In the US, wells being drilled ever deeper as groundwater vanishes

Actual water resources researcher focusing on climate change here. My job is focused on what can we do to continue to deliver water to society under future scenarios (and what steps we can take to get there) from policy to infrastructure investments. The article doesn't present anything new for us but the problem is that the general public isn't informed.

While we're the oldest engineering discipline, remember that even until around the 80s people didn't think or know about groundwater contamination. They've always thought that sticking contaminated water back into the ground would filter it naturally like magic. In the late 80s more and more people started to understand that's not how it works. Even then, these policies and ideas are still in the process of being accepted in developing countries almost 40 years later and even then "what else can we do? My son needs water now and he could get hit by a car tomorrow so this is a problem I'll deal with later."

The problem (as the article states) is that the issue is so distributed. We're talking about traditionally individualized solutions for a problem that needs a more coordinated solution. However, noone is willing to pay for that or considers other investments as "more critical" than major water projects (also many environmental groups aren't as risk averse as water utilities). I mean the biggest cost in water isn't the actual product but the transportation costs. We have water, we just don't have enough funds to deliver them everywhere in a sustainable manner at a price that people are willing to pay.

NAWPA idea was conceived even before we understood our environment. It's the wrong solution. I mean even 10 years ago we had a landmark article that changed the paradigm of how we decide policy and build infrastructure[0]. I'd never take NAWPA for anything now than the "grandiose-ness of the 50s", especially since that was during a "water resources renaissance" in the United States where even crazy ideas were taken seriously.

[0] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/CLEE/Milly_2008_Science_S...

Any nukes proved too dirty to be feasible, which is why we never used them in this manner. There were a lot of good ideas that sounded good in the 60's, but they had no real idea how much of a pain contamination, cleanup and thousands of years of storage of that material would be. Then they finally did and these ideas went away.

Both science and journalism are iterative processes, you report the facts you have so others can take it further.

Read this

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-o...

> Local farmers had watched over the last decade and a half as waves of industrial farms arrived, tilling so much land that dust storms began darkening the sky. These enormous corporations were descending on the valley for the same reason homesteaders had a century ago: the year-round growing season and the lax regulation.

> In 2014, a Saudi Arabian-owned company, the Almarai Corporation, bought 10,000 acres in the town of Vicksburg, northwest of Sulphur Springs Valley, planting alfalfa to ship halfway around the world to feed Saudi cattle. Then, a United Arab Emirates farming corporation, Al Dahra, bought several thousand-acre farms along both sides of the Arizona-California border. These purchases were perfectly legal, but many residents felt these newcomers were essentially “exporting water.”

Aquifers are a local resource, you can think of them as somewhat like lakes that rest in depressions in geological strata rather than in depressions in the ground. There is not one large aquifer which spans the US. As a result, the details of the situation depend greatly on the area. In the Southwest, where aquifer depletion has been a major concern, there are concerns that some aquifers may deteriorate in quality due to overextraction to the point that expensive water processing is necessary over a scale of one to two decades (e.g. along the Mexico border). It's also somewhat difficult to give a year range because there is generally not actually a cut-off point where you completely "run out" - instead, the cost of extracting and processing the water increases as overextraction continues, due to a lower water table and, worse, increased salinity. Alamogordo, NM has already initiated the construction of a desalination plant because of this problem - a very expensive proposition, and one the public rarely thinks of inland.

Concern about aquifer depletion is increasing across the nation, not just in the desert southwest, but the severity of the problem varies. What is reasonably consistent is that the situation is getting worse in most places.

The USGS has general information here: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/