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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 23 2019, @12:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the as-opposed-to-air-water dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday July 23 2019, @05:09PM (3 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday July 23 2019, @05:09PM (#870393)

    > 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).

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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 24 2019, @07:01AM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @07:01AM (#870599)

    Note that over drawing is required by capitalism.

    What a, um, tragedy [wikipedia.org].

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 25 2019, @05:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 25 2019, @05:29PM (#871149)

      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

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 24 2019, @07:22PM (#870816)

    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.