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Americans are drilling deeper than ever for fresh water
Groundwater may be out of sight, but for over 100 million Americans who rely on it for their lives and livelihoods it's anything but out of mind. Unfortunately, wells are going dry and scientists are just beginning to understand the complex landscape of groundwater use.
Now, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have published the first comprehensive account of groundwater wells across the contiguous United States. They analyzed data from nearly 12 million wells throughout the country in records stretching back decades. Their findings appear in the journal Nature Sustainability.
[...] Focusing on regions known to depend on groundwater, such as California's Central Valley, the pair collected a wealth of information about different types of wells across the country. Groundwater is generally a matter of state management, so they had to cull their data from a variety of sources. "[That was] one of the biggest hurdles," said Perrone, an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara's environmental studies department.
[...] Scientists know that groundwater depletion is causing some wells to run dry. Where conditions are right, drilling new and deeper wells can stave off this issue, for those who can afford it. Indeed, Perrone and Jasechko found that new wells are getting deeper between 1.4 and 9.2 times as often as they are being drilled shallower.
What's more, the researchers found that 79% of areas they looked at showed well-deepening trends across a window spanning 1950 to 2015. Hotspots of this activity include California's Central Valley, the High Plains of southwestern Kansas, and the Atlantic Coastal Plain, among other regions.
"We were surprised how widespread deeper well drilling is," Jasechko said. News media had documented the trend in places like the Central Valley, but it is pervasive in many other parts of the country as well. This includes places like Iowa, where groundwater hasn't been studied as intensively, he noted.
[...] This new paper provides additional context to one of Perrone and Jasechko's past studies -- completed with professors Grant Ferguson of the University of Saskatchewan, and Jennifer McIntosh at the University of Arizona -- where they found that the United States may have less usable groundwater than previously thought. It also ties into Perrone's work regarding groundwater policy across the U.S. In the future, she plans to look at the legal frameworks surrounding groundwater use. "My goal is to understand what types of laws are being passed in the western 17 states to manage groundwater withdrawals in more sustainable ways," she said.
Debra Perrone, Scott Jasechko. Deeper well drilling an unsustainable stopgap to groundwater depletion. Nature Sustainability, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0325-z
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday July 23 2019, @01:43PM (9 children)
Using wells to irrigate is always going to be a temporary thing, one way or another.
Strange engineering daydream thought experiment; is it more engineering feasible to move the water of the east to the west, the dirt of the west to the rainy east, or the people and farms of the west to the watery east?
Another technical side topic is where I live, almost no farmers irrigate, although the friends of my farmer uncle who did irrigate did so for economic competitive reasons where they risked the higher costs of irrigation vs the higher profits of just a tiny little bit earlier than the non-irrigating masses. There are probably economic, EPA, taxation, regulatory, and social pressure solutions to end irrigation in areas that don't biologically need irrigation. I wonder what fraction of irrigation is economically required but not biologically required... in the desert in CA I assume its 0% yet where I live, with the exception of the occasional rice farmer weirdo, its 100%; on a very large scale I wonder how much of a problem we're talking about. I assure you not every farm with well pumped irrigation biologically requires it.
Another technological side topic is the business model of cheap fuel means you grow food far away, like in deserts, and burn tons of oil to ship it extreme distances, can only exist with very cheap fuel. So in the rapidly nearing post-fossil fuel age, maybe we need not concern ourselves at all with pump irrigation; why grow food in a desert that can't be shipped, sold, and eaten? Also that food only grows because cheap crude oil and cheap natgas means cheap fertilizers, cheap pesticides, cheap herbicides, get rid of all that and the desert will not bloom, so a dead and empty desert won't need much pumped water... The primary cause of the emptying of the Ogallala Aquifer is Saudi Arabian Crude Oil, so once that oil source is no longer economically viable, I guess any aquifer water we never pumped up is kinda wasted, isn't it, so may as well pump water while it has a viable economic purpose? Like, in a hundred years and petroleum is mostly a memory its not going to matter how full or empty an aquifer is under the ruins of a long abandoned "ghost farm".
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 23 2019, @02:14PM (1 child)
Not arguing any part of your post. I just want to point out that San Antonio pretty much exists because of the aquifer. They found it by accident, and the water came gushing out. So, they pumped it to the city, to water all those crazy Californians who are taking over Texas. Other aquifers around the country serve cities, and not just farms. The one in San Antonio is just the one I'm most familiar with.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24 2019, @12:24AM
My family moved FROM San Antonio to California. I heard it was to get away from all those Texans like Runaway1956 here :)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 23 2019, @02:15PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @04:37PM (4 children)
The coastal regions have an additional issue of salt water intrusion into the drained aquifers to contend with.
There is a large aquifer in northern San Diego County that used to provide water for the region that was known as the largest avocado producer in the world. There are still some orchards trying to hang on, but they are using city treated drinking water, or mixing well water with city water if their area of the aquifer isn't too salty yet.
