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
Fraccing pumps poison into the ground and it gets into ground water. When we poison the ground water, any water added becomes poison. If you have a full glass of water and add a teaspoon of gasoline, adding some more water doesn’t make the gasoline go away.
The same goes for salt. If we add more fresh water to the ocean, we still can’t drink it. People stuck on life rafts who drank sea water died more often than those who had no water and waited for rescue.
The technology is out there to reduce our need to wait on the water cycle, but it is not part of the overall political agenda to be used consistently and widespread. 80% of Israel’s water supply comes from desalination, and it recycled 90% of its water. They regularly have an over abundance of water and provide for the surrounding countries, too. California has had a desalination plant in Carlsbad since 2015 that supplies San Diego with about 10% of its daily water. If you pretend a plentiful resource is scarce and feign ignorance, you can convince a population to do whatever you want to get that resource.
Drying lands (droughts) is a factor here too. Moist ground allows for rainwater to be ‘soaked in’, the water goes into the ground, filters through, so we can pump it up later and use it.
Dry ground does not. On dry ground even in heavy rains blocks most of the water, so it runs on top, into streams and back into the ocean – without really ever becoming availble as well-water.
time is a big factor. sure eventually it’ll all balance out. but eventually doesn’t mean shit when there are 8 billion mouths to feed and crops need water every year
It’s more about “Cheap clean water”, rather than running out of clean water.
Agriculture and industry uses lots of water for growing plants, and industry uses lots of water in their processes for things like cleaning things between different steps in the process.
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.
it’s a rate problem.
Lets just take an example.
I use 100L a day. Washing, cleaning, eating, using it in squirt guns etc.
It washes out, down to the ocean. It evaporates, rains, percolates and gets filtered.
But it only rains 80L into my well. I still have plenty of water in the well, but I have less. And if I always take more than is replenished then eventually this location will run low enough that I can’t draw 100L today. I’ll only be able to draw 80 today, then put off my other uses till tomorrow. Or curtail them entirely.
Its a bit like money. You spend it. It never disappears. Somebody else has it, uses it and passes it on. But can *you* run out of money? absolutely. And a person or institution could hoard it so that everyone else starts to have problems.
Let’s just pretend the water cycle itself was a big magical machine that took in dirty water from all around the world and spit out clean, usable water from a big ol’ hose, always at a constant rate, 24/7. And for simplicity, let’s just say it’s indestructible, will never shut off, break down, or even slow down. It just hums away, always.
The machine dumps out its fresh water into a massive reservoir where anyone in the world can come and take their fill.
You may look upon this and think, “This reservoir is so huge. And it’s always being filled by a machine that will never break, and never run out. Surely fresh water is functionally infinite?”
Kind of. That magical machine is very big, and it processes a tremendous amount of water. But there are a lot of straws dipped in that reservoir. And they are all *very* thirsty. No one of them can match the output of the machine, but *all* of them combined?
The reservoir level is dropping. The machine can’t keep up. It’s running fine, just as fast as it always has, and it will continue to do so. But the straws keep getting wider. And longer. And *thirstier*…
The reservoir gives us the illusion that everything is fine, so far. Since it has banked up for centuries, millennia, even, we have a large buffer to satisfy us. But that just means we’re on borrowed time. If things keep up as they are, the reservoir will run dry, and we will all huddle up around the machine, fighting over every drop that comes out of it, because even though its supply over time is theoretically infinite, its supply *right now* is finite, and sadly, less than what we’re demanding of it.
That is, perhaps, an extreme dramatization, but the takeaway point is that even if it’s renewable, the rate at which it’s renewable is what’s important, as that is the bottleneck for how much there actually is to go around.
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