LET’S TALK WATER -- #3    

So what’s the problem?

(Note: I need to tweak an earlier comment on water and its place in a closed system. Speculation in the scientific community now is that Mars, for instance, was once covered in water, some of which wandered off into space with the bulk being absorbed by the planet’s crust, a multi-billion-year process. If the earth’s water supply is losing molecules to space, that would suggest that the earth is on its way to becoming a barren, lifeless planet similar to Mars … perhaps in a billion or so years, so let’s not panic.)

T

he problem has nothing to do with an actual shortage of H₂O. The problem arises when it’s in a place that’s hard to access or in a condition of contamination that makes it unusable.

Much of the earth’s potable water is stored in underground caverns and sand beds and we access it with wells and pumps. Some of these underground “lakes” or aquifers have gathered over centuries, but as we pump the water out for agricultural purposes and for human consumption, they deplete faster than they can be replenished, so that many of the largest aquifers in places like Western Texas and Southern California, for example, now show alarmingly low water tables.

By far the largest storehouses of water are, of course, the oceans that cover about two-thirds of the earth’s surface. Unfortunately, this water has become heavily salinized through millenniums of salts being carried in by rivers that pick-up earth salts and deposit them there. Although the bulk of our ground water comes from ocean evaporation that rains down on us, evaporation/condensation has a distilling effect; the salts and other minerals remain behind, making ocean water unpalatable without desalinization.

The fresh water stored in solid form in the ice caps of the Arctic and Antarctic is also not a viable source for us either. With climate change, the potential for harvesting and utilizing this water is hardly a prospect worth considering as the Arctic storehouse, particularly, is melting into the oceans where its waters will join the unpotable mass.

Maps of Canada would seem to belie a shortage of water. Large and small freshwater lakes are abundant, but the unlikely prospect of moving water from Lac La Ronge, for instance, to the Salinas Valley in California renders much of our freshwater resource inaccessible for any practical purposes.

The abundance of water where we live makes even conservation seem ludicrous. Many a family in dry areas of Africa could get by for a day with just the water we release down the drain every day while waiting for it to run cold enough … or hot enough. Think about it: we flush our toilets with drinking water!

                But it’s a world problem, and so drought anywhere is our problem too; we’ve become a global village. Canadians during long, frozen winters depend on the orchards of Mexico and the Southern US having enough water so we can consume fruits and vegetables when we can’t practically grow them. Drought, when it becomes widespread and frequent, results in refugee movement and the suffering that migrants endure … and the accommodating adjustments they represent to receiving, "have" countries.

(On this WORLD WATER DAY, MARCH 22, I highly recommend a look at what we do worldwide to make even that fresh water we have unpalatable. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/un-world-water-day-photos-1.5956227)

                Look for the next installment where I’ll share some thoughts about the psychology and practicality of conservation.