Huge Reservoir of Fresh Water Found Beneath the Sea Off Hawaii (newscientist.com) 83
A huge cache of fresh water found beneath the sea floor off the western coast of Hawaii's Big Island could lift the threat of drought for people living there. From a report, submitted by reader schwit1: Eric Attias at the University of Hawaii and his colleagues discovered the reservoir, which is contained in porous rock reaching at least 500 metres beneath the sea floor, using an imaging technique similar to an MRI scan. They used a boat towing a 40-metre-long antenna behind it to generate an electromagnetic field, sending an electric current through the sea and below the sea floor. As seawater is a better conductor than fresh water, the team could distinguish between the two. They found that the reservoir extends at least 4 kilometres from the coast and contains 3.5 cubic kilometres of fresh water. Most of Hawaii's fresh water comes from onshore aquifers, which are layers of rock and soil underground that collect water after rainfall. The team believes that this newfound reservoir is replenished by water flowing out of these aquifers.
Lift the threat of drought (Score:5, Insightful)
Start pumping fresh water out and see how fast salt water will enter that aquifer to replace it.
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I prefer to die in the past, live for today, and be born in the future.
Re: Lift the threat of drought (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, how fucking stupid are people who do not even get the concept of a limited resource?
Some people get it, but then have to deal with the politics of the rest.
In California, nobody knows how many wells have been sunk into the floor of the San Joaquin valley. But the floor itself has sunk by as much as 30 feet in places and the aquifer below will never recover.
At the same time, driving on Hwy 5 past the irrigated agriculture there you will be treated to a series of signs [kqed.org] saying this like "How is Growing Food Wasting Water?" and blaming the shortage on conservation minded politicians. (Pelosi is a frequent target).
Clearly they believe that left wing politics caused their water shortage (affecting their income) and it has nothing to do with limited resource. You have to wonder if they were allowed to do what they wanted -- which is to drain the Sacramento and sister rivers dry and to hell with whatever ecosystems they support -- if they would still be railing against the evils of socialist politicians when that ran out as well.
It's a tough battle. Greed is hard to fight.
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Well it is better to use the water than to let all that clean river water run into the ocean isn't it? 8^P
NOTE: That was a sarcastic remark in case it wasn't clear enough.
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Maybe, maybe not.
It is probably OK to tap some of it. How much would need careful monitoring.
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The problem really boils down to magical thinking. It starts with what I consider the most egregious aspect of most industrialized cultures; that God (or whatever any particular culture calls the so-called Prime Mover) made humans as some special order of being, that the Universe somehow has been tailored to humanity's needs. This is the bedrock bit mythical nonsense from which so many ills arise. If we're special, that means somehow that the physical laws and their ramifications can be suspended because, a
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Remember when lefties were like: "there's too many people destroying the planet, we need less people"
Then a virus swept through and righties were like: "an extended global lock down doesn't make sense, some people just won't make it"...
And lefties were like: "wait hold up, all life is precious"
Re: Lift the threat of drought (Score:2)
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Re: Lift the threat of drought (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly they believe that left wing politics caused their water shortage (affecting their income) and it has nothing to do with limited resource. You have to wonder if they were allowed to do what they wanted -- which is to drain the Sacramento and sister rivers dry and to hell with whatever ecosystems they support -- if they would still be railing against the evils of socialist politicians when that ran out as well.
The anchoveta disaster off of Peru comes to mind. For years, the island birds near the fisheries produced high quality guano fertilizer. But the fishermen demanded no restraints, because restraints are left wing trying to throttle honest hard working people. So they fished the anchovitas as their rights to not be impeded demanded, until the fisheries collapsed. Then hey - no biggie, we'll just get something else! But they blew out an ecosystem. After the fisheries collapsed, there was no more food for the Island birds, so the left, and no more guano fertilizer was produced. So their nutrients didn't make their way into the water, so there was no chain of life.
But yeah, the greedy have one thing the rest of us don't have. An easy repeatable target that is responsible for every wrong, every inconvenience.
