Permeable pavement sounds interesting, and I wonder how safe it is (the bottom of the fractional-distillation barrel might have fewer volatiles but do we want more surface area of the stuff to come into contact with water?) and how quickly it gets clogged.
Also, beavers: they're great at slowing the flow of water across a landscape, giving the water time to recharge aquifers. We'll need to address how we use land, though, to make room for these engineers to do their thing.
My concern for urban permeable pavement is all of the chemicals that would be absorbed with it. Same with the forced injection of water back into an aquifer. I was under the impression that the water being pulled through the ground is a filtering process so that the water in the aquifer is clean.
> the water ... filtering process ... the water in the aquifer is clean
Clean(er) ... maybe ... nowadays nitrates, pesticides/herbicides, pfas/pfoas, industrial chemicals (solvents, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds), pharmaceuticals (prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications), lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium (through industrial activities, mining operations, and improper waste disposal), chlorinated solvents, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), all were detected in the groundwater.
Nothing is "clean" anymore. Not the arctic, not the tops of the mountains in the natural reserves, not the remote islands, not the deep underground.
This will require the water boards to rethink things like not allowing capture of rainwater/flow.
The evaporation of ponds becomes somewhere else's rainwater (potentially further inland creating a virtuous cycle). And you can use depth to control the capture vs evaporation ratio -- deeper ponds evaporate slower and hold more precipitation.
But this all goes against our very reductionistic thinking -- this quarter section is for corn, nothing else.
Owning property with a pond has it's own issues. In many of those farms run off can be detrimental. We have a 3/4 an acre pond and while we don't farm anywhere near it, the few springs that feed it all touch a lot of farm lands. So far we're lucky, but just a quarter mile down the road, our neighbors have a pond that won't sustain life, which we suspect is due to runoff from their crops.
There's also the issue of excess evaporation and creating unusable land. There's solutions out there but they're not all cut and dry with just placing ponds.
Would organic farming help here? Seems like there are studies [1] showing nitrate leaching is less with it. Probably reducing cattle/chicken counts too, as those shit pits are a big source of it.
Oh most definitely it would, but you run into trade offs with production / productivity. That's at least what most of my local farmer friends argue.
We proactively add some good bacteria to our ponds monthly to reduce waste by products and things as well, so it's possible that they could fix some of the biome issues.
The problem is that organic farming can only feed 2 and a half families. It's not a feasible way to live unless you already have the privilege of wealth or alternate sources of income.
Unfortunately it’s illegal to dig ponds on your property without a permit and the appropriate water rights in some areas. There’s a whole field of law around water rights and these sorts of permits, it’s really wild. You need an engineering plan with the expected evaporation rate and then need to describe how you’d replace the water you took from some downstream, more senior rights holder.
“More ambitiously, however, the Water Authority in 2007 initiated a pilot program for aquifer storage and recovery, in which a small amount of San Juan-Chama water was released into the Bear Canyon arroyo and tracked to see if it reached the aquifer. Results were positive, and the Water Authority is moving forward with plans to recharge the aquifer on a larger scale.
We will be using direct injection as well as infiltration to get the water into the aquifer. We hope to put up to 40,000 acre-feet back into the aquifer in the first couple of years. After that, we will continue to add purified San Juan-Chama water to the aquifer primarily during winter months when demand is low.“
Speaking of Albuquerque, this just-published paper shows how measuring the change in acceleration due to gravity can be used to map aquifer storage change. Importation of San Juan River water has made a big difference.
Microgravity surveying is great for this and other geo applications. I know of many geothermal fields mapped the same way to monitor fluid level and steam migration.
Good stuff!
I very much enjoy this type of article or videos on similar subjects. Another source that has been very entertaining / educational for me is "Practical Engineering" Youtube channel.
Snowpack is a huge deal in California, as around 30% of the state's water comes from snowmelt in the Sierras. They don't track it for funsies: https://cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.action
Some projects are pumping CO2 underground to reduce global warming. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Maybe we could use some of that money and equipment, to pump water underground!
It may be still more efficient to pump water underground. Isolating CO2 is very energy intensive, for the same amount of energy we may isolate 100x more H2O. Sometimes it even condenses spontaneously!
