Slashdot Mirror
NASA: Huge Freshwater Loss In the Middle East
dstates writes with news from NASA about the state of available water in the Middle East. From the NASA article: "'GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,' said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. 'The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.'" dstates adds:
"Water is a huge global security issue. To understand the middle east, you need to understand that the Golan Heights provides a significant amount of the water used in Israel. Focusing on conflicts and politics means that huge volumes of valuable water are being wasted in the Middle East, and this will only exacerbate future conflicts. Water is a serious issue between India and China. And then there is Africa. U.S. food exports are in effect exporting irrigation water drawn from the Ogallala aquifer. Fracking trades water for energy, and lack of water limits fracking in many parts of th world. Think about it."
It would be nice to think that a regional water shortage would pull these countries together to solve a mutual problem.
And I've recently been in the market for the London Bridge; have one for sale?
Yeah, I know it sounds stupid but Saddam Hussein drained 7,700 sq miles just to try to flush out people during the first gulf war. Before that the British had tried to drain all that fresh water out of there to stop the breeding of mosquitoes. Which, in the near future, is going to be looked back upon with disgust.
I don't think people yet understand or truly appreciate how much destruction they can bring to ecosystems. I wish conservation was given more respect than treating advocates like tree hugging hippies that have no clue about industry and economy. The area between these two rivers was once so lush and full of life that it was thought to be the origin of the Garden of Eden myth.
My work here is dung.
Quite a bit of Israel's water consumption is already either from desalination (domestic) or recycled (agriculture) water. It created quite a spike in the water prices, but otherwise greatly increased Israel's water reserves (the Kineret, as well as a couple of big underground reservoirs, one of them shared with the Palestinians).
Shachar
Ok. Seriously. There is a problem, but there are solutions too. Water conflicts have been around for a long time now in the Middle East since the beginning of civilization tiself.
4500 years ago, the control of irrigation canals vital to survival was the source of conflict between the states of Umma and Lagash in the ancient Middle East. 2700 years ago, Assurbanipal, King of Assyria from 669 to 626 B.C., seized control of wells as part of his strategic warfare against Arabia. In the modern era, the Jordan River Basin has been the scene of a wide variety of water disputes. In the 1960s, Syria tried to divert the headwaters of the Jordan away from Israel, leading to air strikes against the diversion facilities. The 1967 war in the Middle East resulted in Israel winning control of all of the headwaters of the Jordan as well as the groundwater of the West Bank. In these cases, water was certainly an important factor in both pre- and post-1967 border disputes.
But contrast this to cases in Africa, like the Okavango delta (the world's largest inland delta) which through a negotiation by Angola, Botswana and Namibia has received a fresh lease of life. I think the key is how likely countries are to negotiate rather than go to war. The current Middle East does not seem like a place where cooperation can or will replace conflict.
Just like our shortage of oil has pulled the west together.
i give some back to the world every few hours
Doesn't rain much in the middle of a desert and there are these things called "droughts" you have to worry about...
If you use fresh water faster than nature can replenish it, you're going to have a shortage. The fact that fresh water reservoirs are decreasing is a sure sign that water is being used faster than it is being replenished... so you either reduce usage (start with waste), supplement supply (desalinization, massive aqueduct construction, etc), or suffer drought.
=Smidge=
It is renewable just not at the rate that it is being used. In any case, I think it is likely we will find ways to cheaply desalinate ocean water before the threat of massive death by dehydration is imminent. After all, necessity is the mother of invention. Also, grey water systems would probably become more culturally acceptable as water prices increased. Here is one interesting reverse osmosis technology that is being researched using graphene.
Also, lord knows that people will not want to drink recycled water.
Call it Brawndo(TM) and they won't be able to drink enough of it.
The technical issue of distribution (and to a lesser degree storage) is the issue for many of the water problems.
This is not really a technical issue. It is more of an economic policy issue. Here in California, farmers receive subsidies, and subsidized water, to grow water intensive crops like rice and cotton. If you remove the subsidies, farmers will switch to crops and irrigation practices that actually make sense, and the "water shortage" will disappear. The problem in the Middle East is similar. For instance, Saudi Arabia pays huge subsidies to domestic wheat farmers, when for a fraction of the cost they could just import wheat.
