Trees and grazing animals collaboratively replenish aquifers. Meadows, being porous, guide moisture downwards, preventing floods and evaporation. Animal droppings enhance soil bioactivity, boosting water capture. Moreover, this process, free of fossil fertilizers, sequesters carbon. Areas abandoning cattle operations or imposing 're-wilding' often face desertification and flooding. Similarly, grain plantations that exclude animals share this issue. I've personally seen a parched, over-fertilized grain field transform into a vibrant savannah with natural springs within five years due to herd migration. The soil is now a joy to walk on, spongey and soft. Next farm over they still plant grains, and it's hard-pan and salted.
So, how do you refill an aquifer?
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Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#52For further reading on aquifers I highly recommend https://www.edwardsaquifer.net It's run by a scientist in Texas and has an amazing wealth of information on the aquifers of Texas. I never thought I would find a subject like this interesting until I read this guy's site. Texas has been managing aquifers for a long time, there's a rich history behind their management, and reading about this stuff has been the only wa…
There's also this guy who purchased a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, West Texas who's trying to terraform it into a forest.
No idea how feasible it is, but interesting to watch! https://www.youtube.com/@dustupstexas
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phoenix is the same way. They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular (PHX sits on top of an underground lake) they use huge 'ponds' to let the water soak back into the aquifer.
We have to. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights agreement among the states drawing from the Colorado River. I see a lot of water harvesting structures here, often in the form of parks and greenways.
That’s actually not true, IIRC per capita we are actually better off than California and Nevada.
Edit: Just looked it up and california gets about 5 million acre feet (maf), AZ gets about 2.8maf and Nevada only gets 0.3maf.
So per capita, AZ is doing pretty well allocation-wise.
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is it is the other way around, that in equal concentrations water vapor has a much stronger greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide. However for physics reasons the atmosphere does not hold much water vapor. In fact if I understand correctly this is the mechanism for a runaway greenhouse, that is, something like what happened to venus. Warmer temps allow for more water vapor in the atmosphere, due to i…
> However for physics reasons the atmosphere does not hold much water vapor. The atmosphere is currently ~422 ppm of CO2, and an average of ~5,000 ppm of H2O, with humid tropical areas having up to ~50,000 ppm of H2O. Water vapour makes up ~half of the greenhouse effect. It's not a 'good' greenhouse gas, it's just that it's very unevenly distributed, with a strong bias towards having a lot of it in the parts of the w…
I am definitely not an expert on the subject. But doing some basic web searches and I note how much more of the infrared spectra is absorbed by water vs the relatively narrow band that co2 absorbs. As a infrared emission blocking gas water vapor is several times more effective than co2. this is fine, we don't want earth to be a freezing ice cube. but add the excessive amounts of co2 and you start to get an alarming condition.
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#55This remind me of Aubrey Jaffer's story about his father making 'disposal wells' in Miami: https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells
Because a lot of land got paved over, it was easily flooded, as the water couldn't make its way into the aquifer. Jaffer senior had a business digging wells, and discovered that they could also suck down the water in a flooded carpark, so added making plugholes for carparks to his business.
Although in theory this replenishes the aquifer, I'm not sure that water off a carpark floor is these days considered clean enough to inject into the aquifer. I think I read somewhere that a lot of these injection wells had to be plugged, but now I can't find that.
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#56Albuquerque has been doing this since 2007. “More ambitiously, however, the Water Authority in 2007 initiated a pilot program for aquifer storage and recovery, in which a small amount of San Juan-Chama water was released into the Bear Canyon arroyo and tracked to see if it reached the aquifer. Results were positive, and the Water Authority is moving forward with plans to recharge the aquifer on a larger scale. We wil…
Speaking of Albuquerque, this just-published paper shows how measuring the change in acceleration due to gravity can be used to map aquifer storage change. Importation of San Juan River water has made a big difference. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413
Microgravity surveying is great for this and other geo applications. I know of many geothermal fields mapped the same way to monitor fluid level and steam migration.
Good stuff!
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#57I think we should dig the California viaduct deeper. Make it one long lake. Or dig giant water holes all along it. All the excess water can just fill up the holes along its 700 mile length. No idea if it's practical(probably not), but watching all that water flow into the ocean this winter seemed like such a waste.
The WRCB's plan is to store 600,000 acre feet of water which is 26,136,000,000 cubic feet. If we took 500 miles of viaduct (2,640,000 feet) at an average depth of 30 feet and average width of 40 feet ( = 3,168,000,000 cubic feet) and dug it 10x deeper, we'd be styling.
I mean, a 300 foot trench along the middle of California is doable, right?
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#58This remind me of Aubrey Jaffer's story about his father making 'disposal wells' in Miami: https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Wells Because a lot of land got paved over, it was easily flooded, as the water couldn't make its way into the aquifer. Jaffer senior had a business digging wells, and discovered that they could also suck down the water in a flooded carpark, so added making plugholes for carparks to his busin…
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to send water directly down a hole without getting filtered at all through layers of earth.
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#59Well – I refill an aquifier very simply so because I don't refill them.
Re: So, how do you refill an aquifer?
#60In the case of a place like Florida, parts of the gigantic aquifer that extends under that State and up in Georgia get backfilled by brackish water once depleted below a certain level and this effectively destroys it, preventing refilling or refreshing because of the salt content that gets introduced.
yes, this is commonly called saltwater intrusion and is a serious problem
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...