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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 i

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 7y ago
Both science and journalism are iterative processes, you report the facts you have so others can take it further.
chewz 7y ago
Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-of-arizona.html 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 7y 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/ https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/

rhcom2 7y ago

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

chewz 7y ago

Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-of-arizona.html 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 7y 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/ https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/