US groundwater shortage is forcing us to dig extremely deep wells

[Judi Lynn]

ENVIRONMENT 22 July 2019

By Adam Vaughan

The US’s thirst for water – whether to drink or to grow crops – is encouraging an unsustainable trend towards ever deeper groundwater wells. That is the warning from US researchers who have produced the first map of the country’s wells, spending four years painstakingly talking to scores of public authorities to unearth the data.

Groundwater provides drinking water for 120 million Americans and around half of the country’s irrigation needs. But demand in places such as California’s central valley is drying up existing wells, and engineers are drilling deeper ones to replace them.

No one knew how many and how deep these new wells were. But a mapping exercise by Debra Perrone and Scott Jasechko at University of California, Santa Barbara found there are 11.8 million wells in total, and they are becoming deeper over time. “We wanted to make the invisible visible,” says Perrone.

Simply drilling deeper is “an unsustainable stopgap to groundwater depletion”, Perrone and Jasechko argue, for four reasons: cost, energy for pumping, geology, and water usually becoming saltier the deeper you go. Perrone suggests that the alternative is to improve governance around groundwater use, and to look closer at which legal controls around withdrawals are most effective. In those cases where deeper drilling has to go ahead, water quality must be protected, she adds.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2210661-us-groundwater-shortage-is-forcing-us-to-dig-extremely-deep-wells/#ixzz5uRETkyok

(Short article, no more at link.)

[elleng]

1. Get water from nestle.

[hlthe2b]

2. Geez, so how deep is "deeper".. Seems they could at least state what depth "normal" wells are?

[The_jackalope]

3. In India, some places are going down almost 1,000 feet.

How unchecked pumping is sucking aquifers dry in India

DAPEGAON, India – At dawn, as bells ring out from Hindu shrines, the people of this village get in line for water.

Wells have been going dry across the countryside, and the village’s one remaining well yields just enough to run the communal taps for an hour or two a day. In front of the spigots, people leave their empty water jugs and buckets arranged in rows, and they crowd around to collect what they can while the taps are running. The water could stop flowing at any time.

For farmers here, finding sources of water underground is becoming exceedingly difficult. They’ve been drilling wells deep beneath the tilled soil into the volcanic rock – 700 feet, 800 feet, even 900 feet down. The few who strike water usually plant sugarcane, a thirsty crop that fetches fixed prices subsidized by the government. Lately, though, many farmers drill wells and find nothing at all.

In large portions of India, from the plains that spread out below the Himalayas to the country’s southern plateau, water is being quickly drained from the ground and aquifers are rapidly declining. In some areas, government data show groundwater levels have dropped by an average of more than 30 feet since 2005.