Now we can talk about Houston, which is sinking, and it's getting hard to pin it on the liberals - but I'm sure they will. https://www.houstonchronicle.c... [houstonchronicle.com]
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It would make more sense to stop using water to keep all the lawns and golf courses in SoCal green before cutting food irrigation though wouldn't it?
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It would make more sense to stop using water to keep all the lawns and golf courses in SoCal green before cutting food irrigation though wouldn't it?
A quick and dirty chart on how much water is needed to grow some crops in California [businessinsider.com]. This is only from five years ago.
That said, California uses recycled water (i.e. wastewater which has been lightly treated) for crops as well as golf courses [casaweb.org] and some other uses. If treated further, they use it to help recharge aquifers.
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Too many illegals.
You went off the rails there at the end, and unravelled your credibility about everything else you said.
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Too many illegals.
You went off the rails there at the end, and unravelled your credibility about everything else you said.
Are you kidding? Do you know anything about that area? There are too many illegals. There are too many people and it's breaking the back of the water resources. Send the illegals back and that would be a great deal of help. Everyone uses a lot of water every day.
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More than just "know anything about", I've lived there.
"Illegals" constitute a tiny fraction of the overall population. And consume a smaller per capita portion of the resources.
You know who wastes the most resources? Entitled, "American" pricks who think that everyone else is the problem. (Not saying that's you; I don't know you. But it could be, for all I know.)
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There is an estimated 1 million illegals in the Los Angeles area. In the county that I grew up in - PG County in Maryland I barely recognize it any more (I don't live there, haven't for decades). Some schools are entirely taken over by illegals and they form gangs. Normal people fear for their lives there. I'm still in touch with many of my high school friends. Same in Los Angeles from what I've seen. I'm friends with one of the "Rooftop Koreans." He's now in Maryland. He had to leave Los Angeles. He's stil
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There is an estimated 1 million illegals in the Los Angeles area.
Citations, please. We need to define "Los Angeles area", so we know we're talking about the same thing. Also, how are "illegals" defined for your 1,000,000 number? Even at face value, that means that 95% of the people in the LA area are not "illegals".
PG county is a place I wouldn't go back to if I could own a palace there. But the crime there is, by a significant majority, committed by "born-in" Americans. (A fact to which I can attest personally.) The amount of crime committed by "illegals" is nearly a ro
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California has fought over water, and had laws to define water rights, long before it was a state. Water rights are about the most conservative and traditional thing we have in this state. Anyone who calls themselves a conservative but can't recognize this is using their history books to keep the kitchen table from wobbling. (they also don't read the Bible, but like to pretend that they have)
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No it's not. Just put a bullet into the head of the richest person you know. Pretty soon - say, 5 generations - such culling will change social attitudes.
If you do the cull on an annual basis, you'd get the problem solved much faster.
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If people donâ(TM)t have water itâ(TM)ll just turn into a desert again,â said Allen, 52, as he surveyed a field of baked, barren earth on his farm, 10 miles outside Mendota. âoeThatâ(TM)s what this was before they built the whole system.â
That pretty much sums up the entire problem. A desert is a really, really bad place to grow crops, no matter how much you manage to temporarily plaster over the fact that it's a desert using borrowed water.
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Re: Lift the threat of drought (Score:5, Insightful)
Desalinization plants would work wonders there.
Hawaii has the most expensive electricity in America at about $0.40/kwh.
So that would lead to very expensive desalinated water.
Conservation would likely be a better policy. Hawaii is in a tropical rain-belt so there should be enough to go around.
And provide good jobs!
Requiring extra labor is a dumb rationale for anything.
If you want to create jobs, just require ditch-diggers to use teaspoons.
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Half of each island is downwind of the prevailing winds, so in the rain shadow. The Kona Coast of the Big Island is particularly dry. Makes it hard for the Asia-oriented resorts and golf courses.
Re: Lift the threat of drought (Score:2)
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Look closer to home. My Aug./Sept. PG&E bill had a peak rate of $0.41333/kWh.
That is the PRICE of electricity, not the COST.
