17 ms·

So, how do you refill an aquifer?

129 points by Hooke 3y ago

meristohm 3y ago
Permeable pavement sounds interesting, and I wonder how safe it is (the bottom of the fractional-distillation barrel might have fewer volatiles but do we want more surface area of the stuff to come into contact with water?) and how quickly it gets clogged. Also, beavers: they're great at slowing the flow of water across a landscape, giving the water time to recharge aquifers. We'll need to address how we use land, though, to make room for these engineers to do their thing.
- dylan604 3y ago
  My concern for urban permeable pavement is all of the chemicals that would be absorbed with it. Same with the forced injection of water back into an aquifer. I was under the impression that the water being pulled through the ground is a filtering process so that the water in the aquifer is clean.
  - myshpa 3y ago
    > the water ... filtering process ... the water in the aquifer is clean Clean(er) ... maybe ... nowadays nitrates, pesticides/herbicides, pfas/pfoas, industrial chemicals (solvents, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds), pharmaceuticals (prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications), lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium (through industrial activities, mining operations, and improper waste disposal), chlorinated solvents, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), all were detected in the groundwater. Nothing is "clean" anymore. Not the arctic, not the tops of the mountains in the natural reserves, not the remote islands, not the deep underground.
    - hanniabu 3y ago
      Such a depressing truth, I feel like cancer and other illnesses are completely unavoidable for the younger generation
maerF0x0 3y ago
Requiring farms to have ponds/wells could be a way to create a distributed solution. Joel Salatin has been teaching about the value of ponds for decades now. for example here's a video of him talking about ponds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o82ar51eIsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o82ar51eIsE This will require the water boards to rethink things like not allowing capture of rainwater/flow. The evaporation of ponds becomes somewhere else's rainwater (potentially further inland creating a virtuous cycle). And you can use depth to control the capture vs evaporation ratio -- deeper ponds evaporate slower and hold more precipitation. But this all goes against our very reductionistic thinking -- this quarter section is for corn, nothing else.
- ganoushoreilly 3y ago
  Owning property with a pond has it's own issues. In many of those farms run off can be detrimental. We have a 3/4 an acre pond and while we don't farm anywhere near it, the few springs that feed it all touch a lot of farm lands. So far we're lucky, but just a quarter mile down the road, our neighbors have a pond that won't sustain life, which we suspect is due to runoff from their crops. There's also the issue of excess evaporation and creating unusable land. There's solutions out there but they're not all cut and dry with just placing ponds.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Would organic farming help here? Seems like there are studies [1] showing nitrate leaching is less with it. Probably reducing cattle/chicken counts too, as those shit pits are a big source of it. 1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880920301493 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...
    - ganoushoreilly 3y ago
      Oh most definitely it would, but you run into trade offs with production / productivity. That's at least what most of my local farmer friends argue. We proactively add some good bacteria to our ponds monthly to reduce waste by products and things as well, so it's possible that they could fix some of the biome issues.
onecommentman 3y ago
Albuquerque has been doing this since 2007. “More ambitiously, however, the Water Authority in 2007 initiated a pilot program for aquifer storage and recovery, in which a small amount of San Juan-Chama water was released into the Bear Canyon arroyo and tracked to see if it reached the aquifer. Results were positive, and the Water Authority is moving forward with plans to recharge the aquifer on a larger scale. We will be using direct injection as well as infiltration to get the water into the aquifer. We hope to put up to 40,000 acre-feet back into the aquifer in the first couple of years. After that, we will continue to add purified San Juan-Chama water to the aquifer primarily during winter months when demand is low.“ https://www.abcwua.org/education-23b_Recharge/ https://www.abcwua.org/education-23b_Recharge/
- jubjubbird 3y ago
  Speaking of Albuquerque, this just-published paper shows how measuring the change in acceleration due to gravity can be used to map aquifer storage change. Importation of San Juan River water has made a big difference. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413
  - fghorow 3y ago
    Microgravity surveying is great for this and other geo applications. I know of many geothermal fields mapped the same way to monitor fluid level and steam migration. Good stuff!
sb8244 3y ago
I very much enjoy this type of article or videos on similar subjects. Another source that has been very entertaining / educational for me is "Practical Engineering" Youtube channel. Looked it up and there's a great video from him about wells & aquifers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG19b06NG_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG19b06NG_w
AlbertCory 3y ago
CA is on a very short fuse to do this, since there's all that snow from the winter that's melting or about to. I've been wondering about that myself. What I would like to see is the gross numbers: what percent of this year's precipitation is going to flow into the ocean? Anyone?
