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Western US States Using Up Ground Water At an Alarming Rate
sciencehabit (1205606) writes A new study shows that ground water in the Colorado basin is being depleted six times faster than surface water. The groundwater losses, which take thousands of years to be recharged naturally, point to the unsustainability of exploding population centers and water-intensive agriculture in the basin, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Because ground water feeds many of the streams and rivers in the area, more of them will run dry.
The Santa Cruz river thru Tucson has been dry for so long, the local joke is the first day that the temp hits 100F, "breaking news, the ice has melted on the Santa Cruz"
In the 1960's there were pictures of concrete pads on wells that were three to five feet off the ground. Drive I-10 near Pich-a-co Peak (Picacho Peak) and there is a ten foot drop in the highway from ground water subsidence.
Not new news.....
in northwestern Venezuela we are having the biggest drought in 60 years. We only have 57 days left of water, and that's including with limited use (1 and a half days of water per week!)
Our water comes by the way of reservoirs, and we depend heavily on rain. Can't remember the last time it rained and we are getting extremely worried
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Until your well collapses one day and you need to get approval to drill a new one and that approval is not forth-coming because there's now a water-coop that you need to join instead; paying them lots of money to run a pipe to your house and charging you per cubic meter...
Seen it happen; it's coming.
My well collapsed and fortunately a permit to drill a new one was a rubber stamp and I have a nice clean (albeit very hard) 10gpm well. Hopefully this well will last until I'm too old to care...
All of those 2 acre lots are a tiny spot on the water table map that they lie on. Everyone else is sucking up your water and you don't even know it.
There is a treaty with respect to water in the Great Lakes. Not sure how that would affect things.
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You mean where they've been at the highest point in a decade because we now seeing a return to normal winter snowfalls? I remember 8 years ago that they were screaming that the end was nigh because the water levels had dropped. This was because we had unseasonably short winters with no heavy snow packs.
Om, nomnomnom...
Oh no! Kids in Seattle must not have rotten teeth. The horror!
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What usually happens is that the well water starts getting nasty and the well must be drilled a bit deeper to get decent water. There are places out west where good water used to be had at 200 ft. and now the wells have been extended down to 450 ft.. The energy used to lift that water gets more and more expensive.