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Scientists Discover Huge Freshwater Reserves Beneath the Ocean
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered huge freshwater reserves beneath the seabed on continental shelves off the coast of Australia, North America, China and South Africa. 'The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we've extracted from the Earth's sub-surface in the past century since 1900. Fresh water on our planet is increasingly under stress and strain so the discovery of significant new stores off the coast is very exciting. It means that more options can be considered to help reduce the impact of droughts and continental water shortages' says Dr Vincent Post of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT) and the School of the Environment at Flinders University."
Presumably this water will need to be accessed via drilling and pumping the water. Imagine the horrors if there were a water spill, contaminating all that ocean water with its freshness!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The ocean is like a layer cake? Who'd have thunk it?
Before we try and get and that additional freshwater - has anyone found another possible _deposit_ location for all the rubbish and toxic waste we're producing? ...even if we would get at that water, it would only be a stop-gap -- right now, most seem to think that there will always be some new source of whatever resource we need to keep our "unsustainable" pace going...
It's the same about what people say that the shale oil will give the US enough oil for 100 years -- it's _maybe_ 100 years _at the current pace of consumption. But if there is a 100 years worth of more energy - why even _try_ and save? Why not even indulge in even more energy-intensive enterprises?
The same goes for finding huge amounts of new fresh-water - we'll just find ways to consume it even faster, instead of trying to focus on limiting the damage we do to the planet, and treating any additional resources as 'emergency rations' that we won't touch unless there is no other way.
Latrines use seawater on various naval vessels. Using fresh water to catch poop, if an abundant supply of seawater is available, is just dumb.
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Latrines use seawater on various naval vessels. Using fresh water to catch poop, if an abundant supply of seawater is available, is just dumb.
You've never cleaned a naval vessel toilet before, I take it? (neither have I, I just thought I'd ask).
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I'm afraid that pumping this water will lead to the same phenomenon in Libya :
As they pump the fossil water of deep aquifers in the desert, the dwells all around get dry or have now a much lower water level.
See the GMMR project: huge pipe to provide fresh water to the coastal cities, pumped from deep fossil aquifers of the desert that may not get resplenish any time soon. This is maybe not as simple as communicating vessels, but the people think the dwells dry out are link to this project.
At the moment Australia is looking at desalination to support the growing population and as a backup for when floods and droughts cause problems with our existing dams. Desalination tends to take up a lot of energy so you have to wonder if pumping this fresh water is a better solution. We already run some large pipelines so what's a few more?
It would take trillions of years to colonize the known universe.
I'm not even very interested in the universe. Let's just take the damned moon, and Mars. Hell, the moon can become the new Australia. "Welcome to New Australia Penal Colony, Convict 4,107,239."
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Now that we know those freshwater reserves exist polluting them will be our topmost priority.
1) Find a new natural resource, a crown jewel of mother nature
2) Start immediately raping this resource and pumping it dry
3) ???
4) Profit!
has anyone found another possible _deposit_ location for all the rubbish and toxic waste we're producing?.
A huge amount of products and processes are just waste.
Economics, politics, etc try to stimulate, encourage, reward the production of more. More of whatever. Generally, more waste. In my view, we need to address this waste-stimulation.
As it is, generating waste is directly linked to generating product, profit, jobs, and taxes. That link needs to stop.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Almost a minute and a half of nonsense before the first frame of the "explosion".
It's hard to judge the scale, but all that's there, is a ruptured pipeline, shooting water maybe 75 feet into the air. Need more context - how and why is it characterized as an "explosion"?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I served (as an enlisted man) aboard the USS Nebraska.
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Forgot link! DUHH!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIGZyaCJPuc
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm just about to join up. My recruiter said only officers and above have to clean toilets. Is that true?
"There is water. . .at the bottom of the ocean. . ."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
For a minute there I thought we'd have to stop washing our shit away with drinking water.
POKE 36879,8
Was this not foretold by the Prophet David Byrne?
Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, into silent water
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Scientists should stop discovering resources. Every newly discovered resource reduces the pressure to apply more reason to the usage of existing/known resources...
Really? Then you would know it's called a head not a latrine.
Maybe he used language everyone would understand instead of being a pretentious asshole.
LOL!
Don't worry though, it's not the only lie the recruiter told you...
No sig today...
I think there was a recent article on Slashdot about osmotic energy... the interface between the fresh water and the salty water could be used to generate the electricity to do the pumping. http://mahb.stanford.edu/whats-happening/osmotic-energy/
But what they haven't yet realized is that it contains the viruses that originally led to the extinction of dinosaurs.
Scientists have discovered huge freshwater reserves beneath the seabed on continental shelves off the coast of Australia, North America...
Low salinity water: good. But near North America they better check for radioactivity as well... nobody knows how deep are the Fukushima [1,3] cores..
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That since 1900 is greater than a century right?
Installing gray water systems to catch the water from laundry machines and using them to flush toilets is not a bad idea. The day is not far off, the fresh water price goes up so high, people voluntarily install such systems to cut their water bills down.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't speak English you insensitive clod!
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Nice spam, bro. If we knew what you are talking about.
Sea water is a lot more damaging to pipes, and piping sea water in as well as freshwater would require two sets of incoming pipes to residences. So I assume you're talking about a very limited context.
They'll start fracking now, to get every last drop.
