Just because it’s been replaced doesn’t mean it’s a disaster. It might become a disaster if we stop using it for crops, but so long as the fast-food restaurants of the world needs that much corn and stockyard beef, it’s just differently-ecological.
Right up until the Oglala Aquifer is gone, then we all starve.
I was out that way last year. Went to some museum/sciency place. They noted that the Oglala Aquifer was something like the 6th great lake, just underground obviously. Since farming really took off out there the water table has been drained down something like 300 feet :eek: IIRC. Sounds like that water is going to run out sooner rather than later. I imagine what will happen eventually is that most of the land will be returned to a more natural state because you won’t have enough water for anything else and some small fraction of land will be irrigated by taking a tiny bit of “excess” water from the natural land.
Oh, and even as a lover of deserts, I gotta say very southeastern Colorado is one of the OMG crappy places I have ever seen.
Well, then I submit that burning down Amazonian rain forests for cropland isn’t an ongoing disaster. (It is, though.)
It’s funny how dismissive people are of ecosystems that aren’t sexy; not full of exotic, colorful flora and fauna, lots of trees, etc. “It’s just grass, plow it under.” “It’s not a disaster, we’re using it for farmland.” It’s a disaster from the perspective of the ecosystem. I assumed that’s what the OP had in mind.
Lake Karachay–Lake Of Atomic Death
You can’t even get near it, without dying.
Yes, it is.
In 25 years, by some estimates. The aquifer supplies 30% of the irrigation water and 80% of the drinking water in that very large area. Since the aquifer is probably paleo in origin (ice age), natural replenishment isn’t an option in the near term.
Many years ago, Walter Hickel - an Alaskan entrepreneur - advocated state investment in a water pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 states. He was laughed at.
Tell that to the kids who died of dust pneumonia in the 30’s.
Until I read that article I would have bet everything I owned that “exabecquerels” was not a word.
But hey (hay?), on the plus side, when we’re forced to convert it to grazing land, those of us who can still afford to eat will be able to have a lot of meat.
If we are talking about “eco-disasters” in terms of the impact upon human quality of life and habitation, the deforestation of Britain and much of Europe led to a sharp decline in the quality of life and nutrition in the late Medieval period. It was only the shift from wood and charcoal consumption to the mining of soft coal that averted a fuel crisis and allowed for industrialization. Similarly, the shift to potatoes and maize (“Indian corn”) versus traditional cereal “corn” crops (wheat, barley, rye) with lower caloric yields averted agricultural shortfalls, although from a nutritional standpoint those crops are less desirable.
Ground subsidence due to overconsumption of peat for fuel and drainage of peat grassland polders (large below grond reservoirs) for agriculture threatens the very existence of a significant portion of the Netherlands. The Dutch turned to peat as an energy resource after deforestation, and it powered the rise of the worldwide Dutch trading and colonial empire. However, once they ran out of peat (along with losses during the French Revolutionary wars) the fortunes of the empire declined to the point that most people don’t even think of the Dutch as having had an empire on the scale of Britain, Spain, or France.
The Oglala Aquifer has already been mentioned, but it is just one of many ongoing irrigation disasters, the most visible of which (aside from the Aral Sea) is the depletion and mishandling of the Ganges river resources and resulting damage to the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. Haiti is in bad shape, but Mexico City, however, is probably the world’s most concentrated urban disaster area; not only does it suffer from aquifer subsidence that threatens the foundation of the city and some of the worst urban air pollution levels in the world, but the biological and hazardous waste disposal problem around Mexico City defies conception.
However, the Aral Sea, along with deforestation of the Amazon, are the most evident ongoing disasters since the inception of satellite imagery, and so they get the most attention.
Stranger
Guiyu, China processes a lot of electronic waste; the place sounds pretty messed up.
There is a similar situation in Ghana.
I’d speculate that the deforestation and salinization (from irrigation) in the Fertile Crescent is a pretty big one.
North Africa / Sahara was mentioned, but was that caused by humans? I doubt it.
Deforestation of Southwest US by the Ansazi might be another one, though that might have merely hastened the inevitable.
The deforestation of Europe would be a big one but thanks to the climate and other factors, the trees grow back pretty quickly there. Not so lucky as the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which was clearcut to rebuild Chicago after the great fire; erosion precluded the great forests growing back.
The Aswan Dam almost made a mess of Egypt’s fragile Nile valley. They went from annual floods to irrigation for crops. However, even fresh water has residual levels of salt. IIRC, this is what, over millenia, has destroyed much of the fertile crescent. Pour water on the crops, it evaporttes, and the salt remains. Repeat as needed. Egypt escaped this problem because they have so much water (and a narrow valley) that they adopted the technique of overwatering so the salt is carried back out to the river and down to the sea, as it was with the Nile floods.
The habitual flooding of Venice (aqua alta) is a side effect of drawing groundwater. massive industrial quantities of water drawn from the aquifers in Mestre on the mainland cause ground subsidence, to the point where spring and fall high tides can result in a foot of two of water in St. Marks Square and other lower areas of town.
However, the Aral Sea has a special place as a disaster of immense magnitude. If you look at photos of the area now, they have a program underway to dam off the north end and try to get it to refill from the rivers. Supposedly the results while not miraculous, are at least promising.
Well I'm also agree with you.