- nawgz 3y ago
  Given that all the snow at Tahoe will flow into Truckee river and evaporate in Nevada... Can't imagine it's that high a percentage, to be honest.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Snowpack is a huge deal in California, as around 30% of the state's water comes from snowmelt in the Sierras. They don't track it for funsies: https://cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.action https://cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.action
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      Thanks. Is there an aggregate number CA somewhere? "CA" == amount of precipitation remaining in California, in one form or another. i.e. CA = total - ocean - NV - AZ - OR - evaporation - other
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    The Sierra nevada mountain range has two sides. The vast majority of snowmelt runs downhill into California. The is more to the mountain range than Tahoe and more to the river system than the Truckee. You can take a look at the California river system to get a sense of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California#/media/File:California_rivers.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California#/... Not many rivers flow east and the truckee is failrly small. The annual flow from the Truckee is 303,240 acre-feet, which is about %1 of the Sacramento river
Throw73849 3y ago
Some projects are pumping CO2 underground to reduce global warming. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Maybe we could use some of that money and equipment, to pump water underground!
- vkou 3y ago
  The greenhouse coefficient of water vapour is, pound-for-pound, about one hundredth that of CO2. There's also no meaningful amount of water that can be sequestered, given there's about 10^18 tonnes of it in the world's oceans.
  - Throw73849 3y ago
    It may be still more efficient to pump water underground. Isolating CO2 is very energy intensive, for the same amount of energy we may isolate 100x more H2O. Sometimes it even condenses spontaneously! There is also huge amount of natural CO2, single vulcano eruption... It is about reducing green house gas emissions generated by humans. And there are many artificial lakes, fields and forests that generate huge footprint on water vapour..
    - qzw 3y ago
      Clippy: It looks like you’re trying to turn Earth into Arrakis. Would you like some help with that? More seriously though, as the effects of climate change intensify, I think it’s all but inevitable we’ll have to seriously look at manipulating whatever environmental factors we can in order to counteract the worst of them. Maybe we can’t do much about the sea level rise, but maybe it would be possible to moderate storm and drought/flooding intensities. As you pointed out, water vapor levels may be one of the easier things we could manipulate, as least on a local or regional scale.
    - saalweachter 3y ago
      Ignoring all the other problems with that, there is also nearly 100x more water in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and roughly 10000x more water in the oceans than the atmosphere. Do you expect sequestering H2O to have a significant impact on the amount in the atmosphere before you dry up the oceans, whence it is evaporating?
Dig1t 3y ago
For further reading on aquifers I highly recommend https://www.edwardsaquifer.net https://www.edwardsaquifer.net It's run by a scientist in Texas and has an amazing wealth of information on the aquifers of Texas. I never thought I would find a subject like this interesting until I read this guy's site. Texas has been managing aquifers for a long time, there's a rich history behind their management, and reading about this stuff has been the only way I've found to make geology interesting. Many of the lessons learned and policies employed in Texas likely would be very useful in California.
- mech422 3y ago
  Phoenix is the same way. They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular (PHX sits on top of an underground lake) they use huge 'ponds' to let the water soak back into the aquifer.
  - hosh 3y ago
    We have to. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights agreement among the states drawing from the Colorado River. I see a lot of water harvesting structures here, often in the form of parks and greenways.
    - genmud 3y ago
      That’s actually not true, IIRC per capita we are actually better off than California and Nevada. Edit: Just looked it up and california gets about 5 million acre feet (maf), AZ gets about 2.8maf and Nevada only gets 0.3maf. So per capita, AZ is doing pretty well allocation-wise.
      - hosh 3y ago
        When I said, “bottom of the water rights”, I mean that the other states has senior water rights, not allocation per capita. When there is not enough water, priority goes to those holding senior water rights. (Complicating this is that various tribal nations have water rights senior to the states, and it is only now affecting allocations)
pgrote 3y ago
Aquifers are intriguing. They are so large a person has a hard time realizing over a period of time how the land is affected when they are tapped. Subsidence is hard to wrap your head around. San Joaquin Valley is a good example. https://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/local-news/san-joaquin-valley-sinks-droughts/ https://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/local-news/san-joaquin-... https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subsidence-us-levels-1925-and-1977 https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  The water users sucked up $500M worth of water infrastructure - that 250k people are likely to pay for - $2000 per person. As long as greedy people have this option, they're going to take it. The solution is not hoping people start thinking sustainably. It's doing something to prevent people from putting expensive externalities onto others.
aurizon 3y ago
I have often felt the ogallala aquifer could be recharged by diverting some of the great lakes spring runoff into the Atlantic via canals as well as via one of the many gravel buried moraines that connect with and now recharge the ogallala. Not sure how this would affect the Atlantic, but 5-10% of it would go a long way to help the lowering of the Ogallala over the pat 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
thescriptkiddie 3y ago
I wonder if this could help Venice with its subsidence problem.
maCDzP 3y ago
This is pretty common where I live. We take water from the river and replenish the aquifers. Why do it manually you ask? We have thick layer of impermeable dirt that prevents natural infiltration.
SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
Some regions in India with wet and dry seasons have been successfully doing this for some time now. Interestingly, the very high precipitation during the wet season allowed them to achieve improvement without megaprojects, instead focusing on outreach campaigns to teach many small farmers to build recharge wells and water slowing features (frequent small dams) on runoff streams on their land to foster ground absorption during the wet season.
- hosh 3y ago
  Slowing down water is the key and there are many design patterns that achieve this. You don’t even need to build structures (like when we envision with the word “dam”). Even digging a small trench that follows contours in the upland helps water infiltrate into the ground. The dirt you dig out can be piled up as a bearm. The permaculture community the world over has been putting these design patterns for decades now, and they drew from ideas found in pre-modern societies. Brad Lancaster wrote an excellent multi-volume book about water harvesting structures, including taking into account erosion and silt deposit patterns, and working with plants. He calls it “planting the rain”. It doesn’t have to be in places with wet and dry seasons. In much of temperate climates of the US, beavers modified the flow of the rivers such that the surface water was able to meander a much greater surface than the main flow of the river. It supported the trees and vegetation, which in turn formed habitat.
  - modriano 3y ago
    I came across an excellent permaculture YouTuber (who is also a professor at Oregon State (I think) and is incredible at drawing diagrams) [0]. Incidentally, based on his videos on the power of plants to filter out things as toxic as heavy metals and some biological wastes [1], I'm very concerned that the "injection well" idea for filling aquifers could result in contaminating the aquifer. Filtering through earth and active ecosystems seems like an important step in recharging aquifers safely. [0] https://youtu.be/7fFXJ3G49pY https://youtu.be/7fFXJ3G49pY [1] https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg
    - 3y ago
gaoshan 3y ago
In the case of a place like Florida, parts of the gigantic aquifer that extends under that State and up in Georgia get backfilled by brackish water once depleted below a certain level and this effectively destroys it, preventing refilling or refreshing because of the salt content that gets introduced.
- walleeee 3y ago
  yes, this is commonly called saltwater intrusion and is a serious problem https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/saltwater-intrusion#overview https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...
indus 3y ago
There is a California-specific law called the Subdivision Map Act that requires cities/counties to have provisions for parks when approving new subdivisions and housing. The specifics of this is super convoluted and left to the interpretation of the city and its planning done at the county. What would be amazing is to add a certain percentage to lakes and ponds when new parks are created--and not just green field. Hope someone can lead and get this amended.
- lief79 3y ago
  Surface water in the desert ... that could easily backfire. I think a related idea that might be more appropriate is requiring drainage areas that slow water flow and increase absorption.
0ct4via 3y ago
https://archive.is/R7KQU https://archive.is/R7KQU
ChiCityRanger 3y ago
The article needlessly mentions the Murzuk-Djado Basin and the Arabian Basin as having "little hope of recharging", when the very study it cites shows that the Murzuk-Djado basin as being less stressed than the California basin it talks about. I hate how American Exceptionalism always creeps its way into everything regardless how benign the topic seems. It's like she's trying to say "hey, we've got it bad but at least we're not as backwards as those mOsLeM countries". here's the study for those interested: https://news.uci.edu/2015/06/16/a-third-of-the-worlds-biggest-groundwater-basins-are-in-distress/ https://news.uci.edu/2015/06/16/a-third-of-the-worlds-bigges...
- Permit 3y ago
  > It's like she's trying to say "hey, we've got it bad but at least we're not as backwards as those mOsLeM countries". Nope, it’s not like that at all.
  - ChiCityRanger 3y ago
    I could be wrong. It's likely that my characterization was not her intent. That said, even the most well meaning individual in the "west" has this implicit bias against the "non west" that it just gets everywhere and you see it everywhere.
    - whiskeytuesday 3y ago
      You see it everywhere, I see it occasionally.
- pdabbadabba 3y ago
