"Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink"
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1798
Today, the usually vapid home town paper published quite an informative article. It is something I have written about for years now in previous blogs. It was on our water - or the lack there of. We are running out of ground water. In good years, where the rainfall is adequate to surplus, we are still pumping more ground water than is replenished. It is simple math - the amount of water we are extracting from the ground is not proportional to how much goes back in. This problem is not centuries nor decades away - it is right around the corner. If we don't do something quickly, it will make all our other problems seem like chump change.
He is the irony. The Earth is covered by about 70% water. However, 96.5% of that is ocean salt water. The other 3.5% is fresh water, although not all of it is potable. Scientists have estimated that if all the water on Earth was measured in a sphere, it would be almost 333 million cubic miles. That is a whole bunch of H2O. What mankind has done for years, is go after the "low fruit on the trees". In other words, if the rainfall was not adequate, wells into the aquifers, lakes or tributaries were used. Now it seems as if nature is telling us that card has been overplayed and soon the ground water will be hard if not impossible to use.
So now what. Pray for rain? Or should be prepare for drought. Fact 1 - the scientists have told us for years that the world's oceans are going to continue to rise. In other words, the chance of us running out of ocean water is about zero. We have had the technology for years on how to do large scale desalination on sea water. We can even "super-size" the technology. Three of our coasts have hundreds of miles of ocean front. There is not one reason why we cannot built mammoth water farms by the coastal waters to harvest fresh water. That water does not have to be potable - just fresh. The fresh water can be used for irrigation and can also be refined into potable water cities which need it.
Fact 2 - Every year, there are trillions and trillions of gallons of water which fall on the United States. Some goes into the ground, some into lakes, and much of it goes into rivers and streams as run off. What happens to that water? Most of it ends up in the Mississippi water shed and heads south towards New Orleans. Once there, it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico and good bye water. Same is true for the St. Lawrence Seaway. All the excess water from the Great Lakes heads to the East Coast and then gone. Is there any reason why some of that fresh water cannot be captured prior to mixing with the sea water? It sure would be easier and cheaper than extracting sea water and then going thought the desalination process.
Fact 3 - The way we waste good fresh water in this country is nothing short of criminal. Water is our life blood. The problem is we have always had so much of it, we have taken that fact for granted. We pour millions, maybe billions of gallons of valuable fresh water on our crop land in the middle of a dry day. Much of that water evaporates before it hits the ground. Drip irrigation has been proven for years to be much for efficient. Yet, we see very little drip irrigation used in the heartland. We also use huge amounts of water making bio-fuels such as ethanol. This has been a folly and should be stopped immediately.
This has not been the first time I have addressed this issue has been addressed, and will not be the last. It is simply too important. As we go further into the 21st century, fresh water will become the new oil, the new gold. We can sit around and do nothing, or do something quickly. On a thirsty planet, we need to provide the solutions, not just agree we have a problem.
He is the irony. The Earth is covered by about 70% water. However, 96.5% of that is ocean salt water. The other 3.5% is fresh water, although not all of it is potable. Scientists have estimated that if all the water on Earth was measured in a sphere, it would be almost 333 million cubic miles. That is a whole bunch of H2O. What mankind has done for years, is go after the "low fruit on the trees". In other words, if the rainfall was not adequate, wells into the aquifers, lakes or tributaries were used. Now it seems as if nature is telling us that card has been overplayed and soon the ground water will be hard if not impossible to use.
So now what. Pray for rain? Or should be prepare for drought. Fact 1 - the scientists have told us for years that the world's oceans are going to continue to rise. In other words, the chance of us running out of ocean water is about zero. We have had the technology for years on how to do large scale desalination on sea water. We can even "super-size" the technology. Three of our coasts have hundreds of miles of ocean front. There is not one reason why we cannot built mammoth water farms by the coastal waters to harvest fresh water. That water does not have to be potable - just fresh. The fresh water can be used for irrigation and can also be refined into potable water cities which need it.
Fact 2 - Every year, there are trillions and trillions of gallons of water which fall on the United States. Some goes into the ground, some into lakes, and much of it goes into rivers and streams as run off. What happens to that water? Most of it ends up in the Mississippi water shed and heads south towards New Orleans. Once there, it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico and good bye water. Same is true for the St. Lawrence Seaway. All the excess water from the Great Lakes heads to the East Coast and then gone. Is there any reason why some of that fresh water cannot be captured prior to mixing with the sea water? It sure would be easier and cheaper than extracting sea water and then going thought the desalination process.
Fact 3 - The way we waste good fresh water in this country is nothing short of criminal. Water is our life blood. The problem is we have always had so much of it, we have taken that fact for granted. We pour millions, maybe billions of gallons of valuable fresh water on our crop land in the middle of a dry day. Much of that water evaporates before it hits the ground. Drip irrigation has been proven for years to be much for efficient. Yet, we see very little drip irrigation used in the heartland. We also use huge amounts of water making bio-fuels such as ethanol. This has been a folly and should be stopped immediately.
This has not been the first time I have addressed this issue has been addressed, and will not be the last. It is simply too important. As we go further into the 21st century, fresh water will become the new oil, the new gold. We can sit around and do nothing, or do something quickly. On a thirsty planet, we need to provide the solutions, not just agree we have a problem.
The notion of tapping the Great Lakes for water has been around a while. Definitely interesting!
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