There is also huge amount of natural CO2, single vulcano eruption... It is about reducing green house gas emissions generated by humans. And there are many artificial lakes, fields and forests that generate huge footprint on water vapour..
Clippy: It looks like you’re trying to turn Earth into Arrakis. Would you like some help with that?
More seriously though, as the effects of climate change intensify, I think it’s all but inevitable we’ll have to seriously look at manipulating whatever environmental factors we can in order to counteract the worst of them. Maybe we can’t do much about the sea level rise, but maybe it would be possible to moderate storm and drought/flooding intensities. As you pointed out, water vapor levels may be one of the easier things we could manipulate, as least on a local or regional scale.
Ignoring all the other problems with that, there is also nearly 100x more water in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and roughly 10000x more water in the oceans than the atmosphere. Do you expect sequestering H2O to have a significant impact on the amount in the atmosphere before you dry up the oceans, whence it is evaporating?
My understanding is it is the other way around, that in equal concentrations water vapor has a much stronger greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide. However for physics reasons the atmosphere does not hold much water vapor.
In fact if I understand correctly this is the mechanism for a runaway greenhouse, that is, something like what happened to venus. Warmer temps allow for more water vapor in the atmosphere, due to it being such a good greenhouse gas, temps then build out of control as more and more water is vaporized.
> However for physics reasons the atmosphere does not hold much water vapor.
The atmosphere is currently ~422 ppm of CO2, and an average of ~5,000 ppm of H2O, with humid tropical areas having up to ~50,000 ppm of H2O.
Water vapour makes up ~half of the greenhouse effect. It's not a 'good' greenhouse gas, it's just that it's very unevenly distributed, with a strong bias towards having a lot of it in the parts of the world that get a lot of sun - the tropics.
I am definitely not an expert on the subject. But doing some basic web searches and I note how much more of the infrared spectra is absorbed by water vs the relatively narrow band that co2 absorbs. As a infrared emission blocking gas water vapor is several times more effective than co2. this is fine, we don't want earth to be a freezing ice cube. but add the excessive amounts of co2 and you start to get an alarming condition.
> clouds can have either cooling or warming effects
Just in case anyone is wondering... one of the simplest interactions has to do with daytime and nighttime cloud cover.
Daytime cloud cover causes shade, which _can_ lower temps below the clouds. At night, heat from the ground radiates up and clouds can block the radiated heat. This is why cloudless nights during winter are colder, and cloudy summer nights can be stifling.
The amount of water in the air is almost impossible to change because the evaporation and condensation keep the balance "constant". It actually depends on the average temperature and other factors so it's not a real "constant", but unless it's possible to cover all the seas it's impossible to reduce it.
The amount of CO2 changes more slowly, plants and cyanobacteria and some minerals absorb it, but it's a slow process. Natural decomposition, fires and fossil fuel power plants release it, but it's a slow process.
So it's easy to modify the CO2 amount in either direction. Burning fossil fuel to produce energy makes a lot of money. Carbon capture requires a lot of money. So you can guess which one is wining now.
It's run by a scientist in Texas and has an amazing wealth of information on the aquifers of Texas. I never thought I would find a subject like this interesting until I read this guy's site.
Texas has been managing aquifers for a long time, there's a rich history behind their management, and reading about this stuff has been the only way I've found to make geology interesting. Many of the lessons learned and policies employed in Texas likely would be very useful in California.
Phoenix is the same way. They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular (PHX sits on top of an underground lake) they use huge 'ponds' to let the water soak back into the aquifer.
We have to. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights agreement among the states drawing from the Colorado River. I see a lot of water harvesting structures here, often in the form of parks and greenways.
"The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi, though near-future speculative fiction, gives a pretty solid explanation of the issues. Junior rights don't matter much when there isn't enough water
Yeah - but PHX doesn't really rely on the Colorado as much as the rest of AZ. We also have the Salt and Verde rivers which is a luxury a lot of other parts of the state don't have...
