
Global groundwater extraction a “ticking time bomb” - EndXA
https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth-sciences/global-groundwater-extraction-a-ticking-time-bomb
======
dredmorbius
Another element of groundwater, and other natural mineral extraction (coff oil
coff gas coff) is the legal doctrine that's applied, whether directly or
through reference or gloss.

In much of the US and elsewhere, that's an old English common law notion
called the Rule of Capture. As interpreted in a Texas Supreme Court ruling,
Houston & Texas Central Railroad Co. v. East (1904), which held for the right
of individuals to draw as much as they wished from any underground reservoir,
"Because the existence, origin, movement and course of such waters, and the
causes which govern and direct their movements, are so secret, occult and
concealed that an attempt to administer any set of legal rules in respect to
them would be involved in hopeless uncertainty"

[https://www.twdb.texas.gov/publications/reports/numbered_rep...](https://www.twdb.texas.gov/publications/reports/numbered_reports/doc/R361/1%20CH%20Potter.pdf)

That's _still_ governing law in Texas, and is frequently referenced in the oil
and gas industry, as a Web search on "rule of capture" will show.

One hundred fifteen years later, the science has moved on. It's well past time
for that exceptionally poor example of jurisprudence to be overturned.

~~~
mc32
Wonder how the Middle East deals with this when petroleum fields straddle
borders...

~~~
_rrnv
One of the reasons behind Iraq invading Kuwait was the latter did slant
drilling into the Iraqi oil fields, underground behind the border. Another
reason was several billion dollars Iraq owed to Kuwait. What's interesting, a
few days before Saddam invaded Kuwait, there were talks between the diplomats,
and Kuwait was willing to forgo $800M in debt as a compensation for the slant
drilling. Apparently, Saddam didn't want to hear of anything less than a
billion. The rest is history...

~~~
bpodgursky
The accusation of slant drilling was not proven in the slightest, and it's a
misrepresentation to state it as a fact (Iraq itself is the only source which
stood by that accusation).

I'm not saying it's impossible that it was true, but it is not a known fact
like you represented it.

~~~
_rrnv
Indeed nothing was proven, but it was still an Iraqi reason. If it was proven,
imagine the implications for the validity of desert storm... Nice write up
from 1990 [https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-
th...](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-the-
oilfield-lying-below-the-iraq-kuwait-dispute.html)

------
EndXA
> The hydrological model, published in the journal Nature, shows that in
> nearly 20% of regions that pump groundwater, rivers are already flowing too
> low to maintain healthy aquatic ecosystems.

This refers to this study:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1594-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1594-4)

Abstract:

> Groundwater is the world’s largest freshwater resource and is critically
> important for irrigation, and hence for global food security1,2,3. Already,
> unsustainable groundwater pumping exceeds recharge from precipitation and
> rivers4, leading to substantial drops in the levels of groundwater and
> losses of groundwater from its storage, especially in intensively irrigated
> regions5,6,7. When groundwater levels drop, discharges from groundwater to
> streams decline, reverse in direction or even stop completely, thereby
> decreasing streamflow, with potentially devastating effects on aquatic
> ecosystems. Here we link declines in the levels of groundwater that result
> from groundwater pumping to decreases in streamflow globally, and estimate
> where and when environmentally critical streamflows—which are required to
> maintain healthy ecosystems—will no longer be sustained. We estimate that,
> by 2050, environmental flow limits will be reached for approximately 42 to
> 79 per cent of the watersheds in which there is groundwater pumping
> worldwide, and that this will generally occur before substantial losses in
> groundwater storage are experienced. Only a small decline in groundwater
> level is needed to affect streamflow, making our estimates uncertain for
> streams near a transition to reversed groundwater discharge. However, for
> many areas, groundwater pumping rates are high and environmental flow limits
> are known to be severely exceeded. Compared to surface-water use, the
> effects of groundwater pumping are markedly delayed. Our results thus reveal
> the current and future environmental legacy of groundwater use.

~~~
donkeyd
I'm not sure if it's reasonable, but I'm starting to think that the amount of
people that are currently inhabiting earth is just not sustainable. We are
inhabiting many places that high risk for the people living there (fault
lines, hurricane paths), we're exhausting resources and causing plants and
animals to go extinct. And, according to this article, we're also exhausting
groundwater reserves.

Meanwhile, projections show that probably another couple billion people will
be added in the next three decades. There's strong resistance against any
proposals to cut back emissions, especially if it means giving up some of the
luxury we're used to (flights, meat, cars, large houses, etcetera).

I might have a bleak perspective of the current state of affairs, but I'm
really not seeing any feasible short term solutions, that can actually get
people on board. Naming possible solutions is easy, but getting everyone to
agree seems downright impossible for the foreseeable future. And I fear that
we won't change a thing before it's too late.

~~~
snarf21
I agree. I don't think the earth can support more than about 4B or so people.
Our aquifers are drying up and they can take centuries to refill. Or they
compress and will never fill again (but maybe new ones will instead). We have
no real chance of changing human behavior so it seems like we just need less
humans. I'm not suggesting laws but you can remove tax breaks for kids after
the second. Have all you want, you just don't get the breaks.

