Eli5: Were detroits rivers and lakes lower than they normally would be? Was there less rain because these gallons were missing from the atmosphere? Was there any affect at all in nature from these millions of gallons of water going missing?
“–3.5 million gallons (13.2 million liters) of water was pumped from the basement”
https://apnews.com/article/michigan-central-train-station-detroit-ford-mobility-49c55d18ee0b377fa54c70f389168639
In: Biology
For comparison, Lake Michigan (admittedly, a pretty big lake) contains about 10^15 gallons of water. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 or a quadrillion gallons. You’d need to pump out that basement roughly a billion times to equal that amount of water. And that’s just one lake. The Ogallala Aquifer is an underground reservoir of water stretching across a large part of the US Midwest region. It contains about 3 trillion gallons of water, or about a million times more water than this basement.
A few million gallons of water sounds like a lot (and it’s pretty wasteful if you watered your lawn with that much), but in a global or even regional sense it’s not even a drop in a bucket!
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