  As a general matter, I hear you. But in this case I think your objections are misplaced: it actually agrees with you that the California basis is more stressed, but also is the subject of an ambitious plan to recharge it (which may or may not succeed) which is the topic of the article. It also blames the stress on the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins on climate change which, to me, places the blame more on the U.S. than on 'backwards muslims.' Here's the full passage: > Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage. In any case, it's actually pretty fascinating how a few sentences about aquifers can draw out these issues. And, to your point, I would certainly not be shocked to learn that there are ambitious plans to recharge the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins that this article overlooks.
w10-1 3y ago
The numbers and interest could change significantly if desalinization membranes could target multi-stage high-volume applications. Or using overland solar tunnels: roofed with solar arrays, the bottom of which would be cooled to condense the evaporation from the water.
clord 3y ago
Trees and grazing animals collaboratively replenish aquifers. Meadows, being porous, guide moisture downwards, preventing floods and evaporation. Animal droppings enhance soil bioactivity, boosting water capture. Moreover, this process, free of fossil fertilizers, sequesters carbon. Areas abandoning cattle operations or imposing 're-wilding' often face desertification and flooding. Similarly, grain plantations that exclude animals share this issue. I've personally seen a parched, over-fertilized grain field transform into a vibrant savannah with natural springs within five years due to herd migration. The soil is now a joy to walk on, spongey and soft. Next farm over they still plant grains, and it's hard-pan and salted.
ajb 3y ago
This remind me of Aubrey Jaffer's story about his father making 'disposal wells' in Miami: https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells Because a lot of land got paved over, it was easily flooded, as the water couldn't make its way into the aquifer. Jaffer senior had a business digging wells, and discovered that they could also suck down the water in a flooded carpark, so added making plugholes for carparks to his business. Although in theory this replenishes the aquifer, I'm not sure that water off a carpark floor is these days considered clean enough to inject into the aquifer. I think I read somewhere that a lot of these injection wells had to be plugged, but now I can't find that.
- mrbgty 3y ago
  Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to send water directly down a hole without getting filtered at all through layers of earth.
russellbeattie 3y ago
I think we should dig the California viaduct deeper. Make it one long lake. Or dig giant water holes all along it. All the excess water can just fill up the holes along its 700 mile length. No idea if it's practical(probably not), but watching all that water flow into the ocean this winter seemed like such a waste. The WRCB's plan is to store 600,000 acre feet of water which is 26,136,000,000 cubic feet. If we took 500 miles of viaduct (2,640,000 feet) at an average depth of 30 feet and average width of 40 feet ( = 3,168,000,000 cubic feet) and dug it 10x deeper, we'd be styling. I mean, a 300 foot trench along the middle of California is doable, right?
m_antis89 3y ago
Well – I refill an aquifier very simply so because I don't refill them.
- cwmoore 3y ago
  Nothing could be simpler.
walleeee 3y ago
While initiatives like these are important, it is also critical to rethink agricultural practice. California grows a number of thirsty crops under conditions which make little ecological sense. Reform must address the legal framework, incentives for farmers, and consumer habits and expectations upstream, as it were.
- billbrown 3y ago
  Pricing would also make a huge difference.[1] In general, though, California is a _mess_.[2] I mean, it didn't even have state groundwater management legislation until 2014—they're seriously playing catch-up now. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/shopping-for-water-how-the-market-can-mitigate-water-shortages-in-the-american-west/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/shopping-for-water-how-th... [2] https://archive.is/JGUe2 https://archive.is/JGUe2
phkahler 3y ago
So farmers engineer land so that heavy rain will run off into streams, rivers, and ultimately cause flooding someplace in Iowa. This is of course to prevent flooding the fields and drowning crops. Then they pump ground water to water crops when there isn't enough rain. What we need is a way to store the runoff and get it into the ground. This would likely require some land use, and a bit of money to set up, for little immediate benefit.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Soil carbon. It’s called soil carbon.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Cisterns and lakes are not exactly new. The issue is that you need to take somebody’s land to do it, and no one wants to be the one to lose so everyone else wins. Interestingly this is also happening at the micro level in urban areas with bioswales the size of parking spaces.
mcswell 3y ago
Off topic: Why do people feel compelled to start what they say with "So"? I find it very annoying. And get off my lawn.
- crtified 3y ago
  :) I'd advise you to not spend too much time sweating the small stuff, my friend. Not least because 'being annoyed' is not a fun state-of-being. <hastily leaps backward off of lawn, narrowly avoiding thrown materials>
totetsu 3y ago
Reminds me of this project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project
EricE 3y ago
They could do more by just not growing water intensive crops like almonds in a desert.

