Interesting New York Times article about groundwater depletion in the U.S. (they did a serious statistical analysis). Someone posted a gift link:
Look at this image:
I previously thought this was only a problem in the West [Ogallala aquifer for example] and that the East had plenty of rain–but see the Arkansas/Mississippi area and along the East Coast and elsewhere.
I’ve not heard anything about it in Arkansas, save for the Mississippi having shallow stretches around Memphis. They have been dredging the Arkansas for as long as I can remember.
The era of free water is just about over. There are too many people on this planet to survive without some form of reclamation and desalination - along with conservation and a lot more efficiency.
And getting rid of lawns.
Reducing/eliminating lawns.
Golf Courses.
Switch to far more direct irrigation.
Build Solar Panels over open water canals to reduce evaporation and generate energy.
Changing basically dumb agricultural practices that are water intensive in arid regions.
Ending Almond Milk, the poster child for water wasting.
Keep upgrading old toilets for less wasteful ones.
The big water wastes are poor agriculture usage, lawns, golf courses (giant under utilized lawn)
We don’t have any in these parts. We depend on rain water and snow melt. It doesn’t look like all the regions depleting ground water have to be dependent on it. They’ve just been taking advantage of it for a long time and in the good old American way aren’t going to do anything about it as long as it’s available.
How much water do golf courses use in the United States as compared to, say, showers? Manufacturing? I’d like to see that data, but I would guestimate that “golf course in Las Vegas bad” but “golf course in mid-Michigan who gives a crap?”
In a sense, ground water like that isn’t any different than fossil fuels, in that practically speaking, there’s a limited amount of the resource in the ground that can be used in a human time scale (ISTR that it’s a 6000 year recharge timeon the Ogalalla aquifer).
Everyone just makes the erroneous assumption that rainfall elsewhere replenishes it somehow. Which is true, but it’s on a timescale of thousands of years.
The vast majority of groundwater use (or water in general) is agricultural. For example, here in Texas, all the big cities use surface water. That big orange blob in the Panhandle is all agricultural, and in the absence of that ground water, will mean that a large part of it ends up becoming ranch land or growing some sort of crops that are lower water or that align better with the seasonal rainfall there.
Why?
(More specifically, is having a lawn a problem, or just watering it?)
It is the watering mainly. Same issue with Golf Courses. Golf Courses work well enough in wet locals, but where the require constant watering should be done away with. Same with lawns. Grow what wants to grow in the climate.
What pisses me off is to see sprinklers going full blast-in a driving rain. Rain sensors for sprinkler systems have been available for decades now, so there’s no excuse not to install them. My former Florida apt. complex did that (as in didn’t have sensors), drove me crazy each time.
Anecdotally, I’m guessing my nephew and niece that live with us use roughly the same amount of water showering as needed for a 9-hole course in this area.
That patch in Arkansas and Mississippi is cotton/rice country. Cotton is not only a thirsty crop, but it needs water at specific points in the growing season. Rice, of course, grows in wet fields, and they have to be irrigated for the same reason.A lot of growers irrigate their fields as a matter of course.
Also, sandy soils and “shotgun” clay (like other areas in the South) just don’t retain water, and irrigation is necessary to get a good crop in those places, as well.
Do we do anything to get the water we use back in the ground to refill the aquifers instead of letting it run off into rivers and the ocean?
Thanks. “Getting rid of lawns” makes me think “pave the Earth.”
The sobering part of the article is the diminishing supply of drinking water. When towns and counties and states start being unable to provide drinking water, all those people are gonna want to move elsewhere, which means first urban, then northern migration. Gigantic logistical problem looms.
And what wants to grow here is grass. I need to constantly weed any other ground cover to keep the grass down.
I wouldn’t grow a lawn in a place where it needed regular watering. But it’s one of the easiest and least thirsty things i can grow here.
At least Long Island, NY is somewhat misleading. LI has mostly 3 aquifers. The top most is unfortunately contaminated and thus not used and somewhat protecting the other 2. The second one is the one most of the island used (Raritan aquifer) which might be depleting, but the deepest one (Lyoid), which is only tapped in a few places mostly where the Raritan does not reach, has a water catchment basin that goes deep into Canada and has something like 1000 years of water if we use it at our current peak usage continuously and if it never rained again. Practically all of that water in the Lyoid aquifer feeds into the Atlantic Ocean deep off the continental shelf and easily could supply all of LI.
You want to be careful when doing this as you can end up putting large amounts of toxic “forever chemicals” into the groundwater:
Today, the New York Times has an article (gift link) on how in 2021 (during a drought) Minnesota farmers drew down groundwater in excess of what was permitted by the state.