If you think exploiting deep freshwater reserves is cool, just ask the venetians. In the early 1900s, the northern italian industrial city of Mestre-Marghera was built on the mainland edge of the venetian lagoon and a large number of 900 meter deep wells were bored to provide sweetwater for various factories and oil refinery plants. As the deep reserves dimished, the lagoon basement sunk and now the medieval aquatic city of Venice sits deeper in the water, the pavement and the base floors of historic buildings are almost constantly flooded from late autumn to spring. They are building a 10 billion euro MOSE dam system to keep the high sea tides out of the lagoon, so it cannot flood the subsided city. It is a race between the builders finishing the dam and the 400-600 year old houses starting to collapse. Problem is, that 10 billion euros funding is not flowing smoothly. Better pray to the Virgin Mary of Health, that's what locals did this Nov. 21 and have done every year since 1630.
I always saw him and Squidward finding some river or something below the ocean.
Corrosion and greater mineral build up would be the reason why this is not dumb.
The reason ships do it is because saving fresh water is important when you have to make it yourself on the ship using RO filters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_(Baxter_novel)
one more non-renewable resource we can drain to help spread the plague of hairless apes!
There is water at the bottom of the ocean Remove the water, carry the water Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down Letting the days go by, water flowing underground Into the blue again, after the money's gone Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground Into the blue again, into silent water Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yes, all our fresh water, once drunk, is lost forever to space. Some say water you pee into the toilet or behind a tree runs to the sea, evaporates into clouds, falls to the ground as rain, and flows as rivers and springs back to the great intake pipes that lead to your faucet in the great hydrological cycle, but I call that junk science. Mumbo-jumbo about conservation of mass and energy aside, once you've used something. IT. IS. GONE. FOREVER.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
So they are going to drill into it? Since seawater is denser, it will simply spill into it, and the fresh water will come out. In fact, with all the earthquakes over the centuries, it had to have happened a number of times already, so why is there still fresh water?
Is there life in the fresh water? What kind? It needs studied.
The rubbish will largely degrade. The rubbish that won't degrade (plastics, etc.) will be a resource for future generations.
Interesting take - I envy future generations, which will have amazing resources like, say, debts the level we can't even dream of yet.
You think they might be able to just climb up to the moon on the pile of IOUs from the US, Japan and other western democracies?
Another valuable resource, no doubt will be the dead oceans - from overfishing and animals killed from plastic rubbish; if only they could find something else to eat.
potable water
According to the article, this is "portable" water.
When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.
[citation needed]
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
How does one propose transport the fresh water? In Tankers?
Talking Heads prophecy comes true 30 years later:
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Quick, someone find a way to get poison down there!
drill, baby, drill?
... I guess there's no need to worry about the easily obtained fresh water that we used for drinking and, you know, survival. Let's use all that for fracking and when it's polluted beyond use, some corporation will drill for the sub-seafloor fresh water and make a huge profit selling it to us.
Call me skeptical about this fresh water. It seems every time some alternative to carbon-based energy production begins to gain a foothold in the market, some oil reserve is miraculously ``found'' thereby making investment in the alternatives ``unnecessary''. Something tells me this is the same situation.
people voluntarily install such systems to cut their water bills down.
Which is illegal in most of the US (building codes)
Or use composting toilets.
...it makes them look like what they are.
Followers of a cult-type religion...
Military guys in control room: "Who is this guy, what does he want"
Dennis Quaid: "I'm a paleo-climatologist...."
**dramatic pause**
Quaid: "I believe we've reached a critical de-salination point"
**gasps**
Thank you Dave Raggett
Wasn't there an article recently about using membrane pressure to extract energy from fresh/salt water mixing?
New energy source with no (intrinsic) carbon footprint/no waste issues/no dead birds = win :)
Tho the Luddites will scream no matter what I suppose...
This means nothing...
All it will lead to is Government/Corporate (same thing today) Control of "our" Water, seeing that only corporations will be able to afford to "mine" the water and sell it to us, then they can control access to surface water supplies and humanity is fucked.
This is bad, just bad.
Oh yeah, fuck those assholes in the NSA!
That is true. Gray water systems are illegal in almost all the building codes. But if it saves money people would push for code changes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Isn't there any way we could just filter salt water and drink that? Or is something like that to expensive or even possible? Just curious, I would think that we could just filter the salt out of salt water along with everything else so that we can drink it.
Looks like you typed out a coherent English sentence to me...
Is that likely to give us an insight of were Mars' water has gone?
Latrines, or toilets if you prefer, are found in the head. You might want to see a doctor about getting that foot removed from your mouth, shipmate.
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Can we finally arrest the idiots who say we have a limited supply of fresh water for false advertising?
* Fresh water falls as rain (and sleet and snow) every day.
* Fresh water can be obtained by desalination (and 2/3rds of the surface of our planet is salt water.)
* Fresh water has now been found below the sea floor.
So...why are alarmist enviro-wackos exempt from false advertising laws?
...another big excuse to do nothing to stop wasteful lifestyles and explosive population growth.
then launch a pr campaign about it
One important fact the article doesn't mention is how this water was identified -- much less how its enormous volume was estimated. Supposedly, it's stored in vast pools under the seabed. Not a trivial observation
I have learned my lesson, finally, I think. I missed out on fracking. This might be my last chance. Fuck Earth!