Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
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Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#2Fresh water is the new global warming scam. There's water everywhere, just nobody wants to route it properly. Instead just complain and wait for the leaders to leverage it to stay elected.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#3TLDRV They divert the rainy season water to natural aquifers and hope it reappears down river in the dry season.
The small scale of the effort currently makes me a little skeptical that it's achieving anything. Underground water is impossible to measure.
What might be more effective and certainly more measurable would be to build a dam/reservoir.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#4TLDRV They divert the rainy season water to natural aquifers and hope it reappears down river in the dry season. The small scale of the effort currently makes me a little skeptical that it's achieving anything. Underground water is impossible to measure. What might be more effective and certainly more measurable would be to build a dam/reservoir.
The linked paper
> Infiltrated water is retained for an average of 45 d before resurfacing, confirming the system’s ability to contribute to dry-season flows. We estimate that upscaling the system to the source-water areas of the city of Lima can potentially delay 99 × 106 m3 yr−1 of streamflow and increase dry-season flows by 7.5% on average, which may provide a critical complement to conventional engineering solutions for water security.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#5TLDRV They divert the rainy season water to natural aquifers and hope it reappears down river in the dry season. The small scale of the effort currently makes me a little skeptical that it's achieving anything. Underground water is impossible to measure. What might be more effective and certainly more measurable would be to build a dam/reservoir.
Thank you so much. The article is just too polluted with pseudo intellectual nonsense, but water management is a very underappreciated discipline of engineering.
Although it seems impossible to measure how much water is stored in the deep soil, it is often possible to notice if it runs out. We had that last summer in the Netherlands. I suppose knowing we reached zero, and knowing the influx (mm rain, and the flow of the Rhine), and then also knowing the outflow means you can make a some sound estimate.
However, that requires a high density of weather stations and tooling at the influx and outputs.
It's not something you can just do through some regulation targeted at the water company. You'll need a specific branch of the government, since messing with water affects everyone, from erosion to trade, to agriculture to climate (the presence of water makes the climate a more mild climate)
In the Netherlands, this is all done by an independent water government, a democracy older than our democracy itself. It even predates notions of citizenship.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#6Fresh water is the new global warming scam. There's water everywhere, just nobody wants to route it properly. Instead just complain and wait for the leaders to leverage it to stay elected.
Can you explain where the article is wrong in saying that Peru has limited fresh water supplies? After that, explain “everywhere” including arid and desert regions. Please cite sources and your level of expertise.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#7Fresh water is the new global warming scam. There's water everywhere, just nobody wants to route it properly. Instead just complain and wait for the leaders to leverage it to stay elected.
Can you explain where the article is wrong in saying that Peru has limited fresh water supplies? After that, explain “everywhere” including arid and desert regions. Please cite sources and your level of expertise.
Troll
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#8TLDRV They divert the rainy season water to natural aquifers and hope it reappears down river in the dry season. The small scale of the effort currently makes me a little skeptical that it's achieving anything. Underground water is impossible to measure. What might be more effective and certainly more measurable would be to build a dam/reservoir.
Article woo aside, underground water is not impossible to measure. Min well depth (or depth of dry wells) is a straightforward way to measure the aquifer level for a small area. It doesn’t tell you much but it tells you something. Combine with your neighbors taking the same measurement over time and you have a good data set. That is before you get to things like ‘geology’ which are known factors shaping underground water supplies.
Further, if water goes into a pit, you can measure or estimate how much is going in. If you can measure the shape of the pit you know how much is there. If you know surface area at a given level and temp/environmental conditions you can estimate evaporation. So you can say: X vol went in, Y evaporated, and Z is how much we now think is ground water based on current depth and evaporation (excluding animals and humans drinking).
It is much harder to associate the pit activity with a given well and obviously the scale here may be below the precision of any of the estimators.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#9I can't speak for Peru specifically, but natural ecosystems play a huge role in absorbing and holding on to rain water, ensuring it doesn't all just flow back into the sea. This has been known for ages - I remember a friend who did environmental sciences telling me stories of cities in developing countries that cut all the nearby forests and as a side-effect also ruined their water supply.
So with that in mind I'm a bit surprised at the skepticism on display here.
Re: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water
#10Fresh water is the new global warming scam. There's water everywhere, just nobody wants to route it properly. Instead just complain and wait for the leaders to leverage it to stay elected.
Can you explain where the article is wrong in saying that Peru has limited fresh water supplies? After that, explain “everywhere” including arid and desert regions. Please cite sources and your level of expertise.
The fact is that water is plentiful in some areas while insufficient in others (and the areas can change over time), but so fucking what - you cannot transport it efficiently enough. Well, sometimes you can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River