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Beneath Africa, Survey Finds 'Huge' Water Reserves
gambit3 writes with this news, carried by the BBC: "Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface. Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water. Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated."
More resources means people will think they can make more people. Which, of course, will be worse in the long run since underground water never lasts forever, and it will be a larger population to starve.
What Africa needs is education, not more water to be exported to other countries.
It is also a FINITE supply.... not a true fix for water shortage problem long-term...
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
I don't care how much good that water might do today: I want to know how long it'll last if a billion people start sucking it up. Aquifers replenish, but only very slowly. Even the scientists behind the research are stressing that industrial-scale drilling will exaust the supply eventually.
When do we get to play "colonize" again?
Although I'm sure many will say this is inhumane, I suggest that this survey quietly disappear. Many of the United States' agricultural land is in danger of turning to dust due to several factors. Part of it is the poor use of land; Overuse of pesticides, chemical fertilizer, genetically engineered crops (the crops are not the problem, the business practices of companies like Monsanto are), and the loss of top soil due to erosion are just some of the problems. We have several states that are largely desert right now (the "dust bowl" was a ecological disaster caused by irresponsible farming practices). However, the other part of it is due to lack of access to fresh water. People are living in places that have tapped out their underwater reserves; Especially those in the southeastern United States. Several municipalities are embroiled in fierce legal battled over neighboring cities (and even states!) refusal to share their water. This is a situation that will only get worse over time; Already there is talk about southern states passing legislation or taking overt and aggressive action to divert water from the Great Lakes to areas of the south that soon will be uninhabitable without water relief -- others of course argue that the areas should never have been inhabited in the first place.
If the countries of Africa tap that resource, on one hand they will experience a sudden burst of economic activity and agricultural reform; and with it a corresponding explosion in population. However, there is already too much industrialization of the planet as it is, and with global warming going unaddressed due to a lack of cooperation by sovereign powers, an untempered entry into industry by so many new countries could cause a global ecological disaster that could leave most of the tropical regions of the planet devastated and unfarmable. If an industrialized country with access to state of the art technology, extensive scientific understanding, and sufficient natural resources, cannot solve these problems... I shudder to think what could happen if an entire continent did a history repeat.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Global warming is likely to lead to a de-desertification of Africa anyway, as increasing equatorial heat increases the absorption of water by the air over the Atlantic. But it's still Africa.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...an aquifer was found in Africa it was drained dry due to wastage and abuse of resources. This isn't a miracle cure, guys. If used properly, it might reduce the stress on the land (so allowing it to recover, so increasing rainfall) but it is NOT a substitute for surface reservoirs, it is NOT a substitute for learning how to be efficient with resources, it is NOT infinite and it is NOT going to cure centuries (if not millenia) of neglect of Africa.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's not new that there are huge groundwater resources in Africa. The only new thing in the article is that they mapped it in more detail then ever before. And these resources are also heavily utilized today. However, using groundwater for food production is not without great danger - the keyword here is salinification.
People bread like rabbits once there is enough food and water to go around. They do anyway, but the infant mortality rate is high and migration to barren areas is very limited. Once there's food, water and safety, large groups of people migrate and breed. In just one or two generations, the country will be densely populated and there will once again be a shortage of resources.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
You see this bullshit all the time from people who never took more than BIO 100 and presume that humans work like bacteria. Turns out, they don't. The proof of that is first world nations. They all have at most low population growth, and many have neutral or negative population growth. The "human bacteria" theory says they should be the prime places for a massive booming population. There's abundance in everything and IMR is low so population should explode... But it doesn't.
Turns out when you solve the basic needs, when people have more than a subsistence living, when they don't have to worry about a bunch of their offspring dying, they stop having so many kids.
The way to control population is not to try and starve people of resources. You might notice that is the situation now and yet there's high birth rate. The way to control is to get people better lives. Sufficient food, clean water, medical care, shelter, etc and then the population growth is tamed.
This isn't a "Well we hope humans work like this," theory, it is how things HAVE worked. It is the reason there was no massive boom and crash in the US, Europe, Japan, and so on. Population growth has slowed, leveled off, or even inverted in all the places that have the most abundant resources.
The strategy of "Just let the brown people die," is not only extremely callous, it is also counter productive to getting a stable population level.
Exactly. When you pump water out of the ground it's gone forever.
Underground reservoirs are not necessarily refilled by the next rain. Read up on such reservoirs found in North America. They were filled over many thousands of years and significantly drained by agriculture related drilling and pumping in decades. Every year agriculture has to drill deeper and deeper to find water.
It gets consumed, evaporates, and then it never rains again.
Of course it rains, the problem is that it does not necessarily rain where the water was harvested. Harvesting deep water reservoirs does not somehow change the fact that a region is a desert or arid region with little rainfall.
All of this water is great! But with all of the corrupt governments throughout Africa who will ever get to benefit from it?
I've always felt that Africa is the richest continent. It's chock-full of minerals, oil, diamonds, arable land (some land better than other land but with the right techniques just about anything is possible)... The climate is warm to hot throughout much of the continent facilitating growing. Its people? If you go to the right places hard-working, skilled and eager to work. But its corruption is widespread. Without targeting that (much easier said than done) this water will either stay in the ground or will go to benefit some dictator or other "politician".
It's a bullshit explanation. NATO didn't go to war against Libya, the Libyan people went to war against Qaddafi, and NATO lent support. Also, precisely what does NATO have to gain by preventing the Libyans from having more water?
That's like!... that's like!... *mumbles doing some math* carry the four... subtract the depth times the... divide out all extra... mmhm ... surface area... ah, yes... average out the known surface water... okay... times roughly 100... *writes some more* Yes! ... That's like zero liters of water!
*shoulders drop in disappointment*
Having been to Africa, I can tell you that more freshwater wont solve the problem in the least. The water they get is not contaminated at the source. Much of it comes from wells, or Rivers and lakes. The rivers and lakes may have "Some" contamination... but that's not what the real problem is. The real problem is their horrible infrastructure. They lack even basic building inspection laws. Plumbing is done on-site, by whomever happens to be there. With no training in the field. The result is a haphazard public water supply infrastructure that is subject to contamination from the user.
A simple example is: Every bathtub that I saw in Africa did not have a shower. It had a sprayer that had a hose that led back to the side of the faucet. There was a hanger on the wall for... in every case that I saw the hanger had been long broken, and the sprayer lay in the bottom of the tub. If you fill the tub while leaving the sprayer laying in the water, you can get a siphon effect fairly easily. This draws dirty water from the tub back into the water supply. It's irrelevant where that water came from, it could have been triple distilled, it's now contaminated. This sort of setup is illegal in the united states for that very reason. There were thousands of other problems like this. Now imagine that your city had this sort of problem... ALL of the plumbing would have to be replaced... from the well to your faucet. The whole thing. How could you fix that? Now imagine it's an entire continent... and now you have a grasp of the size of the problem.
Actually, that is *exactly* what we do right now - with "Fiji" water being the biggest example - a spring with lots and lots of lovely water coming out of it that is bottled up and shipped to the US while the local population faces water shortages, all because people have been fooled into thinking that the Fiji water is somehow better than tap water.
They will have to build it themselves if it doesn't lead directly from the mine to the container-port.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Both of feathers and dots variety.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens