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Half of the world's biggest aquifers are being depleted

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Land size vs water availability (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-06-28 22:42 (#CQ3D)

Often there are calls from people abroad to increase the migrant intake for Australia. You have lots of land, they say. Size of a european country or three, they say. Farms bigger than cities. Waste of space, they say. Get more people! Wonderful. Where will the water for these people come from?

Re: Land size vs water availability (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-06-28 22:59 (#CQ40)

Re: Land size vs water availability (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-06-29 07:11 (#CQZH)

We are getting a water desalination plant in San Antonio, where I live. Even though we are pretty dang far from the coast, the bottom half of our aquifer is brackish and too salty to drink. The desalination plant will clean up the (slightly) too salty water so that we can suck the rest of the aquifer dry that we otherwise had to ignore. :)

Re: Land size vs water availability (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-06-29 22:34 (#CTDM)

Is there a reason why we couldn't desalinify water to pour into rock/sand filters so the water ends up in the aquifers?

Re: Land size vs water availability (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-06-30 01:10 (#CTPJ)

You COULD do that, but you're wasting a lot of energy pumping it back up to the surface from the depths of the aquifer, for no good reason.

Re: Land size vs water availability (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-06-30 02:23 (#CTTZ)

In other parts of the world, fresh water is pumped down into underground salt formations. Then brought back up and the water evaporates out of the brine in big shallow ponds--it's one way to mine salt.

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2015-06-30 08:30 Informative +1 bryan@pipedot.org

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by bryan@pipedot.org on 2016-05-06 23:24