And we're back down to 1950s level of water usage due to less agriculture. Other parts of AZ don't have that reduction in usage, and have to try to do more with less
Fair enough. Even with the additional sources of water, it’s better to design civilization in a way that incorporates natural cycles.
The Intel fab facility does a lot to reclaim water, ultimately pumping used water back into the aquifer. New construction, such as the light rail expansion has purposely-designed swales to also help with that.
If anything, it’s because the ground water has been banked for years that it is mitigating the water restriction in effect in AZ last year.
On the other hand, we have so much precipitation this past winter, that the dams along the Salt River are having daily releases now. If you’re living in Phoenix right now, you might notice the elevated humidity for this time of the year; we might have a monsoon season starting weeks early here.
Man - I miss the 'old style' monsoons with the huge lighting displays...When I first moved to PHX, I used to sit out on the patio everyday just to watch them..
>> They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular
Yes, except for some very bad deals allowing great tracts of land to be sold and leased at below-market rates to Saudi companies without charging or monitoring water use. They grow forage crops like alfalfa that are banned or restricted in Saudi because of excessive water requirements, and ship the crops back to their cattle there. It has made neighbors' wells run dry. They are effectively taking the water from the aquifer and shipping back to Saudi. For free. One of many articles here [0] (guess which political party made the deals).
That's not PHX though... PHX is lucky/planed well enough not to be in the same predicament a lot of the state is. We have 2 additional sources of water besides the colorado, our water consumption is down because of less argiculture, and the underground lake seems to be holding up pretty well.
Granted, the rest of the state is constantly having to do more with less
Just subscribed! Very cool channel. Although his latest video outlining some of his experience with migrants in the desert is extremely heart wrenching. It's nice to see it from his perspective, as just another guy.
That's the aquifer that serves where I live, San Antonio, among other parts of the region. It's neat seeing the Edwards Aquifer mentioned here along with that site!
I remember local news reporting on the aquifer level quite a bit throughout my life. Curious if other regions near major aquifers do the same thing. It really raises awareness about water management. The news publishes the "worst offending addresses" for water overuse occasionally, too. We had the worst drought in recent memory for the region last year, although this year seems to be starting to make up for that.
I imagine water infrastructure projects like this are only going to become more common as the climate changes in coming years. The massive aquifer recharge projects mentioned in the original article about California aquifers make me wonder if there's some way one could engineer a very large scale desalination project using natural resources. A project using geothermal resources for evaporative desalination could be interesting.
It wasn't until I moved out of San Antonio, that I realized that you don't get a daily report in the local news as to how much water is in your local water supply.
Aquifers are intriguing. They are so large a person has a hard time realizing over a period of time how the land is affected when they are tapped. Subsidence is hard to wrap your head around.
I have often felt the ogallala aquifer could be recharged by diverting some of the great lakes spring runoff into the Atlantic via canals as well as via one of the many gravel buried moraines that connect with and now recharge the ogallala.
Not sure how this would affect the Atlantic, but 5-10% of it would go a long way to help the lowering of the Ogallala over the pat 100 years.
Some regions in India with wet and dry seasons have been successfully doing this for some time now. Interestingly, the very high precipitation during the wet season allowed them to achieve improvement without megaprojects, instead focusing on outreach campaigns to teach many small farmers to build recharge wells and water slowing features (frequent small dams) on runoff streams on their land to foster ground absorption during the wet season.
Slowing down water is the key and there are many design patterns that achieve this. You don’t even need to build structures (like when we envision with the word “dam”).
Even digging a small trench that follows contours in the upland helps water infiltrate into the ground. The dirt you dig out can be piled up as a bearm.
The permaculture community the world over has been putting these design patterns for decades now, and they drew from ideas found in pre-modern societies.
Brad Lancaster wrote an excellent multi-volume book about water harvesting structures, including taking into account erosion and silt deposit patterns, and working with plants. He calls it “planting the rain”.
It doesn’t have to be in places with wet and dry seasons. In much of temperate climates of the US, beavers modified the flow of the rivers such that the surface water was able to meander a much greater surface than the main flow of the river. It supported the trees and vegetation, which in turn formed habitat.
I came across an excellent permaculture YouTuber (who is also a professor at Oregon State (I think) and is incredible at drawing diagrams) [0].