129 points by Hooke 3y ago

Permeable pavement sounds interesting, and I wonder how safe it is (the bottom of the fractional-distillation barrel might have fewer volatiles but do we want more surface area of the stuff to come into contact with water?) and how quickly it gets clogged. Also, beavers: they're great at slowing the flow of water across a landscape, giving the water time to recharge aquifers. We'll need to address how we use land, though, to make room for these engineers to do their thing.

dylan604 3y ago
My concern for urban permeable pavement is all of the chemicals that would be absorbed with it. Same with the forced injection of water back into an aquifer. I was under the impression that the water being pulled through the ground is a filtering process so that the water in the aquifer is clean.
- myshpa 3y ago
  > the water ... filtering process ... the water in the aquifer is clean Clean(er) ... maybe ... nowadays nitrates, pesticides/herbicides, pfas/pfoas, industrial chemicals (solvents, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds), pharmaceuticals (prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications), lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium (through industrial activities, mining operations, and improper waste disposal), chlorinated solvents, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), all were detected in the groundwater. Nothing is "clean" anymore. Not the arctic, not the tops of the mountains in the natural reserves, not the remote islands, not the deep underground.
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    Such a depressing truth, I feel like cancer and other illnesses are completely unavoidable for the younger generation

maerF0x0 3y ago

Requiring farms to have ponds/wells could be a way to create a distributed solution. Joel Salatin has been teaching about the value of ponds for decades now. for example here's a video of him talking about ponds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o82ar51eIsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o82ar51eIsE This will require the water boards to rethink things like not allowing capture of rainwater/flow. The evaporation of ponds becomes somewhere else's rainwater (potentially further inland creating a virtuous cycle). And you can use depth to control the capture vs evaporation ratio -- deeper ponds evaporate slower and hold more precipitation. But this all goes against our very reductionistic thinking -- this quarter section is for corn, nothing else.

ganoushoreilly 3y ago
Owning property with a pond has it's own issues. In many of those farms run off can be detrimental. We have a 3/4 an acre pond and while we don't farm anywhere near it, the few springs that feed it all touch a lot of farm lands. So far we're lucky, but just a quarter mile down the road, our neighbors have a pond that won't sustain life, which we suspect is due to runoff from their crops. There's also the issue of excess evaporation and creating unusable land. There's solutions out there but they're not all cut and dry with just placing ponds.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Would organic farming help here? Seems like there are studies [1] showing nitrate leaching is less with it. Probably reducing cattle/chicken counts too, as those shit pits are a big source of it. 1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880920301493 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...
  - ganoushoreilly 3y ago
    Oh most definitely it would, but you run into trade offs with production / productivity. That's at least what most of my local farmer friends argue. We proactively add some good bacteria to our ponds monthly to reduce waste by products and things as well, so it's possible that they could fix some of the biome issues.

onecommentman 3y ago

Albuquerque has been doing this since 2007. “More ambitiously, however, the Water Authority in 2007 initiated a pilot program for aquifer storage and recovery, in which a small amount of San Juan-Chama water was released into the Bear Canyon arroyo and tracked to see if it reached the aquifer. Results were positive, and the Water Authority is moving forward with plans to recharge the aquifer on a larger scale. We will be using direct injection as well as infiltration to get the water into the aquifer. We hope to put up to 40,000 acre-feet back into the aquifer in the first couple of years. After that, we will continue to add purified San Juan-Chama water to the aquifer primarily during winter months when demand is low.“ https://www.abcwua.org/education-23b_Recharge/ https://www.abcwua.org/education-23b_Recharge/

jubjubbird 3y ago
Speaking of Albuquerque, this just-published paper shows how measuring the change in acceleration due to gravity can be used to map aquifer storage change. Importation of San Juan River water has made a big difference. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413
- fghorow 3y ago
  Microgravity surveying is great for this and other geo applications. I know of many geothermal fields mapped the same way to monitor fluid level and steam migration. Good stuff!

sb8244 3y ago

I very much enjoy this type of article or videos on similar subjects. Another source that has been very entertaining / educational for me is "Practical Engineering" Youtube channel. Looked it up and there's a great video from him about wells & aquifers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG19b06NG_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG19b06NG_w

AlbertCory 3y ago

CA is on a very short fuse to do this, since there's all that snow from the winter that's melting or about to. I've been wondering about that myself. What I would like to see is the gross numbers: what percent of this year's precipitation is going to flow into the ocean? Anyone?

