From my understanding, water has a pretty complex life cycle that can boil down to (hehe) this : it’ll move around in the ground and in the air forever, sometimes passing through alive creatures in the process.
But water is water, if I buy 100L of bottled water and pour it to the ground, is it really wasted? It’s just moving through the cycle and it’ll come back just as clean eventually. The waste is financial for me or for the cleaning process in the water treatment plant. But really the water on the planet is always the same amount, right? It’s finite, but both abundant and “self cleaning”, no?
When I see the rivers being dry I can’t help but think the water is just elsewhere, which is just a matter of reaching it.
Bonus question : How does toxic waste affect that cycle? Is evaporating enough to be clean again?
In: 65
Over thousands of years, lots of clean good water has collected in underground aquifers. Basically rock with holes in, where the holes are filled with water. These aquifers are huge. They make it easy to get good water – just dig a well. Unfortunately, what was filled up over thousands of years is now being rapidly emptied by humans.
As the aquifers empty, wells will dry up. We will be able to redig them deeper, for a bit, but eventually the aquifers will be completely empty. Then we will have to rely on rainfall for all our water (I’m including lakes and rivers in that, since rivers just collect rainfall). Or we can switch to desalination, which needs a lot of energy. And we are already in the middle of a climate crisis caused by our inability to generate energy without destroying the planet.
I mean, nuclear, wind, solar are all planet friendly energy sources, but we currently use mostly fossil fuels instead.
Latest Answers