I think the earth is about to strike back and show us who is boss. Clean
water, food monoculture, and antibiotics overuse are going to come home to
roost and we'll quickly learn what a sustainable population is.

~~~
dredmorbius
The long-term historical trend was far closer to 50-100m.

There are very few historical large wild mammal populations remotely close to
this. And historical, because we've reduced wild terrestrial vertebrate
biomass by about 90% over the past 100-1000 years.

There are about a half-million wild zebra, and maybe 12 million white-tail
deer. The largest seal populations are estimated at about 8 million -- roughly
the number of people in New York City. We're probably outnumbered by brown
rates, roughly 11 billion.

Even of domesticated cattle and pigs, totals are on the order of about a
billion.

The passenger pidgeon, two centuries ago, numbered 3-5 billion individuals.
Today there are none.

For most large terrestrial mammals, populations are in the 5,000 - 50,000
range. That's the population of a small to mid-sized town. For an entire
species.

Update: an Imgur photo gallery consisting of images with as many pixels per
image as there are individuals in the population:

[https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p](https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p)

------
someonehere
After the water rationing I heard happening in South Africa’s capital, I took
it upon myself to research commercial water from air extractors. A
dehumidifier essentially.

There’s a company out in Arizona that had an article published in wired. Zero
Mass Water. The article intrigued me. I lived close enough to the ocean, would
it work?

I had a few panels installed on my roof. I can yield somewhere between 3-15
liters per day if the conditions are right. I can store 90 liters total. I use
it as drinking water in my home. I no longer drink from municipal tap water as
a result. Yes I shower with it, but I’m not really ingesting as much.

Point is I did the panels for the exact same reason this article is the
mentioning water wars coming up. At some point we’ll have to be rationing
water in cities and I don’t want that for myself or my family.

~~~
dredmorbius
Are you familiar with how much energy it takes to boil water?

Dehumidifying moisture from the air is effectively un-boiling water: you've
got to _remove_ the latent heat of vapourisation to convert a gas to a liquid.
It's unbelievably energy consumptive, and there is no free lunch.

~~~
abstractbarista
This sounds like a fantastic pairing with solar power! You can grab as much
water as needed during the sunny times and store it for the dark times.

~~~
mrguyorama
That energy is way more efficiently used in water desalination. We also don't
know what kind of effects large scale de-humidification would do to the water
cycle or environment

------
hourislate
Netflix has a great series called "Explained", short 18 minute episodes about
interesting topics. I just watched the one about water and it was a real eye
opener. Who would have thought that cotton t-shirt required over a 1000 liters
of water to produce. Even a can of Coke required some ridiculous amount of
water to produce.

[https://www.netflix.com/title/80216752](https://www.netflix.com/title/80216752)

~~~
noonespecial
I'm always a bit dubious when claims are made that this or that "requires" a
certain amount of water to do. What kind of water, and what happens to it
afterwards? It doesn't just vanish.

Water is just moved from a useful (to humans) state to a less useful state.
The bottom of which is seawater. Seawater is still useful, it just takes more
energy to do it. There's an unlimited supply of less useful water.

All that to say that once we use the easy water, that cotton shirt is just
going to cost a lot more.

~~~
tpm
And also some people won't have enough water to drink, cook, wash etc.

Yes there is an unlimited supply of seawater, and there are also a lot of
places far away from seashore in regions with scarce water where people live,
and once that scarce water is used it's not a very livable place anymore.

See also the history of the Aral Sea, nearly completely disappeared because of
Soviet cotton industry.

------
jofer
If you're interested in this topic, "Cadillac Desert" is well worth a read.
Much of our society and a surprising portion of our agriculture is heavily
dependent on non-renewable groundwater resources in arid regions.

------
carapace
[https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/landsubsidence-
poland.htm...](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/landsubsidence-poland.html)

> This photo shows the approximate location of maximum subsidence in the
> United States, identified by research efforts of Dr. Joseph F. Poland
> (pictured). The site is in the San Joaquin Valley southwest of Mendota,
> California. Signs on pole show approximate altitude of land surface in 1925,
> 1955, and 1977.

> In this case, excessive groundwater pumping allowed the upper soil layers to
> dry out and compress and compact, which is by far the single largest cause
> of subsidence. Soil compaction results in a reduction of the pore sizes
> between soil particles, resulting in essentially a permanent
> condition—rewetting of the underground soil and rock does not cause the land
> to go back up in altitude. This results in a lessening of the total storage
> capacity of the aquifer system. Here, the term "groundwater mining" is
> really true.

------
numtel
Just like in the thread [0] about the dam in Turkey: new metal-organic
frameworks could change the game for water usage.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPSYzLZ7xKU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPSYzLZ7xKU)

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-
har...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-harvest-
water-desert-air-turn-carbon-dioxide-liquid-fuel)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21156325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21156325)

------
denton-scratch
“This shows that riverine water freshwater ecosystems are extremely sensitive
to water decline”

No. Really?

