We’re undergoing an unprecedented loss of freshwater across the planet

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2490008-were-undergoing-an-unprecedented-loss-of-freshwater-across-the-planet/

by New_Scientist_Mag

7 comments

  1. Yeah water is being dried up and sucked into the atmosphere and what goes up must eventually come down…in a downpour causing floods.

  4. Capitalism is unable to stop itself before everything is wiped clean, including our advanced civilization.

  5. The Future for cities around the great lakes looks especially bright 🙂

  6. Hate to be a doomer but the next few decades not looking so hot.

  7. Quick story.

    A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine was up in Scotland, in the Highlands. At this time, someone was doing some drilling in the rocks up there and being interested in that sort of thing, he went to have a look.

    Now, drills like this need a huge amount of water pumped over them to keep them cool as they drill. When he arrived he saw a tanker full of water. He asked where they’d got it and the drill operators told him they just went to a local farmer and bought a tanker of it direct from him for relatively little money.

    Then he watched them drill and noticed the water was pouring away into the bedrock as they drilled. That is to say, it was leaving the groundwater and falling deep into the stone, where it will stay locked away for, effectively, the rest of time. We cannot ever get it back.

    When the tanker ran dry, they would go and pay the farmer, and take more fresh water, and come and pour it away into the bedrock forever. Multiple tankers. Gallons of freshwater. Gone forever. Robbed from us all for a few hundred pounds.

    This is a process, my acquaintance said, that is being repeated all over the world, every day.

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