16-County Region In TX Panhandle Saw 2.56-Foot Drop In Ogalalla Last Year - Largest In 25 Years

[hatrack]

The historic Texas drought caused the Ogallala Aquifer to experience its largest decline in 25 years across a large swath of the Texas Panhandle, new numbers from a water district show.

The 16-county High Plains Underground Water Conservation District reported this week that its monitoring wells showed an average decline last year of 2.56 feet — the third-largest in the district’s 61-year history, and three times the average rate over the past decade. Farmers pumped more water during the drought to compensate for the lack of rainfall, which was about two-thirds less than normal last year in Lubbock and Amarillo.

Further north in the Panhandle, along the state's border with Oklahoma, a second water district also registered large declines in the Ogallala. Steve Walthour, the general manager of the eight-county North Plains Groundwater Conservation District, calculated on Monday that the average drop in the Ogallala reached 2.9 feet last year.

"We’ve seen some pretty heavy declines," Walthour said, noting that the west side of his district got hit especially hard. Given the catastrophic nature of the drought, which was the most intense in recorded state history, some farmers said things could have been worse.

EDIT

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-environmental-news/water-supply/drought-caused-huge-drop-texas-portion-ogallala/

[Firebrand Gary]

1. Crickets.......nt

[GliderGuider]

2. All larger lifeforms have died of heatstroke and thirst... nt

[Denninmi]

3. And when it's completely depleted, then what?

How are they proposing to grow crops in these areas without rain or groundwater for irrigation?

[hatrack]

4. Why, they'll get Uncle Sugar to run an pipeline from the Mississippi or Lake Superior or wherever .

You know, those tough-talkin' government-hatin' welfare-refusin' bootstrap types.

[phantom power]

6. you've never lost your hatred of freedom

[joshcryer]

9. Exactly. The Great Lakes are not immune from exploitation.

No matter the treaties, no matter the states rights, they will be used. The question is, will they start building the pipeline before the aquifer is totally fucked? My inclination is no. It will take the depletion to make it politically viable.

A really fucked catch-22 if I ever thought of one.

[Odin2005]

13. They will take our water from our cold, dead hands.

[joshcryer]

14. When grain prices jump exponentially overnight you'll be begging them to.

[pscot]

7. It will never be depleted.

As the price goes up, new technologies will emerge which will create alternatives to water. Increased exploration will discover vast new reserves of water. Someday we may even learn to capture the hugh cosmic snowballs that constantly bombard the earth. Failing that. we can always just drill, baby. Drill.

[zeaper]

15. We have the technology now, fresh Water is energy

Pump sea water into a filer, reject the salt (blow down), and you have fresh water. This is done on an industrial scale in many places as I write. But, it is not free; pressuring water though into very small filers (reverse osmosis) takes a lot of energy. A few pipes and pumps and we can refresh this aquifer, no problem. Just takes money!!

[Nihil]

16. 3 problems with that:

1) Feedback cycle

The amount of energy required "could" be provided by carbon-free sources
but, there again, so "could" most of the electrical needs of the country in
the first place. The fact that it *doesn't* happen means that the energy
needed to force reverse osmosis desalination will be adding to the underlying
problem of accelerating climate change.

2) Waste product

The salt that comes out of the water has to go somewhere.
If you dump it back into the sea, you are poisoning practically all life within
the area as most living things are adapted to a fairly small halinity range.
If you dump it on land, you will be creating a toxic wasteland (think about
the great salt flats and how much grows there) and also threatening the
very groundwater that you are expending so much energy & money in an
attempt to enhance.

3) Scale

Whilst I took your comment ("A few pipes and pumps and we can refresh
this aquifer, no problem&quot as flippant, some may not and many will not
have any concept of the sheer scale of the situation. A "2.56 foot drop" will
sound like a trivial lowering of water level when it applies to a single dam
and reservoir. Applying that across a contiguous aquifer the size of the
Ogalla should be terrifying. Even if you take the best possible interpretation
that it is only in the stated 16 county region, the area that this encompasses
is significant and the fact that the inflow from the adjoining (hopefully) less
depleted areas cannot keep up with the rate of extraction is (or should be)
a real wake-up call for the people wasting that water.

[happyslug]

17. Why such a complicated process, I can think of two simpler methods

First is build move salt water to one of the many dried up salt lakes in the west. Watch the heat of the sun evaporate the water, leaving the salt behind. If the salt water is large enough, the resulting moisture in the air will come down as rain.

Second method is a variation of the first, build over the salt lake a glass dome, that would leave the sun light in, and keep the water INSIDE the glass. The glass would have built in channels so the water would roll down the glass in the from of droplets into larger channels that then takes the water to where you want it to go.

Variations of the above, Mostly the first version, has been suggested for the Dead Sea, the Qattara depression on the Egyptian-Libyan border and the Death Valley in the US. All are below sea level, so no need to pump in the salt water, all you have to do is dig a channel or tunnel from the sea to each of the Dead sea (1386 feet below sea level), Death valley (286 below Sea Level) or the Qattara Depression 436 feet blow sea level) and watch the water flow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

Please note, while the above three are the best known below sea level locations, other exists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_on_land_with_elevations_below_sea_level

The real key (beside that it is below sea level) is how far from the ocean is the depression (and is it mountains, flat lands or valleys).

The lowest point in China, the Aydingkol, is 505 feet below sea level, but in the Western most part of China, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which borders Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan (In addition to Mongolia, India and Russia);

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aydingkol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Uyghur_Autonomous_Region

But other factors also come into play, for example Kazakhstan lowest point in at Karagiye, which is 433 feet below sea level, but is on the Caspian Sea, which is mostly fresh water north of Karagiye but gets salter as you go further south, thus adding water from the Black Sea (Then nearest body of water connected to the oceans) would introduced water with a higher salt content then at present in the Caspian sea, and at a point where the Caspian sea has its lowest level of salt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karagiye

Side note: The worse environmental disaster involvign a sea is the Aral sea. The Aral is located between "Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda provinces) in the north and Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, in the south".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
http://ccb.colorado.edu/docs/ambio_mhg.pdf

The Aral Sea is located ABOVE mean sea level, thus diverting sea water to the Aral WITHOUT pumping is impossible (Even the Russian Plan for the Aral, requires some pumping, but the Russian plan is to divert water from the Pechora, Kama, Tobol, Ishim, Irtysh, and Ob rivers to the Aral Sea, and would have cost 30-50 Billion dollars in the 1980s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal

I mention the above more to show the cost of such diversion of water, but the cost are much lower if you stay with low spots close to the sea. The Quttara Depression, Death Valley (via Gulf of California. Cortes) and the Dead sea (from the Red Sea) are all within 50 miles of the sea,

[Odin2005]

12. They will probably pray for GAWD and JEBUS to help them.

And when that doesn't help the scapegoating starts...

[rfranklin]

5. But the swimming pools are open and the sprinkler systems are still running full blast...

The golf courses are being watered with abandon and people are taking 20 minute showers while they shave their legs.

[joshcryer]

8. The vast majority of water on farms evaporates.

It's pretty astonishing. I don't think the Grain Belt was ever sustainable because of this.

[Nihil]

10. Fossil fuel, fossil water, ...

... fossil humans ...

[Sirveri]

11. I'm sure it will run out just when peak oil/gas and climate change hits.

So why bother trying to fix it, nobody else seems to care about any of this stuff enough to actually do anything.