nawgz 3y ago
Given that all the snow at Tahoe will flow into Truckee river and evaporate in Nevada... Can't imagine it's that high a percentage, to be honest.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Snowpack is a huge deal in California, as around 30% of the state's water comes from snowmelt in the Sierras. They don't track it for funsies: https://cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.action https://cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.action
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Thanks. Is there an aggregate number CA somewhere? "CA" == amount of precipitation remaining in California, in one form or another. i.e. CA = total - ocean - NV - AZ - OR - evaporation - other
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  The Sierra nevada mountain range has two sides. The vast majority of snowmelt runs downhill into California. The is more to the mountain range than Tahoe and more to the river system than the Truckee. You can take a look at the California river system to get a sense of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California#/media/File:California_rivers.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California#/... Not many rivers flow east and the truckee is failrly small. The annual flow from the Truckee is 303,240 acre-feet, which is about %1 of the Sacramento river

Throw73849 3y ago

Some projects are pumping CO2 underground to reduce global warming. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Maybe we could use some of that money and equipment, to pump water underground!

vkou 3y ago
The greenhouse coefficient of water vapour is, pound-for-pound, about one hundredth that of CO2. There's also no meaningful amount of water that can be sequestered, given there's about 10^18 tonnes of it in the world's oceans.
- Throw73849 3y ago
  It may be still more efficient to pump water underground. Isolating CO2 is very energy intensive, for the same amount of energy we may isolate 100x more H2O. Sometimes it even condenses spontaneously! There is also huge amount of natural CO2, single vulcano eruption... It is about reducing green house gas emissions generated by humans. And there are many artificial lakes, fields and forests that generate huge footprint on water vapour..
  - qzw 3y ago
    Clippy: It looks like you’re trying to turn Earth into Arrakis. Would you like some help with that? More seriously though, as the effects of climate change intensify, I think it’s all but inevitable we’ll have to seriously look at manipulating whatever environmental factors we can in order to counteract the worst of them. Maybe we can’t do much about the sea level rise, but maybe it would be possible to moderate storm and drought/flooding intensities. As you pointed out, water vapor levels may be one of the easier things we could manipulate, as least on a local or regional scale.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    Ignoring all the other problems with that, there is also nearly 100x more water in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and roughly 10000x more water in the oceans than the atmosphere. Do you expect sequestering H2O to have a significant impact on the amount in the atmosphere before you dry up the oceans, whence it is evaporating?

Dig1t 3y ago

For further reading on aquifers I highly recommend https://www.edwardsaquifer.net https://www.edwardsaquifer.net It's run by a scientist in Texas and has an amazing wealth of information on the aquifers of Texas. I never thought I would find a subject like this interesting until I read this guy's site. Texas has been managing aquifers for a long time, there's a rich history behind their management, and reading about this stuff has been the only way I've found to make geology interesting. Many of the lessons learned and policies employed in Texas likely would be very useful in California.

mech422 3y ago
Phoenix is the same way. They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular (PHX sits on top of an underground lake) they use huge 'ponds' to let the water soak back into the aquifer.
- hosh 3y ago
  We have to. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights agreement among the states drawing from the Colorado River. I see a lot of water harvesting structures here, often in the form of parks and greenways.
  - genmud 3y ago
    That’s actually not true, IIRC per capita we are actually better off than California and Nevada. Edit: Just looked it up and california gets about 5 million acre feet (maf), AZ gets about 2.8maf and Nevada only gets 0.3maf. So per capita, AZ is doing pretty well allocation-wise.
    - hosh 3y ago
      When I said, “bottom of the water rights”, I mean that the other states has senior water rights, not allocation per capita. When there is not enough water, priority goes to those holding senior water rights. (Complicating this is that various tribal nations have water rights senior to the states, and it is only now affecting allocations)

pgrote 3y ago

Aquifers are intriguing. They are so large a person has a hard time realizing over a period of time how the land is affected when they are tapped. Subsidence is hard to wrap your head around. San Joaquin Valley is a good example. https://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/local-news/san-joaquin-valley-sinks-droughts/ https://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/local-news/san-joaquin-... https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subsidence-us-levels-1925-and-1977 https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
The water users sucked up $500M worth of water infrastructure - that 250k people are likely to pay for - $2000 per person. As long as greedy people have this option, they're going to take it. The solution is not hoping people start thinking sustainably. It's doing something to prevent people from putting expensive externalities onto others.

aurizon 3y ago

I have often felt the ogallala aquifer could be recharged by diverting some of the great lakes spring runoff into the Atlantic via canals as well as via one of the many gravel buried moraines that connect with and now recharge the ogallala. Not sure how this would affect the Atlantic, but 5-10% of it would go a long way to help the lowering of the Ogallala over the pat 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

thescriptkiddie 3y ago

I wonder if this could help Venice with its subsidence problem.

maCDzP 3y ago

This is pretty common where I live. We take water from the river and replenish the aquifers. Why do it manually you ask? We have thick layer of impermeable dirt that prevents natural infiltration.

SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago

Some regions in India with wet and dry seasons have been successfully doing this for some time now. Interestingly, the very high precipitation during the wet season allowed them to achieve improvement without megaprojects, instead focusing on outreach campaigns to teach many small farmers to build recharge wells and water slowing features (frequent small dams) on runoff streams on their land to foster ground absorption during the wet season.

hosh 3y ago
Slowing down water is the key and there are many design patterns that achieve this. You don’t even need to build structures (like when we envision with the word “dam”). Even digging a small trench that follows contours in the upland helps water infiltrate into the ground. The dirt you dig out can be piled up as a bearm. The permaculture community the world over has been putting these design patterns for decades now, and they drew from ideas found in pre-modern societies. Brad Lancaster wrote an excellent multi-volume book about water harvesting structures, including taking into account erosion and silt deposit patterns, and working with plants. He calls it “planting the rain”. It doesn’t have to be in places with wet and dry seasons. In much of temperate climates of the US, beavers modified the flow of the rivers such that the surface water was able to meander a much greater surface than the main flow of the river. It supported the trees and vegetation, which in turn formed habitat.
- modriano 3y ago
  I came across an excellent permaculture YouTuber (who is also a professor at Oregon State (I think) and is incredible at drawing diagrams) [0]. Incidentally, based on his videos on the power of plants to filter out things as toxic as heavy metals and some biological wastes [1], I'm very concerned that the "injection well" idea for filling aquifers could result in contaminating the aquifer. Filtering through earth and active ecosystems seems like an important step in recharging aquifers safely. [0] https://youtu.be/7fFXJ3G49pY https://youtu.be/7fFXJ3G49pY [1] https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg
  - 3y ago

gaoshan 3y ago

In the case of a place like Florida, parts of the gigantic aquifer that extends under that State and up in Georgia get backfilled by brackish water once depleted below a certain level and this effectively destroys it, preventing refilling or refreshing because of the salt content that gets introduced.

walleeee 3y ago
yes, this is commonly called saltwater intrusion and is a serious problem https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/saltwater-intrusion#overview https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...

indus 3y ago

There is a California-specific law called the Subdivision Map Act that requires cities/counties to have provisions for parks when approving new subdivisions and housing. The specifics of this is super convoluted and left to the interpretation of the city and its planning done at the county. What would be amazing is to add a certain percentage to lakes and ponds when new parks are created--and not just green field. Hope someone can lead and get this amended.

lief79 3y ago
Surface water in the desert ... that could easily backfire. I think a related idea that might be more appropriate is requiring drainage areas that slow water flow and increase absorption.

0ct4via 3y ago

https://archive.is/R7KQU https://archive.is/R7KQU

ChiCityRanger 3y ago

The article needlessly mentions the Murzuk-Djado Basin and the Arabian Basin as having "little hope of recharging", when the very study it cites shows that the Murzuk-Djado basin as being less stressed than the California basin it talks about. I hate how American Exceptionalism always creeps its way into everything regardless how benign the topic seems. It's like she's trying to say "hey, we've got it bad but at least we're not as backwards as those mOsLeM countries". here's the study for those interested: https://news.uci.edu/2015/06/16/a-third-of-the-worlds-biggest-groundwater-basins-are-in-distress/ https://news.uci.edu/2015/06/16/a-third-of-the-worlds-bigges...