People are stupid. It was known this was happening long before it was irreversible. The avocado growers who's livelihoods were destroyed by over pumping the aquifer are the same folks who are responsible for destroying the aquifer. But, everybody reducing irrigated area by 50% so, everybody can continue to farm is apparently less attractive to these folks than, "Extract maximal profits for a few more years until we burn it all to the ground!'
In Sacramento, there are areas with 15' of subsidence as the aquifers pancaked due to over drawing during the last drought. There is no aquifer where that subsidence occurred anymore.
Even disregarding that some aquifers are ancient water that are not being replenished, even the ones that would otherwise be replenished are being destroyed completely by over drawing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday July 23 2019, @05:09PM (3 children)
> even the ones that would otherwise be replenished are being destroyed completely by over drawing.
Note that over drawing is required by capitalism. If I do not over draw but my neighbour does, my neighbour sells his avocadoes for less money and I go bust. When I share a finite resource with my neighbour, capitalism requires us both to race to exhaust the resource, regardless of concepts of sustainability.
Note also that the same can be said for globalism, where nations have a shared "resource" (like carbon emissions).
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 24 2019, @07:01AM (1 child)
What a, um, tragedy [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 25 2019, @05:29PM
It is not a tragedy of the commons, such a thing does not exist. It is a tragedy of privatization and capitalism.
If you look at the historical commons in places like England, there wasn't overgrazing etc., it was protected by everyone who used it, as they were all dependent upon it, and they all had equal say (among their own class anyway), since it was held in common. If you ended up with a sociopath like the folks that run most capitalist enterprises, the community around the commons would put that sociopath in line, and prevent him from damaging the commons. The commons was destroyed when it was enclosed-- privatized.
The globe today suffers from the tragedy of the capitalist.
We should stop using right-wing tropes to describe things, as they are intentionally designed to frame things to redirect attention from the actual perpetrators / causes of harm.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 24 2019, @07:22PM
SHARED resource, yes. Not an issue with private resources. The world being really frigging large and the largest business organizations being quite a bit smaller, we gonna have some inherent problems using aquifers.
At the highest level of regulation imaginable, maybe land zoning laws should not permit land use activities that require local environmental modification that our species doesn't handle very well, like using aquifers. God knows we're not running out of dirt that gets four feet of rain per year, its just that dirt isn't "dirt cheap" and located in the desert in Nevada or CA or similar western places.
If I own the resource then its a different weird optimization game where you do lots of NPV calculations based on current and predicted inflation rates and interest rates.
The problem rapidly becomes chronological where the global financial system whipsaws back and forth faster than a nice slow grape or olive farm can biologically react, or even relatively fast growing grains can react.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @05:12PM
You just need to dig even deeper: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core/ [newscientist.com]
;)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday July 23 2019, @01:51PM (1 child)
Drill for freshwater deep enough in the US nowadays, and what you're likely to find is fracking fluids that have escaped into the water tables under pressure.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 23 2019, @02:16PM
Yes, that. Anything dumped into or on the ground is going to find it's way into the water. People with shallow wells seem to have learned that first - people with deeper wells are learning it later.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @01:57PM (4 children)
Let them drink soda pop!
(Score: 5, Touché) by Snow on Tuesday July 23 2019, @02:45PM
Nestle can solve this problem for us!
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:42PM (2 children)
No, obviously Brawndo is the answer. Heck, you can even water plants with it! It's got electrolytes -- what plants crave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @04:10PM (1 child)
But do you even know what they are?? Why are they in Brawndo??????
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday July 24 2019, @01:56AM
" It's what they use to make Brawndo. "
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:00PM (3 children)
India will have to solve this problem first and we can just copy what they do /s
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/india/india-water-crisis-intl-hnk/index.html [cnn.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:05PM (2 children)
Are they tho? They seem to have known about the issue for decades and decided to do f*ck all about it really. Who would have guessed that investing near zero in infrastructure such as pluming or sewers while at the same time letting the population explode in size would somehow drain more water. Perhaps they can milk one of their many elephant Gods for liquids cause that appears to be about all they are good for.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:55PM
Politicans are never in a hurry to make long term investments that will benefit their successors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @04:20PM
Always keep an eye out for the " /s ", it indicates sarcasm.
"Perhaps they can milk one of their many elephant Gods for liquids cause that appears to be about all they are good for."
Your ignorance aside, milking cows is very sustainable and not cruel when done outside industrial . I eat meat so this isn't some vegetarian lecture, but don't kid yourself about the general morality of it.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:02PM
I continue to pump hundreds of gallons of water out of my sump every day.
Pretty sure we'll be able to clean that up and be just fine.
Of course, I don't live in a desert. That would be stupid.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:42PM (3 children)
As the wells get deeper, eventually we'll dig so deep that we'll start using China's underground water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @04:40PM
Hope you like your coffee lava hot!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @08:40PM (1 child)
No, they will use ours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @08:42PM
... and then sell it to us.