Incidentally, based on his videos on the power of plants to filter out things as toxic as heavy metals and some biological wastes [1], I'm very concerned that the "injection well" idea for filling aquifers could result in contaminating the aquifer. Filtering through earth and active ecosystems seems like an important step in recharging aquifers safely.
Andrew Millison! He used live out in Arizona and did projects out here before being enticed to Oregon. The story I heard is that someone wanted him to teach out in Oregon badly enough to arrange for teaching at Oregon State.
OSU and the Prescott College (here in AZ) are one of the few places teaching permaculture design at a college level.
Millison also did a series of video on the Indian water crisis and how they used permaculture design to transform wastelands into productive habitats.
In the case of a place like Florida, parts of the gigantic aquifer that extends under that State and up in Georgia get backfilled by brackish water once depleted below a certain level and this effectively destroys it, preventing refilling or refreshing because of the salt content that gets introduced.
There is a California-specific law called the Subdivision Map Act that requires cities/counties to have provisions for parks when approving new subdivisions and housing.
The specifics of this is super convoluted and left to the interpretation of the city and its planning done at the county.
What would be amazing is to add a certain percentage to lakes and ponds when new parks are created--and not just green field.
The article needlessly mentions the Murzuk-Djado Basin and the Arabian Basin as having "little hope of recharging", when the very study it cites shows that the Murzuk-Djado basin as being less stressed than the California basin it talks about. I hate how American Exceptionalism always creeps its way into everything regardless how benign the topic seems. It's like she's trying to say "hey, we've got it bad but at least we're not as backwards as those mOsLeM countries".
I could be wrong. It's likely that my characterization was not her intent. That said, even the most well meaning individual in the "west" has this implicit bias against the "non west" that it just gets everywhere and you see it everywhere.
As a general matter, I hear you. But in this case I think your objections are misplaced: it actually agrees with you that the California basis is more stressed, but also is the subject of an ambitious plan to recharge it (which may or may not succeed) which is the topic of the article.
It also blames the stress on the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins on climate change which, to me, places the blame more on the U.S. than on 'backwards muslims.'
Here's the full passage:
> Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage.
In any case, it's actually pretty fascinating how a few sentences about aquifers can draw out these issues. And, to your point, I would certainly not be shocked to learn that there are ambitious plans to recharge the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins that this article overlooks.
The numbers and interest could change significantly if desalinization membranes could target multi-stage high-volume applications. Or using overland solar tunnels: roofed with solar arrays, the bottom of which would be cooled to condense the evaporation from the water.
Trees and grazing animals collaboratively replenish aquifers. Meadows, being porous, guide moisture downwards, preventing floods and evaporation. Animal droppings enhance soil bioactivity, boosting water capture. Moreover, this process, free of fossil fertilizers, sequesters carbon. Areas abandoning cattle operations or imposing 're-wilding' often face desertification and flooding. Similarly, grain plantations that exclude animals share this issue. I've personally seen a parched, over-fertilized grain field transform into a vibrant savannah with natural springs within five years due to herd migration. The soil is now a joy to walk on, spongey and soft. Next farm over they still plant grains, and it's hard-pan and salted.
This remind me of Aubrey Jaffer's story about his father making 'disposal wells' in Miami: https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells
Because a lot of land got paved over, it was easily flooded, as the water couldn't make its way into the aquifer. Jaffer senior had a business digging wells, and discovered that they could also suck down the water in a flooded carpark, so added making plugholes for carparks to his business.
Although in theory this replenishes the aquifer, I'm not sure that water off a carpark floor is these days considered clean enough to inject into the aquifer. I think I read somewhere that a lot of these injection wells had to be plugged, but now I can't find that.
I think we should dig the California viaduct deeper. Make it one long lake. Or dig giant water holes all along it. All the excess water can just fill up the holes along its 700 mile length. No idea if it's practical(probably not), but watching all that water flow into the ocean this winter seemed like such a waste.
The WRCB's plan is to store 600,000 acre feet of water which is 26,136,000,000 cubic feet. If we took 500 miles of viaduct (2,640,000 feet) at an average depth of 30 feet and average width of 40 feet ( = 3,168,000,000 cubic feet) and dug it 10x deeper, we'd be styling.
