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In general I understand and agree with your point. With respect to recharging aquifers, climate change can have an effect in two ways: 1) Some plants are far b

In general I understand and agree with your point. With respect to recharging aquifers, climate change can have an effect in two ways: 1) Some plants are far better at recharging aquifers than others (indeed, some will basically prevent aquifer recharge). Climate change, along with probably the more significant human element here, will affect what plants grow here. 2) Rainfall. https://climate.k-state.edu/precip/county/ https://climate.k-state.edu/precip/county/ I'm not seeing huge changes over the last 129 years, so maybe this really isn't affecting recharge of the aquifer from Kansas at least. Some parts of the aquifer seem to be recharging well. I know that Texas has some recharge locations, but I wonder what Nebraska is doing right. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/national-climate-assessment-great-plains%E2%80%99-ogallala-aquifer-drying-out https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
It's my understanding that there's no meaningful way we can recharge the aquifers: > Aquifers hold water in between bits of sand, gravel, or clay. When the amount of clay in an aquifer is particularly high, the grains arrange themselves like plates thrown haphazardly in a sink—they’ve basically got random orientations, and the water fills in the spaces between the grains. But if you start extracting water from an aquifer, those spaces collapse and the grains draw closer together. “Those plates rearrange themselves into more like a stack of dinner plates that you put in your cupboard,” says Sneed. “It takes a lot less space, obviously, to stack the plates that way. And so that's the compaction of the aquifer system that then results in land subsidence at the surface.” > > But wouldn’t pumping more water back into the aquifer force the clay plates back to their random, spacey orientations? Unfortunately, no. “It'll press those grains apart a little bit—you'll get a little bit of expansion in the aquifer system represented as uplift on the land surface. But it's a tiny amount,” says Sneed. We’re talking maybe three quarters of an inch of movement. “They're still stacked like the plates in your cupboard,” she continues. https://www.wired.com/story/the-ongoing-collapse-of-the-worlds-aquifers/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-ongoing-collapse-of-the-worl...
- anonymouskimmer 2y ago
  Yeah, you'd preferably want to recharge it before the land subsides. But even if you don't it's best to try to maintain the current levels than let them decrease even more.
- mturmon 2y ago
  This is an important point, and true insofar as it goes (because the discussion you quote is about clay). But not all aquifers are clay. The ones that are composed of coarser material are more stable. Like a lot of Earth science, it's complicated. But, yes, once clay has compacted, it's not reversible and that natural storage space has been lost.
mechagodzilla 2y ago
Increased temperatures also affect evaporation rates (and hence how much watering needs to be done). Climate change and the future of farming are pretty intimately connected.

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago

It's my understanding that there's no meaningful way we can recharge the aquifers: > Aquifers hold water in between bits of sand, gravel, or clay. When the amount of clay in an aquifer is particularly high, the grains arrange themselves like plates thrown haphazardly in a sink—they’ve basically got random orientations, and the water fills in the spaces between the grains. But if you start extracting water from an aquifer, those spaces collapse and the grains draw closer together. “Those plates rearrange themselves into more like a stack of dinner plates that you put in your cupboard,” says Sneed. “It takes a lot less space, obviously, to stack the plates that way. And so that's the compaction of the aquifer system that then results in land subsidence at the surface.” > > But wouldn’t pumping more water back into the aquifer force the clay plates back to their random, spacey orientations? Unfortunately, no. “It'll press those grains apart a little bit—you'll get a little bit of expansion in the aquifer system represented as uplift on the land surface. But it's a tiny amount,” says Sneed. We’re talking maybe three quarters of an inch of movement. “They're still stacked like the plates in your cupboard,” she continues. https://www.wired.com/story/the-ongoing-collapse-of-the-worlds-aquifers/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-ongoing-collapse-of-the-worl...

anonymouskimmer 2y ago
Yeah, you'd preferably want to recharge it before the land subsides. But even if you don't it's best to try to maintain the current levels than let them decrease even more.
mturmon 2y ago
This is an important point, and true insofar as it goes (because the discussion you quote is about clay). But not all aquifers are clay. The ones that are composed of coarser material are more stable. Like a lot of Earth science, it's complicated. But, yes, once clay has compacted, it's not reversible and that natural storage space has been lost.

mechagodzilla 2y ago

Increased temperatures also affect evaporation rates (and hence how much watering needs to be done). Climate change and the future of farming are pretty intimately connected.