Permit 3y ago
> It's like she's trying to say "hey, we've got it bad but at least we're not as backwards as those mOsLeM countries". Nope, it’s not like that at all.
- ChiCityRanger 3y ago
  I could be wrong. It's likely that my characterization was not her intent. That said, even the most well meaning individual in the "west" has this implicit bias against the "non west" that it just gets everywhere and you see it everywhere.
  - whiskeytuesday 3y ago
    You see it everywhere, I see it occasionally.
pdabbadabba 3y ago
As a general matter, I hear you. But in this case I think your objections are misplaced: it actually agrees with you that the California basis is more stressed, but also is the subject of an ambitious plan to recharge it (which may or may not succeed) which is the topic of the article. It also blames the stress on the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins on climate change which, to me, places the blame more on the U.S. than on 'backwards muslims.' Here's the full passage: > Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage. In any case, it's actually pretty fascinating how a few sentences about aquifers can draw out these issues. And, to your point, I would certainly not be shocked to learn that there are ambitious plans to recharge the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins that this article overlooks.

w10-1 3y ago

The numbers and interest could change significantly if desalinization membranes could target multi-stage high-volume applications. Or using overland solar tunnels: roofed with solar arrays, the bottom of which would be cooled to condense the evaporation from the water.

clord 3y ago

Trees and grazing animals collaboratively replenish aquifers. Meadows, being porous, guide moisture downwards, preventing floods and evaporation. Animal droppings enhance soil bioactivity, boosting water capture. Moreover, this process, free of fossil fertilizers, sequesters carbon. Areas abandoning cattle operations or imposing 're-wilding' often face desertification and flooding. Similarly, grain plantations that exclude animals share this issue. I've personally seen a parched, over-fertilized grain field transform into a vibrant savannah with natural springs within five years due to herd migration. The soil is now a joy to walk on, spongey and soft. Next farm over they still plant grains, and it's hard-pan and salted.

ajb 3y ago

This remind me of Aubrey Jaffer's story about his father making 'disposal wells' in Miami: https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells Because a lot of land got paved over, it was easily flooded, as the water couldn't make its way into the aquifer. Jaffer senior had a business digging wells, and discovered that they could also suck down the water in a flooded carpark, so added making plugholes for carparks to his business. Although in theory this replenishes the aquifer, I'm not sure that water off a carpark floor is these days considered clean enough to inject into the aquifer. I think I read somewhere that a lot of these injection wells had to be plugged, but now I can't find that.

mrbgty 3y ago
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to send water directly down a hole without getting filtered at all through layers of earth.

russellbeattie 3y ago

I think we should dig the California viaduct deeper. Make it one long lake. Or dig giant water holes all along it. All the excess water can just fill up the holes along its 700 mile length. No idea if it's practical(probably not), but watching all that water flow into the ocean this winter seemed like such a waste. The WRCB's plan is to store 600,000 acre feet of water which is 26,136,000,000 cubic feet. If we took 500 miles of viaduct (2,640,000 feet) at an average depth of 30 feet and average width of 40 feet ( = 3,168,000,000 cubic feet) and dug it 10x deeper, we'd be styling. I mean, a 300 foot trench along the middle of California is doable, right?

m_antis89 3y ago

Well – I refill an aquifier very simply so because I don't refill them.

cwmoore 3y ago
Nothing could be simpler.

walleeee 3y ago

While initiatives like these are important, it is also critical to rethink agricultural practice. California grows a number of thirsty crops under conditions which make little ecological sense. Reform must address the legal framework, incentives for farmers, and consumer habits and expectations upstream, as it were.

billbrown 3y ago
Pricing would also make a huge difference.[1] In general, though, California is a _mess_.[2] I mean, it didn't even have state groundwater management legislation until 2014—they're seriously playing catch-up now. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/shopping-for-water-how-the-market-can-mitigate-water-shortages-in-the-american-west/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/shopping-for-water-how-th... [2] https://archive.is/JGUe2 https://archive.is/JGUe2

phkahler 3y ago

So farmers engineer land so that heavy rain will run off into streams, rivers, and ultimately cause flooding someplace in Iowa. This is of course to prevent flooding the fields and drowning crops. Then they pump ground water to water crops when there isn't enough rain. What we need is a way to store the runoff and get it into the ground. This would likely require some land use, and a bit of money to set up, for little immediate benefit.

hinkley 3y ago
Soil carbon. It’s called soil carbon.
bobthepanda 3y ago
Cisterns and lakes are not exactly new. The issue is that you need to take somebody’s land to do it, and no one wants to be the one to lose so everyone else wins. Interestingly this is also happening at the micro level in urban areas with bioswales the size of parking spaces.

mcswell 3y ago

Off topic: Why do people feel compelled to start what they say with "So"? I find it very annoying. And get off my lawn.

crtified 3y ago
:) I'd advise you to not spend too much time sweating the small stuff, my friend. Not least because 'being annoyed' is not a fun state-of-being. <hastily leaps backward off of lawn, narrowly avoiding thrown materials>

totetsu 3y ago

Reminds me of this project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project

EricE 3y ago

They could do more by just not growing water intensive crops like almonds in a desert.