I mean, a 300 foot trench along the middle of California is doable, right?
While initiatives like these are important, it is also critical to rethink agricultural practice. California grows a number of thirsty crops under conditions which make little ecological sense. Reform must address the legal framework, incentives for farmers, and consumer habits and expectations upstream, as it were.
Pricing would also make a huge difference.[1] In general, though, California is a _mess_.[2] I mean, it didn't even have state groundwater management legislation until 2014—they're seriously playing catch-up now.
So farmers engineer land so that heavy rain will run off into streams, rivers, and ultimately cause flooding someplace in Iowa. This is of course to prevent flooding the fields and drowning crops. Then they pump ground water to water crops when there isn't enough rain. What we need is a way to store the runoff and get it into the ground. This would likely require some land use, and a bit of money to set up, for little immediate benefit.
Cisterns and lakes are not exactly new. The issue is that you need to take somebody’s land to do it, and no one wants to be the one to lose so everyone else wins.
Interestingly this is also happening at the micro level in urban areas with bioswales the size of parking spaces.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadAlso, beavers: they're great at slowing the flow of water across a landscape, giving the water time to recharge aquifers. We'll need to address how we use land, though, to make room for these engineers to do their thing.
Clean(er) ... maybe ... nowadays nitrates, pesticides/herbicides, pfas/pfoas, industrial chemicals (solvents, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds), pharmaceuticals (prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications), lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium (through industrial activities, mining operations, and improper waste disposal), chlorinated solvents, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), all were detected in the groundwater.
Nothing is "clean" anymore. Not the arctic, not the tops of the mountains in the natural reserves, not the remote islands, not the deep underground.
Joel Salatin has been teaching about the value of ponds for decades now. for example here's a video of him talking about ponds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o82ar51eIsE
This will require the water boards to rethink things like not allowing capture of rainwater/flow.
The evaporation of ponds becomes somewhere else's rainwater (potentially further inland creating a virtuous cycle). And you can use depth to control the capture vs evaporation ratio -- deeper ponds evaporate slower and hold more precipitation.
But this all goes against our very reductionistic thinking -- this quarter section is for corn, nothing else.
There's also the issue of excess evaporation and creating unusable land. There's solutions out there but they're not all cut and dry with just placing ponds.
1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...
Permaculture, OTOH, would make a difference. With robotics it may even become reasonable in cost.
“More ambitiously, however, the Water Authority in 2007 initiated a pilot program for aquifer storage and recovery, in which a small amount of San Juan-Chama water was released into the Bear Canyon arroyo and tracked to see if it reached the aquifer. Results were positive, and the Water Authority is moving forward with plans to recharge the aquifer on a larger scale.
We will be using direct injection as well as infiltration to get the water into the aquifer. We hope to put up to 40,000 acre-feet back into the aquifer in the first couple of years. After that, we will continue to add purified San Juan-Chama water to the aquifer primarily during winter months when demand is low.“
https://www.abcwua.org/education-23b_Recharge/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413
Looked it up and there's a great video from him about wells & aquifers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG19b06NG_w
What I would like to see is the gross numbers: what percent of this year's precipitation is going to flow into the ocean? Anyone?
"CA" == amount of precipitation remaining in California, in one form or another.
i.e. CA = total - ocean - NV - AZ - OR - evaporation - other
The is more to the mountain range than Tahoe and more to the river system than the Truckee.
You can take a look at the California river system to get a sense of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California#/...
Not many rivers flow east and the truckee is failrly small.
The annual flow from the Truckee is 303,240 acre-feet, which is about %1 of the Sacramento river
There's also no meaningful amount of water that can be sequestered, given there's about 10^18 tonnes of it in the world's oceans.
There is also huge amount of natural CO2, single vulcano eruption... It is about reducing green house gas emissions generated by humans. And there are many artificial lakes, fields and forests that generate huge footprint on water vapour..