California uses a tiered billing system for residential customers. So the more you use, the higher the marginal price.
They are charging you 41 cents, but it doesn't cost PG&E that much to generate that kwh. The wholesale price of electricity in California is about 7 cents/kwh, so obviously, the cost to PG&E is even less.
Nonetheless, desalination is a stupid solution to California's water problems too. A much better solution is to stop growing subsidi
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Desalination needs salt water and heat. Electricity is not needed. Hawaii has volcanic heat to tap
I'm not going to argue that you can't boil saltwater and get freshwater, but equipment today is far more advanced. An evaporative desalination process removes a lot of, but not all of the impurities. You really need reverse osmosis in the process at some point, and that requires electricity and lots of it. If you're going to be boiling water and need electricity, you might as well run a steam turbine and improve the thermal efficiency of the plant.
As for volcanic heat, yes Hawaii has a lot of volcanic
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Geothermal energy is a political issue in Hawaii.
Some activists consider it "stealing the breath of Pele".
Protesters have been able to stop geothermal projects in the past. These are mostly the same people that are blocking the construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope.
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There are a few at the expensive resorts, but they're small, sized to provide drinking water for those resorts and nothing more. Too expensive otherwise.
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Also, how fucking stupid are people who do not even get the concept of a limited resource?.
Even if we had an accurate measure of that, the people who'd need to understand it wouldn't pay any attention.
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Skroob: Ah, porous rock and 10,000 years of fresh water.
Dark Helmet: [whispers to Colonel Sandurz] The way he runs things, it won't last 100.
Skroob: What was that?!
Dark Helmet: Nothing!
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Count on Politicians/Lawyers/MBAs to fuck things up.
They would be better off desalinating using either geothermal or small nuclear reactors with waste heat doing the desalination.
Windbourne(moderating).
Drought? (Score:3)
When did this happen?
The eastern part of the big island gets an average of something over 400 inches of rainfall a year. The rest of the islands are similar. Did they somehow break all their reservoirs or something?
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The western side of the Big Island is full of resorts and golf courses catering to the Asian market which require a LOT of fresh water. I think some of them are already producing their own drinking water, which is extremely expensive. That side is in the rain shadow, and while it's not technically desert it doesn't get a whole lot of rain and because of the porosity of the soil there is no way to retain much of it.
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Revenue losses for the ranching industry
Cows aren't native to Hawaii. Just stop.
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Hawaii has porous volcanic soil.
Reservoirs don't work well there.
So, while they get plenty of rain overall, even a few dry weeks can lead to temporary shortages.
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Hawaii has porous volcanic soil.
Reservoirs don't work well there.
They know all about reservoir liners in Hawaii, polymer geotextile ones are popular.
The main issue with water on the Big Island seems to be distribution not over-all availability. There are 23 separate water systems for 185,000 people and the topography -- wet in some places, desert in others (rainfall shadow), and tremendous changes in elevation - makes building a unified system difficult to impossible.
Cool (Score:1)
They used a boat towing a 40-metre-long antenna behind it to generate an electromagnetic field, sending an electric current through the sea and below the sea floor. As seawater is a better conductor than fresh water, the team could distinguish between the two.
They basically dropped a radio into a really, really big bathtub -- and didn't die. Can't wait to try this with my swimming pool.
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Think of it as a huge parallel circuit. Now don't try this at home kids!
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You would be okay if you were in a swimming pool.
Google 'pool light electrocution'.
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I find pool light electrocution incomprehensible. We've had fiber optics for half a century and periscopes for over a century and a half. It seems like there's absolutely zero reason to have the actual electric light underwater. All the electricals should be in a utility box above ground.
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Just use low voltage electronics. Sealed LED modules are perfectly reasonable. Run them on 12VDC.
