You may say, "aquifer? WHATEVER!" If you said that, you probably mean to say this, "aquifer? WhATEvR!" And you would be right to say that, because, for example, in the United States, we derive 30% of our ground water from a SINGLE, GIGANTIC aquifer that has an awesome name: the Ogallala aquifer. According to wikipedia, this aquifer covers 174,000 square miles in the center of the United States, and it lies underneath eight states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. That is one big aquifer.
But what exactly IS an aquifer? I like to imagine that it is an underground lake...but it really isn't...apparently it is more like an underground gravel pit...a WET underground gravel pit, surrounded on all sides (top and bottom) by hard, dense rock that doesn't allow water to easily move through it (in contrast to the gravel). The Ogallala aquifer formed a long time ago (2-6 million years ago), after the Rocky Mountains were born, when erosion from streams carried loose rocky material down from the mountains and deposited it in the low-lying areas of the ancient landscape. It would eventually look something kind of like this (from the waterencyclopedia.com website):
There is a ridiculous amount of water beneath our feet (from Wikipedia, the US Geological Survey estimates that it contained roughly 2,925,000,000 acre-feet of water in 2005)! The scale of it is illustrated in this image taken from Wikipedia:
But in a recent article from the New York Times, and in basically ANYTHING you read about the Ogallala aquifer, you will learn that we are pumping water OUT of this aquifer (into water towers perhaps?) at a rate that far exceeds the rate at which water flows back into it. The wikipedia article says that at the times of heaviest consumption, parts of the aquifer were drained by 5 feet per year. At the same time, water was flowing back into the aquifer at a maximum rate of 6 inches per year (and in many areas, like Texas and New Mexico rates on the order of 0.02 inches per year).
There WAS a ridiculous amount of water beneath our feet, as illustrated by THIS image from Wikipedia:
There are certain aspects of our unsustainable life-style, as humans, and especially as Americans, that are sometimes (unfortunately) relatively easy to ignore because the signs of their consequences remain abstract. But I have never seen such consensus on any issue regarding the environment...if we don't change or stop our currently unsustainable farming practices (growing too much corn, in areas that don't have the climate to support it, for example) the Ogallala aquifer WILL run dry, SOON (according to Wikipedia, in as soon as 25 years). Although I believe in global warming, and I know that many of the resources we take for granted are limited, these still exist largely as ideas in my head. In a strange way, it was almost a pleasure for me to become aware of the Ogallala aquifer, because it is clear, it is indisputable, and it is occurring on a time-scale that will be felt within my generation. I think what pleased me is this: few things in life are so clear, and we should be thankful that, for once, we have a clue as to what path we should take forward. (A path other than the one we are currently on).