More seriously though, as the effects of climate change intensify, I think it’s all but inevitable we’ll have to seriously look at manipulating whatever environmental factors we can in order to counteract the worst of them. Maybe we can’t do much about the sea level rise, but maybe it would be possible to moderate storm and drought/flooding intensities. As you pointed out, water vapor levels may be one of the easier things we could manipulate, as least on a local or regional scale.
In fact if I understand correctly this is the mechanism for a runaway greenhouse, that is, something like what happened to venus. Warmer temps allow for more water vapor in the atmosphere, due to it being such a good greenhouse gas, temps then build out of control as more and more water is vaporized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_v...
The atmosphere is currently ~422 ppm of CO2, and an average of ~5,000 ppm of H2O, with humid tropical areas having up to ~50,000 ppm of H2O.
Water vapour makes up ~half of the greenhouse effect. It's not a 'good' greenhouse gas, it's just that it's very unevenly distributed, with a strong bias towards having a lot of it in the parts of the world that get a lot of sun - the tropics.
Just in case anyone is wondering... one of the simplest interactions has to do with daytime and nighttime cloud cover.
Daytime cloud cover causes shade, which _can_ lower temps below the clouds. At night, heat from the ground radiates up and clouds can block the radiated heat. This is why cloudless nights during winter are colder, and cloudy summer nights can be stifling.
The amount of CO2 changes more slowly, plants and cyanobacteria and some minerals absorb it, but it's a slow process. Natural decomposition, fires and fossil fuel power plants release it, but it's a slow process.
So it's easy to modify the CO2 amount in either direction. Burning fossil fuel to produce energy makes a lot of money. Carbon capture requires a lot of money. So you can guess which one is wining now.
It's run by a scientist in Texas and has an amazing wealth of information on the aquifers of Texas. I never thought I would find a subject like this interesting until I read this guy's site.
Texas has been managing aquifers for a long time, there's a rich history behind their management, and reading about this stuff has been the only way I've found to make geology interesting. Many of the lessons learned and policies employed in Texas likely would be very useful in California.
Edit: Just looked it up and california gets about 5 million acre feet (maf), AZ gets about 2.8maf and Nevada only gets 0.3maf.
So per capita, AZ is doing pretty well allocation-wise.
When there is not enough water, priority goes to those holding senior water rights.
(Complicating this is that various tribal nations have water rights senior to the states, and it is only now affecting allocations)
And we're back down to 1950s level of water usage due to less agriculture. Other parts of AZ don't have that reduction in usage, and have to try to do more with less
The Intel fab facility does a lot to reclaim water, ultimately pumping used water back into the aquifer. New construction, such as the light rail expansion has purposely-designed swales to also help with that.
If anything, it’s because the ground water has been banked for years that it is mitigating the water restriction in effect in AZ last year.
On the other hand, we have so much precipitation this past winter, that the dams along the Salt River are having daily releases now. If you’re living in Phoenix right now, you might notice the elevated humidity for this time of the year; we might have a monsoon season starting weeks early here.
Yes, except for some very bad deals allowing great tracts of land to be sold and leased at below-market rates to Saudi companies without charging or monitoring water use. They grow forage crops like alfalfa that are banned or restricted in Saudi because of excessive water requirements, and ship the crops back to their cattle there. It has made neighbors' wells run dry. They are effectively taking the water from the aquifer and shipping back to Saudi. For free. One of many articles here [0] (guess which political party made the deals).
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
Granted, the rest of the state is constantly having to do more with less
Where can I read more about this? Searching for "Phoenix underground lake" doesn't bring up anything that seems related.
The Phoenix Active Management Area has a bunch of water storage[2]. I'd also direct you to the city's 2021 plan.[3]
[1] https://new.azwater.gov/hydrology/groundwater-modeling/salt-... [2] https://waterbank.az.gov/water-storage [3] https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservicessite/Documents/2021%20C...
Also, SRP has tons of great info. about the water system - its actually pretty cool how them mange it all:
https://www.srpnet.com/grid-water-management/water-managemen...
https://www.srpnet.com/grid-water-management/water-managemen...
https://media.srpnet.com/srps-granite-reef-underground-stora...
