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- Hacker News
- Digging lots of tunnels to store rain will be maybe required. Fortunately is a solved technological problem. It just will be really expensive.by pvaldes
- For anyone interested in the history of water in the American West (what's different about the west, and how did we get here?), I recommend the extremely interesting and readable book Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
- > The only way to know for sure whether permanent compaction has occurred is through expensive core samples or other measurements at depth
Wouldn't it be for rain to fall and the aquifer's levels to rebound less than expected?
- Yes, looks like they are acting like a sponge whose efficiency to retain water decreases as time passes.by tesnorindian
- That is what the one expert quoted said but others thought it might still come back over a longer time period - I interpreted it to mean that method as being more accurate than the one season refill rate.by stevenwoo
- You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...
by morkalork - What can you realistically do?
- Thank you for posting that, saved me from doing so.
Ignorance and stupidity are the greatest threats to human survival - but perhaps it's for the best.
by softjobs - Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.by p-e-w
- I think it’s somewhat fortunate when these aquifers permanently compress, it takes the land out of agriculture production as a sort of forced conservation, because in many ways, humans cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of such a natural finite resource.
https://uttoncenter.unm.edu/resources/2026-06-1-update-paper...
https://www.organicproducenetwork.com/organic-growers/califo...
by toomuchtodo - > You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.
And the same is true for global carbon-related climate change, for which the real bill will become increasingly due over the next 10 years.
We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.
- Who cares there is so much more to exploit. For example no-one has yet moved massive freshwater icebergs by boat, and its up for grabs!by augment_me
- Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael.
Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.
by arjie - Most of the southwest should not have people living in it. It's a fake place that is enabled to exist by massive and unnatural engineering projects, like dams on the Colorado river. We need to create a long term plan to relocate the population to other parts of the country.by rayiner
- You can make this kind of claim about living in lots of different places. Some amount of engineering and technology has been necessary to enable humans to live in most parts of the world. What determines the line?by aesthesia
- As the Super El-Nino is at its peak, South India is facing an acute water crisis
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cauvery-water-managem...
#SaveWater #SaveElectricity #SaveFuel
Interestingly none of our Govts. or Leaders are talking about conservation yet and the ancient water laws/standards don't take climate change into consideration. For eg. as per BIS IS 1172: 1993 standards an average Indian is entitled to 135 Liters of water per day when the actual supply is not even close to 50 liters per Indian per day. This is level of water crisis India is facing today.
by tesnorindian - The answer is desalination plants. Look at rich water-stressed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. All of them use extensive desalination plants. India has lots of very smart engineers. I am sure you can build them. Another thing: India needs to build the equivalent of the California State Water Project to move water from wet areas to dry areas. (China did the same.)
- >In an aquifer that’s permanently collapsed, artificial recharge—pumping water forcibly back underground—is the only option, according to Shirzaei. That’s expensive and carries the risk of triggering earthquakes.
I have spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley and what I have been wondering about over the past few years is what is the effect removing all that water from the faults. Specifically, does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
by marking-time - Toward the end it briefly discusses a possible solution - expensive injection of water into aquifers that might have the side effect of triggering earthquakes like fracking for petroleum or some types of geothermal - there’s no winning.by stevenwoo
- > does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?
Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00137...
- I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out.
I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.
by LanceH - The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out.
Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?
by p-e-w - There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter.
But it is the opening chapter that is very explicit in trying to highlight how most people live today. It isn't that we don't know what is happening or that we do not care, it is just that we have needs and wants that unfortunately have long term blow back. We are just trying to take care of others, but that is leading down a less desirable path.
I thought it was a great message that needs to sent to the future.
The aquifers are being drained, but it was being done to feed the people. Yes, it could have been handled much better but that core driving force behind it will probably be the same in hundred of years from now.
If that message isn't sent forwards, the stories that will be made in our place will not be very kind to us.
If that matters or not, that is up to you to decide. And that is the whole debate on 'What is legacy?'.
by ColdStream - Why would any of us care what people 200 or 500 years in the future think of us?
Peak irrelevance.
by avazhi - Quite true.
Our own individual ancestors were not perfect people. But we only exist today because they survived.
by BobbyTables2 - I disagree strongly and push back on this framing. It's technically correct but it subtracts the huge factor that maximizing short term profit plays, and couching that in "feeding the people" papers over that.
Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.
by basilgohar - We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.by rho138
- California has codified a water caste system. In 2015 (my last experience with this), citizens were ordered to cut water use 25% while ~400 pre-1914 claimants with magical "senior water rights" took 90% of the water. [1][2]
We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.
[1]: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/prog...
[2]: https://archive.gov.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2015/04/01/news1891...
by cobbzilla - I expect the people will realize how easy it is to disable agriculture pumps, located in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to protect them.
When the law fails to protect the people, they will eventually do what it takes to protect themselves.
by voakbasda - Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_...
> Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually
> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023
> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").
by rayiner