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I went ahead and looked up some examples of pool light electrocution as suggested, a number of them happened with badly wired 12v systems. The 12v systems still need to convert AC to DC, so a badly wired system can run AC right into the pool. It just seems like it would be simpler in just about every way to not have electricals running into the pool. You wouldn't need to use special bulbs or seals/gaskets, or fish around in the pool to change the bulb. There wouldn't be electrocution worries jumping into th
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Worth noting that seawater is about a million times more conductive than fresh water, so comparing it to a freshwater pool does not work at all. Seawater should be a better conductor of electricity than a human body, so electrocuting someone submerged in seawater should be really hard.
Hundred times (Score:3)
> Worth noting that seawater is about a million times more conductive than fresh water
Well that sentence made me curious, so I looked it up. It it were a million times more conductive, I might have a use for measuring it - or salinity might screw up a measurement I plan to make.
For anyone else curious, seawater is about 50,000 uS/cm and freshwater is about 500 uS/cm. So seawater is about a hundred times as conductive.
That's for freshwater as in drinking water. Ultra pure laboratory deionized H2O has sign
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Sorry, that wasn't really an accurate number, I was just being hyperbolic. I just meant that there's a huge difference. The difference between "fresh" water and seawater is actually pretty arbitrary since it all depends on how "fresh" the water since truly pure water is actually a really good insulator. So you can get a pretty extreme differential comparing against absolutely pure water. That's obviously not really realistic though.
Yeah, I figured (Score:2)
I figured you probably didn't mean literally a million. But then I wondered if maybe you did. I started to ask, but then I figured I'd just look it up.
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I really should have just said "orders of magnitude" or something like that. I nitpick about things like that enough myself. Mea culpa.
Should last long enough.... (Score:3)
And then what?
Hawaiian Poseidon water. (Score:2)
False alarm (Score:2)
It was a Perrier-Tanker.
Watch out guys (Score:2)
I've seen via satellites that a huge tanker is approaching Hawaii, named "Mega Maid II".
Quick! (Score:2)
Lets exploit the fresh water before the hippies find out.
Ssssh! (Score:3)
Careful, don’t let Nestlé know.
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The difference between salt water and fresh water (Score:2)
Is energy
and Hawaii has plenty of geothermal energy
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Only the big island. The others have moved off the hot spot so their volcanoes are either extinct or close to it.
Hawaii has plenty of water (Score:2, Interesting)
Every time I've been there it rains every single day. Sometimes it's a brief shower, sometimes all day. Most of this just runs back into the ocean. I've driven the road to Hana on Maui and there must have been a hundred fresh water rain-fed waterfalls just on that one road. There would be no environmental impact to collecting this water.
Water is trapped in rock (Score:2)
Which means they can use the same fracking techniques to fracture the rock and pump water. They estimate 1 trillion gallons of water in that rock. If you let the frackers in, they can probably recover as much as 20,000 gallons (not per hour or per day. Total, rest of the water will be contaminated with fracking fluid and sea water). Probably they lobbying effort has already begun to extract t
It is a huge amount (Score:2)
It is roughly 1 tera-gallon of water.
That is essentially infinite for household, hotel, light industry, crop (coffee, nuts) use.
Less so when used at the rate of 1 mega-gallon per day per golf course.
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So for 100 golf courses that would be 10,000 days worth or 27 years... not seeing the problem here.
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So for 100 golf courses that would be 10,000 days worth or 27 years... not seeing the problem here.
Then Perrier finds out that this is old water. No... fill in the blank with something. They lay claim to it all. Humm... Hawaiian restricted water in disposable plastic bottles. What could go wrong?
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There aren't that many idiots in the world who would pay shipping costs from Hawai'i. They can't drink all 1 teragallons, one liter at a time.
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There aren't that many idiots in the world who would pay shipping costs from Hawai'i. They can't drink all 1 teragallons, one liter at a time.
LOL.. That was a joke... However I wish that were true. Don't underestimate idiots. Look at how many plastic bottles of water they sell right now. For some reason especially to black people. They're scared to death to drink regular tap. It's funny. When I'm at the gym I have a stainless canteen. It's a cylinder shape. I fill it from the water fountain. I've used that container for over 10 years. When I first joined the gym I think I was the only one. Then I saw some other people doing it for a while. I thin