No idea how feasible it is, but interesting to watch! https://www.youtube.com/@dustupstexas
I remember local news reporting on the aquifer level quite a bit throughout my life. Curious if other regions near major aquifers do the same thing. It really raises awareness about water management. The news publishes the "worst offending addresses" for water overuse occasionally, too. We had the worst drought in recent memory for the region last year, although this year seems to be starting to make up for that.
The city's also diversified its water supply outside the aquifer in recent years, such as establishing the Vista Ridge Pipeline from less populated areas of Texas into San Antonio: https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2020/05/08/a-project-10-year...
I imagine water infrastructure projects like this are only going to become more common as the climate changes in coming years. The massive aquifer recharge projects mentioned in the original article about California aquifers make me wonder if there's some way one could engineer a very large scale desalination project using natural resources. A project using geothermal resources for evaporative desalination could be interesting.
It wasn't until I moved out of San Antonio, that I realized that you don't get a daily report in the local news as to how much water is in your local water supply.
San Joaquin Valley is a good example.
https://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/local-news/san-joaquin-...
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...
As long as greedy people have this option, they're going to take it.
The solution is not hoping people start thinking sustainably. It's doing something to prevent people from putting expensive externalities onto others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
Why do it manually you ask? We have thick layer of impermeable dirt that prevents natural infiltration.
Even digging a small trench that follows contours in the upland helps water infiltrate into the ground. The dirt you dig out can be piled up as a bearm.
The permaculture community the world over has been putting these design patterns for decades now, and they drew from ideas found in pre-modern societies.
Brad Lancaster wrote an excellent multi-volume book about water harvesting structures, including taking into account erosion and silt deposit patterns, and working with plants. He calls it “planting the rain”.
It doesn’t have to be in places with wet and dry seasons. In much of temperate climates of the US, beavers modified the flow of the rivers such that the surface water was able to meander a much greater surface than the main flow of the river. It supported the trees and vegetation, which in turn formed habitat.
Incidentally, based on his videos on the power of plants to filter out things as toxic as heavy metals and some biological wastes [1], I'm very concerned that the "injection well" idea for filling aquifers could result in contaminating the aquifer. Filtering through earth and active ecosystems seems like an important step in recharging aquifers safely.
[0] https://youtu.be/7fFXJ3G49pY
[1] https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg
OSU and the Prescott College (here in AZ) are one of the few places teaching permaculture design at a college level.
Millison also did a series of video on the Indian water crisis and how they used permaculture design to transform wastelands into productive habitats.
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...
The specifics of this is super convoluted and left to the interpretation of the city and its planning done at the county.
What would be amazing is to add a certain percentage to lakes and ponds when new parks are created--and not just green field.
Hope someone can lead and get this amended.
I think a related idea that might be more appropriate is requiring drainage areas that slow water flow and increase absorption.
here's the study for those interested: https://news.uci.edu/2015/06/16/a-third-of-the-worlds-bigges...
Nope, it’s not like that at all.
It also blames the stress on the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins on climate change which, to me, places the blame more on the U.S. than on 'backwards muslims.'
Here's the full passage:
> Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage.
In any case, it's actually pretty fascinating how a few sentences about aquifers can draw out these issues. And, to your point, I would certainly not be shocked to learn that there are ambitious plans to recharge the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins that this article overlooks.
Although in theory this replenishes the aquifer, I'm not sure that water off a carpark floor is these days considered clean enough to inject into the aquifer. I think I read somewhere that a lot of these injection wells had to be plugged, but now I can't find that.
The WRCB's plan is to store 600,000 acre feet of water which is 26,136,000,000 cubic feet. If we took 500 miles of viaduct (2,640,000 feet) at an average depth of 30 feet and average width of 40 feet ( = 3,168,000,000 cubic feet) and dug it 10x deeper, we'd be styling.
I mean, a 300 foot trench along the middle of California is doable, right?
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/shopping-for-water-how-th... [2] https://archive.is/JGUe2
Interestingly this is also happening at the micro level in urban areas with bioswales the size of parking spaces.
And get off my lawn.
Not least because 'being annoyed' is not a fun state-of-being.
<hastily leaps backward off of lawn, narrowly avoiding thrown materials>