Aquafear for Aquifers

While many are worried about globing warming, water pollution, depletion of forests because of over logging and other real and imagined man made environmental calamities; a real calamity is bubbling away under 174,000 square miles of the United States.

Trickling away would be a better description. What is trickling away is the vast underwater reservoir named the Ogallala Aquifer. It underlies a region stretching from South Dakota to Texas.

If you identified the area which this aquifer underlies as the Great Plains which is also known as America’s Breadbasket, you are right. It is from this area that was once known as the Great American Desert is where most of this nation’ wheat and other grains are produced.

Irrigation is what transformed the Great American Desert into the Great American Breadbasket. Irrigation is what is also drawing down the Ogallala Aquifer at an alarming rate.

When my father was a child Nebraska the water in the aquifer was so close to the surface of the ground in some spots that one could almost dig to it with a shovel.

Most of the water was used for livestock and domestic use. Little water was used to irrigate the land. The result was until the later 20th century the Ogallala Aquifer remained stable. It was not until the use of large scale farming techniques and using hundreds of millions of gallons of water did things begin to change.

Now, one must drill hundreds of feet in the hopes of striking water. Frequently, the water level in the aquifer is so low that it cannot be pumped to the surface.

The reason for this dramatic turn of events can be easily observed on a clear day by anyone looking from a window of an airplane flying over the Great Plains.  What one sees is one giant circle after another created by the arc of irrigation equipment spewing water onto wheat, corn, soy beans and other crops that not only feed the United States but make the United States the breadbasket to the world.

Unfortunately, the Ogallala Aquifer does not refill, at least not at a noticeable rate. That means the water that is taken from it is gone for practically forever.

The repercussions of the draining of this aquifer will be felt around the world. The least of the consequences will be higher food prices, the worst consequences can be millions of tons of grain that no longer reach the poor and starving people of third world nations.

Some adjustments can be made.  They include reducing the water drawn from the aquifer while the agricultural industry shifts to dry land farming techniques.

There will be danger that if drought occurs and the land is over-farmed without irrigated water to moisten the soil there could be reoccurrences(s) of the great dust bowl that hit the bowels of the Great Plains in the 1930s.

I have no recollection of those times. However, as a child I was told my parents told of me what it was like to live on the northern edge of the dust bowl and the grief and destruction it caused. 

It is ironic that despite our sophisticated civilization relatively minor natural occurrences such as a relatively small volcanic eruption in Iceland, or the near depletion of an underground reservoir of water can have such a profound impact.

Some experts believe the right circumstances in the Atlantic could create a tsunami hundreds of feet high that could obliterate our east coast. Geologists tell us that Yellowstone Park is a in actuality a cauldron formed by a mega volcano. The last time this volcano erupted it wiped out almost every plant and animal Wyoming east to the Mississippi River

Perhaps, on Earth Day we should be a bit less concerned about saving the planet and more concerned about saving ourselves from the earth.