local governments — in parts of Arizona, for instance, and Texas — also have lax rules.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons. The ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized that term in a 1968 essay based on a 19th-century pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd, an English economist. In the pamphlet, Lloyd explained that any individual farmer had an incentive for his cattle to eat as much grass as possible in any field that the community shared. But if all the farmers did so, the field would be ruined. The solution is for the farmers to agree on a set of rules that benefit all of them in the long run.

You can read The Times’s groundwater investigation here.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html

AvgMSUJoe wrote:I don't have the capacity to get into the weeds on environmental issues.

AvgMSUJoe wrote:I don't have the capacity to get into the weeds on environmental issues.

Trapper Gus wrote:

AvgMSUJoe wrote:I don't have the capacity to get into the weeds on environmental issues.

This one is pretty simple. "We" are pumping more water out of the ground than goes back into the ground. As we continue to do the wells have to be drilled deeper. Right now, in parts of the country removal of water from the ground is being limited. Eventually there will be none to be had, and since much of this is in the areas where much of our food comes from, we will be very hungry.

GRR Spartan wrote:Color me shocked about the water table in Kansas is dropping.  Beginning in the 1950’s farmers in the grain belt have been drilling into the Ogallala Aquifer and using center pivot irrigation for improved yields.

No rain? No worries just irrigate.  The water pressure drops at the well head?  No worries, drill deeper or drill a new well and run more pipe to get the water to your irrigation system(s).  

Today it’s farmers and Big Ag crying about water.  

Last month it was people in Phoenix realizing the desert can’t support millions of people.  

Later we’ll probably be reading how the 20M+ Florida residents are struggling after another hurricane hits the state with high winds and flooding but also with a water shortage where that state is literally draining The Everglades.

sεяεηιτλ wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:From t New York Times:

This makes fusion power ever more important. I do not understand why we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on bullets and bombs but we can't find it in our heart to invest tens of billions per year in our future to support serious fusion energy projects.  Had we started drastically funding it in the 80s or 90s (when we actually had a realistic understanding of fusion process and a chance to develop the tech), we might have a few large fusion power plants by now.  IMO, the US should have 2 ITER like projects, one like ITER tokamak reactor design and another one (or even 2) more projects employing experimental moon shot like design ideas. We like to think of ourselves as technological leaders but then we let lobbyists subdue ideas like this.

kingstonlake wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

This one is pretty simple. "We" are pumping more water out of the ground than goes back into the ground. As we continue to do the wells have to be drilled deeper. Right now, in parts of the country removal of water from the ground is being limited. Eventually there will be none to be had, and since much of this is in the areas where much of our food comes from, we will be very hungry.

Someone hacked Trappers account.

ars per year on bullets

sεяεηιτλ wrote:

ars per year on bullets

Imagine what we could do with our money at 2/3rds current military budget

Boggles my mind.  And yet we'd STILL be spending way more on military than anybody else.

I know billions per year is a ton to invest in a single project but come on.  This is that important.

like a national water policy would need similar ideas to be created.

Many of America’s critical sources of underground water are in a state of rapid and accelerating decline, a new study has found.

More than half of the aquifers in the United States (53 percent) are losing water, according to research published Wednesday in Nature.

And in about 1 in 8 American aquifers — roughly 12 percent — the collapse of underground water levels has sped up during the 21st century, the researchers found.

“Groundwater levels are declining rapidly in many areas,” co-author Scott Jasechko of the University of California, Santa Barbara told The Hill.

“And what’s worse, the rate of groundwater decline is accelerating in a large portion of areas,” Jasechko said.

The impacted aquifers support much of the U.S. food system, as well as providing water used by many Americans. And the country is not alone in its losses: The study found rapid loss of water in aquifers that supply hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

sεяεηιτλ wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:From t New York Times:

This makes fusion power ever more important. I do not understand why we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on bullets and bombs but we can't find it in our heart to invest tens of billions per year in our future to support serious fusion energy projects.  Had we started drastically funding it in the 80s or 90s (when we actually had a realistic understanding of fusion process and a chance to develop the tech), we might have a few large fusion power plants by now.  IMO, the US should have 2 ITER like projects, one like ITER tokamak reactor design and another one (or even 2) more projects employing experimental moon shot like design ideas. We like to think of ourselves as technological leaders but then we let lobbyists subdue ideas like this.

A worrisome environmental issue is bubbling up from deep below Michigan’s ground with little public awareness, experts say.

The salinity of the state’s groundwater is on the rise, raising concerns about killed crops and corroded pipes.

The problem is increasingly severe and requires action, but Michigan residents and lawmakers struggle to recognize it, said Alan Steinman, a Grand Valley State University water researcher and board member of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

“It’s hard for people to imagine that we have a water problem in Michigan when their view is the Great Lakes,” he said. “Because we’re surrounded by so much water, they can’t imagine that we’re having an issue with the supply.”

Trapper Gus wrote:https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-planets-begging-for-mercy-why-6af

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth's total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth's continents have entered a persistently drier phase.