9 ms·
California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
- stephengillie 12y agoAnd this means that soon, many of us will be eating food grown with 20,000 year old water.
- leppr 12y agoif water in bottles expires in a few years i can't even imagine how bad this unpackaged water will have turned. this is totaly outragous
- pyrocat 12y agopretty sure water in water bottles only 'expire' because of the plastic leaching into the water over time. "Unpackaged" water has been sitting in the earth for thousands of years, as evidenced by this article, and is perfectly safe to drink.
- jonnathanson 12y agoIn fairness, I think it's not so much the water as the bottles that go bad. That type of plastic is not easily biodegradable, but it is photosensitive, and it weakens over long-term exposure to light. As the bottles break down, they leach toxic chemicals into the water and also lose structural integrity.
- sergers 12y agoThat all started due to NJ state law requiring everything to have an expiry date. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/water-never-goes-bad-so-why-does-it-need-a-expiration-date-18718243/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/water-never-goes-ba...
- koberstein 12y agoYeah, they should really be using new water to water that new food. /s
- srameshc 12y agoWonder what it would be like 30 years from now with all the water problems.
- woodchuck64 12y agoJulian Simon: Bumping against any limit will increase the price of any resource in short supply, leading ingenious humans to find new supply sources or substitutes.
- bitJericho 12y agoNothing like paying $4/gallon for water.
- refurb 12y agoProbably as bad the population problems we have now that were hypothesized in the 1970s?
- ptaipale 12y agoInterestingly, in Asimov's Caves of Steel, the Earth was hopelessly overpopulated, with eight billion people! That book was published in 1954, and set in to future three thousand years ahead. Today, 61 years later, the population of Earth is 7.3 billion people, and there is little doubt that life with 8 billion people, in a decade from now, will not be dramatically different from what we live at the moment. There's some work to do in order to make it sustainable, but it's not such a disaster.
- nawitus 12y agoOne solution to producing water is desalination. You can effectively get unlimited amount of water, but you pay for it in energy. A quick Google search finds that there's a desalination plant under construction in Carlsbad, California.
- xasos 12y agoMIT Technology Review wrote a great article on this: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/533446/desalination-out-of-desperation/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/533446/desalin...
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThat is a good summary. A friend of mine is looking at putting a passive desalinator on the ocean floor off the coast of Monterey. Basically its a pipe with the permeable membrane surrounding the submerged collector. The pipe carries fresh water to the surface and as you pump out fresh water, the pressure of the ocean at depths of up to 1000 meters pushes in more water through the membranes, desalinating it in the process. The challenge (other than just building the darn thing) is whether or not the current flow is sufficient to keep the brine levels down around the intake port. I have no idea how practical that idea really is (he's pretty enthused of course) but I liked the notion of using the pressure difference between the ocean surface and at depths to do the reverse osmosis work for you.
- cma 12y agoHow does the membrane stay clean of marine growth?
- weaksauce 12y agohiring a diver or two to do that is probably cheaper than the alternative ways to desalinate.
- mattgrice 12y agothere is very little marine growth at 1000 meters depth. A bigger concern would be marine snow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_snow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_snow
- ck2 12y agoAll these companies are buying up rights to fresh water sources - it's like the next oil crisis. Maybe instead of the US invading other countries for oil we will have people coming to us for water.
- pyrocat 12y agoAll of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always kept green and watered. I guess it makes sense, a third of the population is 65+, they won't be around when the consequences of their unconscionable actions really hit.
- blhack 12y agoSounds like a lot of Phoenix.
- eyeareque 12y agoyou'd hope that the water they used was at least from waste water treatment plants.. however that water was fresh at one time, and used by a big city in the middle of the desert.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoAll water is fresh at one time...also, water tends to evaporate and come back as rain or snow, but it might go into the ocean where salinity is high and makes it uneconomical to extract back into something drinkable. And that is the problem: with the glaciers melting off, more fresh water winds up in the ocean, and we have to run energy-intensive desalination processes to get it back.
- anigbrowl 12y agoThat's infuriating. Agriculture is the main consumer of water in CA by a mile, but the sort of self-indulgence you describe sets a disproportionately bad example and avoidably confuses the issue.
- maratd 12y agoIt's easily resolved by properly pricing water. Tie the water price to rainfall and you've solved the entire problem. Let the market take care of it.
- tempestn 12y agoOne major problem that needs to be tackled is that much of California (and the world) is still using flood irrigation[1], which wastes massive amounts of water to runoff and evaporation. Fortunately this is starting to be tackled due to higher water costs and government subsidies. (But of course it's only part of the problem, and these subsidies carry some moral hazard[2]. Also, it's interesting to note that not all of the water "wasted" in less efficient methods of irrigation is actually wasted.[3]) [1] http://www.mullerranch.com/making_news/sacbee_drip_2_2014.html http://www.mullerranch.com/making_news/sacbee_drip_2_2014.ht... [2] http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2014/world/conserve-water-california-not-increase-supply/ http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2014/world/conserve-wa... [3] http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5942 http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5942
- jefurii 12y agoI was in the Central Valley the other week and asked my dad about these little tanks that had popped up on farms in the area. He told me they were part of new drip irrigation systems. So things are changing slowly.
- uptown 12y agoWater waste is everywhere. In deserts we water golf courses. In cities we hose down sidewalks to reduce dust and dirt. A huge percentage of the food we produce that uses water to generate gets disposed of. Then there's this: "Initial estimates are that when fully operational, the Utah NSA Data Center will use as much as 1.7 million gallons of water per day."
- ausjke 12y agoStrangely I am concerned about the dryness will more likely trigger an earthquake there. Can they somehow transport sea water to inland? if there is a need for that I'm sure CA will have some startup working on that.
- bronson 12y agoOnly if there's a social angle.
- tw04 12y agoAnd South Dakota is injecting toxic chemicals into theirs because "we won't ever need that water anyways".
- xbeta 12y agoReminds me of the film "Interstellar" with dust storm. And this is already happening every year in Beijing and its neighboring towns. Does this "bad" human cultural behavior push our scientific researcher further? It certainly does for the 200 yrs of technological advances.
- yeukhon 12y agoWell desertification is a very interesting problem. But basically there is natural desertification and there is accelerated desertification caused by the growth of population (misuse of lands, overuse of farm lands, deforestation, rapid growth of population, etc). In northern part of China, the government and locals plant trees to slow down and even able to recover lands from desertification. But the progress is slow... although South America is still full of trees, scientists are already seeing rapid desertification because we are destroying the nature.
- IndianAstronaut 12y agoOur appetite for beef is causing the destruction of forests. If we could tone down our meat consumption, we stand a chance to save tue environment.
- ptaipale 12y agoThe dust storms are not just in Beijing and neighbouring towns; it is a geological phenomenon which has been happening on a geological time-scale, over millions of years. All of the North China Plain, home to many many millions of people, is a result of silt land blowing from the dry Asian inland - Gobi Desert - and then being washed down by the Yellow River, forming an alluvial plain. The dust storms are not nice, but they are not really man-made, although man's actions may have worsened them a little (and now man is trying to help out a little bit, although once again, what you can do about is quite small in scale).
- yeukhon 12y agoNot a secret. Scientists have already found that there are more water underneath the deep earth of Earth if you just search "water under earth". However, digging is very hard. But essentially deep in the Earth there are copious amount of water.