Weather patterns carry evaporated water off the oceans and over land, where it can fall as rain or snow. If the rain falls on the ocean, or on the shore running back into the sea, it doesn't replenish inland reservoirs. If a winter is very mild, less polar water will be frozen in place, meaning the snowmelt won't be enough to keep the rivers full all summer. The evaporation process is also the natural desalinization process, making rainwater the most critical supplier of freshwater. That's why droughts and global patterns like El Niño and El Niña so important.
The overall amount of water on the planet is (mostly) constant, bet the amount of accessible freshwater is a tiny fraction of it, and is highly dependent on the weather and the rate of consumption.
John
I watched the documentary "Ice Pirates" back in the 80s. It shows a far future without much water, and people turning to piracy to get it. I bet they never knew how quickly we'd be getting to that point.
Oh and Bruce Vilanch.
This is an urban problem.
City folks give me a hard time about living in the country, but I pump my water from a hole in the ground and then I dump it back into the ground when I'm done with it. Bacteria eat up all my poo, and the cycle begins again. Call it the ultimate recycling.
Works pretty well until you cram a whole bunch of people into a little space.
Let's hurry up and evolve to live off salt water. Go forth, and have sex with sweaty people.
Foregoing moderation to point this out: They do just dump the brine back in the ocean in some places. Where that's done, you get huge zones where nothing lives, because the algae at the bottom of the food chain usually can't live in such radically different salinity than they evolved in. This results in blooms of exotic algae, which tends to produce toxins - think red tide - when exposed to agricultural runoff. Fishermen are usually just run out of town, and if there was a commercial fishery, or the place was popular with out-of-town anglers, you've just killed the jobs involved with both of those.
Since biological processes impact coastal erosion, you may or may not also have to worry about your coastline receding, too - that depends mostly on how lucky you get, I think, but I have no data handy.
You do realize that much of the world has fallen below replacement rates by the simple expedient of making people wealthy enough that they can choose whether to extrude yet another baby or not?
China has been trying to avoid the messy demographic squeeze that occurs in the intervening period(since improvements in standard of living usually slash child mortality before they slash fertility rates, you end up with ~1 generation of unsupportable boom children); but the evidence is overwhelming that people actually don't like keeping up the uterine-clown-car act once they have an option.
Water that is absorbed by the ground and isn't directed into aquifers or similar structures is effectively lost. The rest is lost to the ocean or to evaporation. Granted, you could desalinate the ocean, but then the question becomes what to do with the leftover material, which is an environmental issue unto itself.
You sell it, duh!
Have you priced Sea Salt lately?
We still have operating salt ponds aorund the San Francisco Bay. Often easily identified by their giant piles of salt. Now if they trapped the water evaporated it would be a Win-Win.
These ponds are intended to collect salt, and the water is lost. You can't use a pond for desalination on an industrial scale*. One common method is to boil the water in a partial vacuum to obtain vapor, and discard the brine. Brine's boiling temperature increases the saltier it gets, so at some point it becomes uneconomical to extract the water. Plus transporting brine is easier than bulk damp salt- you just pump it. You could then put the brine in a pond and let nature run its course, but the amount of land required would probably be prohibitive since desalination on useful scales is BIG. It is much easier and cheaper to just pump the brine back to the sea and deal with the environmentalist complaints. Maybe in the future regulations will be stricter but the places that need this water the most are the kind of places that won't care about a saltier ocean.
Incidentally, most desalination processes use large amounts of energy, so that is why the easier water is used up first.
*you can desalinate using a pond or other small body of water on very small scales, but this is not economical on large scales. It is done in survival situations however.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Because the people would complain that the wells of some poor person 100 miles from where they live whom they never met were being contaminated with salt water now too.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
This is a desert/hot dry country problem. Meanwhile in other parts of the world, flooding is becoming more regular and dangerous.
or grow crops that need alot less water and are native to Socal. Jojoba makes an excellent oil for use in medicine, cosmetics, and Biodiesel. Date palms for fruit, liquor, sweetener, animal feed, a coffee like stimulant, and as a cellulose crop. Citrus fruits are a no brainer, as well as some cultivars of squash, beans, and Corn.
This is all stuff native to california, but nobody plants it, and are willing to import dates from the Middle east and use soybeans to make biodiesel.
Come on California, your better then this
I would prefer that we stop popping out new people at the present rate. will that happen? I doubt it.
The rise in population growth has been declining for decades. The UN median projection is that we will top out just below 10 billion around 2070 and then shrink.
No doubt needed.
it's in my head