Seriously. And I don’t mean after it goes down the drain and recycled by treatment facilities. It’s not as if it all evaporates and rains into the nearest undrinkable ocean, or splits into hydrogen and oxygen during digestion. Here in California water shaming is huge-- a single almond “uses” a gallon of water, a burger 660 (hey my gf made me watch Cowspiracy), but I can’t find any info on the internet. I get that there are over seven billion of us human water bottles, plus livestock… and trees… but where is all this water going that won’t rain back on us again?
Most people I’ve talked to don’t even know that water is recycled, or never thought about it. They think once water goes down the toilet it’s gone for good.
And maybe you run in particularly ignorant circles, but in the rest of the world “uses so and so an amount of water” means “requires this amount of the available fresh water resources in this particular region”. Are you sure the people you’ve talked to don’t understand the water cycle and it’s not just that you’re asking them a malformed question that’s not particularly relevant to the drought situation?
First point to realise is that a lot of water didn’t “rain on us” in the first place. it came from out of the ground. While that groundwater will be replaced by rainfall eventually, that eventually will be anything up to half a million years. Using in 50 years a volume of water that will take 500, 000 years to replace may not be wise.
Even for surface water, if you take all the water out of the Colorado river, the river becomes a gully downstream, and all the people, animals and plants that rely on it die. It doesn’t matter if that water falls again as rain in the exact same catchment, because the water will be taken again. IOW, it’s important whether the water falls again as rain. the important point is that it isn’t flowing where it should flow. It can rain all it wants. If you don’t allow the streams to flow to the ocean anyhting that depends on the existence of those streams will die.
[QUOTE=Mr Micawber]
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.
[/QUOTE]
The water cycle is much like the money cycle. If the precipitation (rain and snow) on California is X megalitres of fresh water, and California uses X + Y megalitres, then something has to give. Either groundwater is used up, or California has to import water, or it has to convert seawater or wastewater to fresh water.
The water we drink has been around a LONG time. If somehow scientists could find a way to “read” its history it might find out that that glass of water has been at one time;
In a glacier.
Flowed thru an underground stream
A dinosaur once swam in it.
A fish drank it.
It has been a cloud several times.
There’s estimates that any glass of water you drink in London has been drunk by and passed through at least seven others: I should imagine much the same is true in New York or Chicago or any other major conurbation.
Only Blake’s post so far has focused on the key part of the OP: in California. California is different from many places in that it consumes vastly more water than falls on it as rain. That’s why water “used” in California won’t be replaced by natural rainfall as part of the water cycle.
California gets this extra water, as Blake indicated, by draining underground aquifers that took a long time to accumulate, and by taking water from surrounding jurisdictions such as the Colorado River, something its neighbors are not always happy about.
Just to make another point explicit that the OP jumped past …
The total supply of water in the world is constant. The total supply of *fresh surface *water is more or less constant, net of humans draining lakes, which is happening in many areas.
The total supply of *fresh ground *water was more or less constant up to a couple hundred years ago when people started pumping it out. And since then this one-time supply is being consumed at many, many times the rate it’s being replenished. For most practical purposes we can consider ground water to be a onetime bucket which we’re rapidly draining and once it’s gone it won’t be coming back.
And as **Sailboat **said, California is one of the places in the US where annual consumption is greatly exceeding the actual annual rainfall. The US desert southwest as a whole, much of Africa, the Middle East, and much of China also fall into this category. In other words, where about 2/3rds of humanity live.
So to answer the OP’s questions explicitly:
Where does the (fresh) water go? To the ocean, to be converted to mostly-useless salt water.
Where does the (fresh) water come from? A few percent comes from always-replenishing rain. A big percent comes from one-time draining of irreplaceable ground water. A big percent comes from one-time melting of non-replaceable snowpack & glaciers. A big percent comes from consuming current rainwater and non-replaceable snowpack, glaciers, & ground water that’s in other states or countries who now want that water for themselves since they too now have large populations.
It is absolutely not true that “California is different from many places in that it consumes vastly more water than falls on it as rain.” This article from the New York Times begins, “From the Arabian Peninsula to northern India to California’s Central Valley, nearly a third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are being drained faster than they are being replenished, according to a recent study led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine.” Link to the actual study.
Um, there are in fact many places that aren’t draining water from the third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers that aren’t being managed sustainably. There are even many places that don’t make significant use of aquifers at all. Do you have some alternative definition of “many” or “places” that would actually make the statement false?
Now if the statement had been “most places” there’d be real room for discussion, but that’s not what was written.
It’s certainly not the case that New York City filters liquid waste water then uses it for human consumption. New York tap water comes from protected groundwater in upstate New York and New Jersey, which is almost certainly fresh rainwater and not recycled. New York’s waste water is filtered but then enters the ocean, I believe through Long Island Sound.
That having been said, all water on planet earth is recycled over long time scales. It is almost certainly true that any 8 oz glass of water contains molecules which have been in other people. Likely far, far many more people than seven.
Yes, the ground water situation is akin to tapping oil reserves.
The other thing we’re dealing with in CA and the whole Southern US is the somewhat slippery concept of “drought.”
Many areas established a concept of “normal” based on rainfall in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Which subsequent science has shown to have been the wettest 50 years in the last couple thousand.
In many areas what we now call “drought” should really be called “normal.” And so the question becomes “When will we adjust our expectations and our long-term plans to accept that little-to-no rain is normal, not a temporary aberration before the deluges resume?”
Naturally there are tremendous economic and political constituencies that fervently want no change and are using every bit of willpower available to engage in wishful thinking about this situation.
When/where exactly “wishful thinking” slides into “willful negligence” is an interesting conversation in itself.
Where did the almond go? You might not see it, but that almond contains a lot of water. So when you grow an almond in California, you’re using California water. When you ship twenty tons of almonds, you’re really shipping nineteen tons of water. So people in other states who are eating those almonds are consuming California water.
It’s been touched on here a bit but the other really important point is that the vast majority of water is unusable (without a lot of expensive processing) as an agricultural or fresh water source and what we do have globally is very limited.
This USGS graphic illustrates the problem quite well.
It truly is unfortunate that so many people take that “unlimited” potable water coming out of your tap for granted because it really is a precious gift.
Except it’s not. Oil (as oil) never ends up back deep underground, it mostly gets turned into CO2 and H2O. But wait, let’s look deeper into this. Since it is about what happens to water.
If you read more, the water is actually from rivers diverted to agriculture, and that water deep under a desert is recent, and from agriculture.
(the same thing is true for many desert regions that irrigate)
A lot of water goes into the ground, and we will probably never see it again. This is a direct answer to the question in the OP. There are vast irrigation projects, just a tremendous amount of dry land that is irrigated for crops. A lot of water goes into the ground, and does not return. Note that just the one desert basin may hold 10 times the amount of water held in the North American Great Lakes, which is a huge amount of water.
The same thing is no doubt true for the vast dams built in deserts, where water from the artificial lakes goes into the deserts beneath. Nobody knows exactly, but it may be gone for good. (however there are plans to drill into failing reservoirs to extract ground water that is under the lake). It is thought that under the Nile river, there is a vast underground aquifer, from the countless years the Nile has been flowing. (a river bottom is not waterproof, most rivers always are adding water to the ground) In a desert, the amount of water lost to the ground can be huge, enough to dry a river up during the dry season.
If you don’t know about the Salton Sea, it is an example of just how much water flows down large rivers. Estimates of the amount of water held behind dams worldwide are hard to come by, but it’s certainly enough to lower the sea level. But, the amount of groundwater extracted that ends up running back to the sea sort of equals things out.
The flip answer would be water goes everywhere. (try and stop it)
The scientific answer, nobody actually knows where all the water goes, or where it comes from.