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Scientists Discover Underground Water Vault in Oregon 3x the Size of Lake Mead
- cedws 2y agoAny life down there?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DueDilligence 2y ago[dead]
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- delichon 2y ago3x the capacity of Lake Mead is about 9x the current Lake Mead.
- cwalv 2y agoOr .75x the capacity of lake tahoe
- gosub100 2y ago... Olympic-sized swimming pools...
- wood_spirit 2y agoAha The Registers standard units! There is even a converter: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...
- awinter-py 2y agookay but it is water instead of mead? would prefer mead
- Aloisius 2y ago81 teraliters according to the article.
- ethbr1 2y agoI have no idea what that means. How many Lake Meads is that equivalent to, for reference?
- bradgessler 2y agoI want to know in units of lake Tahoe’s
- Azerty9999 2y agoI thought you were joking and I laughed, but then I read the article and it says "It also holds more than half the volume of Lake Tahoe".. hmmm..
- bradgessler 2y agoI’ll trade you 18 lake Tahoe’s for one Lake Michigan.
- ethbr1 2y agoMichigan's alright, but there are superior lakes out there.
- bradgessler 2y agoIt’s very Erie when you say it that way.
- ethbr1 2y agoWhat are you trying to say? Wanna fight about it? Because I've got eleven fingers worth of lakes that say different.
- araes 2y agoAnybody have the actual paper? Found the actual publication in PNAS [1] and the author's page that has some of the prior work on lava zones [2], just not much about the actual paper or water reservoir area they're discussing. Looks like it went to conference back in 2023. Be nice if these folks had a pre-print server like Arxiv... [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415155122 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415155122 [2] https://pages.uoregon.edu/leif/markdown/ https://pages.uoregon.edu/leif/markdown/
- SpicyUme 2y agoMaking a guess reading the article, I'd say near Clear Lake, possibly as far south as Waldo lake and as far north as Breitenbush hotsprings. Although it looks like the claim is that similar amounts of water could be found under other regions in the Cascades. Both lakes are very deep and impressively clear, Clear lake has trees at the bottom that were killed in the creation of the lake when the volcano nearby erupted relatively recently.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoOh yes, measuring things in Lake Meads. What is that even the only lake in California or something?
- x3n0ph3n3 2y agoIt straddles the Nevada/Arizona border and sits behind Hoover Dam.
- alemanek 2y agoWhen you get to a certain volume you are required to use Lake Meads instead of Olympic Swimming pools as the unit of measurement. Look I don’t make the rules.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fuzztester 2y agoIt's like light-years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-year
- rich_sasha 2y agoWhat it is as a multiple of the size of Wales? Or how many storeys of a building? I'm lost without sensible units.
- NikkiA 2y ago> Or how many storeys of a building? 19, but only if you start with a ground floor
- x______________ 2y ago> 19, but only if you start with a ground floor With ground floor starting at 0 like in North America or at 1 as they have it in Europe? Bonus: How do you call an elevator in Japan? You press the button.
- jdlyga 2y ago...and it's gone!
- suzzer99 2y agoI think I speak for all LA residents when I say - DIBS!
- kelseyfrog 2y agoI can't wait to exploit it :>
- 1propionyl 2y agoWould have been better to not admit it was there or have hidden it. The last things we need are more clean water reserves sucked dry by Intel rather than it focusing on guaranteeing its own supplies through other means, or used as excuses for Southern California not to continue its (admittedly in some counties admirable) efforts to get water resource management under control in concert with other states in the watersheds. Resource curse.
- pkulak 2y agoThe fresh water that the PNW currently has access to is mind boggling. If it even comes close to being scarce, the whole world is probably in trouble. We irrigate millions of acres with the Columbia, and it’s still the largest river to hit the Pacific once it gets there. Every city gets their drinking water from their own personal watershed. No one needs to bother sucking water up from far below ground.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoFrom a per capita perspective you are probably correct, but there are a ton of people in eastern OR & WA that live within a few miles of the river and still have domestic wells into endangered aquifers. Additionally, there are a lot of farmers with ground water rights (ie wells) and not a ton with surface water rights (ie rivers).
- westurner 2y agoTIL semiconductor manufacturing uses a lot of water, relative to other production processes? And energy, for photolithography. (Edit: nanoimprint lithography may have significantly lower resource requirements than traditional lithography? https://arstechnica.com/reviews/2024/01/canon-plans-to-disrupt-chipmaking-with-low-cost-stamp-machine/ https://arstechnica.com/reviews/2024/01/canon-plans-to-disru... : "will be “one digit” cheaper and use up to 90 percent less power" ) Datacenters too; "Next-generation datacenters consume zero water for cooling" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376406 Most datacenters have no way to return their boiled, sterilized water for water treatment, and so they don't give or sell datacenter waste water back, it takes heat with it when it is evaporated. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454547#42460317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454547#42460317 : > FWIU, datacenters are unable to sell their waste heat, boiled sterilized steam and water, unused diesel, and potentially excess energy storage. "Ask HN: How to reuse waste heat and water from AI datacenters?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952
- andrewstuart 2y agoWill now be exploited.
- 015a 2y agoThis meme does not miss [1]. > There is a global resource shortage. > Authoritarian state on the other side of the planet controls it. > US is finished. > American farmer in the middle of nowhere US discovers the largest supply of said resource known to mankind. > Repeat. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1e77yxp/it_keeps_happening_lol/ https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1e77yxp/it_keep...
- insane_dreamer 2y agoand how does this apply to water?
- bagels 2y agoWe do keep finding new bodies of water. Unfortunately, they come in the form of hurricanes.
- westurner 2y agoHow did it form? How does it affect tectonics on the western coast of the US? Cascade Range > Geology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Range#Geology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Range#Geology https://www.sci.news/othersciences/geophysics/hikurangi-water-reservoir-12323.html https://www.sci.news/othersciences/geophysics/hikurangi-wate... : > Revealed by 3D seismic imaging, the newly-discovered [Hikirangi] water reservoir lies 3.2 km (2 miles) under the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand, where it may be dampening a major earthquake fault that faces the country’s North Island. The fault is known for producing slow-motion earthquakes, called slow slip events. These can release pent-up tectonic pressure harmlessly over days and weeks The "Slow earthquake" wikipedia article mentions the northern Cascades as a research area of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_earthquake They say water has a fingerprint; a hydrochemical and/or a geochemical footprint? Is the water in the reservoir subducted from the surface or is it oozing out of the Earth? "Dehydration melting at the top of the lower mantle" (2014) https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1253358 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1253358 : > Summary: [...] Schmandt et al. combined seismological observations beneath North America with geodynamical modeling and high-pressure and -temperature melting experiments. They conclude that the mantle transition zone — 410 to 660 km below Earth's surface — acts as a large reservoir of water.
- johnea 2y agoAwesome! In 4 or 5 years we should be able to drain that and let the aquifer collapse! +1 for gratuitous consumption!