Posted on 07/21/2012 12:25:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A newly discovered water source could supply half of Africa's driest sub-Saharan country with 400 years of water, reports Matt McGrath of BBC.
The new aquifer – called Ohangwena II – flows under the border between Angola and Namibia, covering an area of about 43 miles by 25 miles on Namibia's side.
The water is up to 10,000 years old and cleaner to drink than many modern sources.
Project manager Martin Quinger told BBC that the stored water could last 400 years based on current rates of consumption.
Currently the 800,000 people living in the northern part of the country get their drinking water from a 40-year-old canal that brings the scarce resource from Angola.
Quinger added that Ohangwena II could change the nature of farming in the area, which has only been viable near two rivers in the region, and could act as a natural buffer for up to 15 years of drought.
Natural pressure will make the water easy and cheap to extract.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The water is up to 10,000 years old and cleaner to drink than many modern sources.I'm sure, as we speak, a group of muzzies somewhere is brainstorming plans for ruining the drinkability of this water.
Why?
Don't ask why.
Muzzies be muzzies and hate all things.
You just KNOW that environmentalists will find some way to make this an impossibility.
I want to pee in this water.
Not to mention the warlords taking control and not a drop will ever be used for anything.
That’s a whole lot of water and may be useful in helping solve America’s problems with current an future droughts.
And while an underground pipeline may not be cost effective, large supertankers full of that African water could be shipped to the US where it is desperately needed.
Now if they could only figure out well drilling.
“drill, baby, drill” and embrace the marketing potential!
The UN will find some reason to say that using this water will destroy the planet.
The last thing they want is for the earth to support more human life.
Their Agenda 21 explicitly states that they want to eliminate 6.5 billion human beings.
Don’t forget the article says 400 years at todays consumption rate.
When they start irrigating, and more people start moving in to reap the irrigation harvest, today’s consumption rate will be a drop in the bucket.
Today not many people in an arid environment waste water, their consumption rate is low. When it becomes plentiful all that will stop.
“A newly discovered water source could supply half of Africa’s driest sub-Saharan country with 400 years of water”
That’s wonderful news except for one thing: it’s in Africa, a place that epitomizes the saying, “Able to screw up a free lunch.”
As the most interesting man in the world says, you’ll “stay thirsty, my friend.”
“...today’s consumption rate...”
The local king will have an enormous fountain built. The water will last for a year after they tap it.
Irrigate an arid environment sufficiently and the microclimate will be altered to less arid via evaporation. Deserts come and go, tremendous ancient cities are buried in desert sands. This region, too, was once much less arid. That groundwater didn’t just materialize out of thin air.
It would be far more practical to tow icebergs from the arctic.
somebody or some group will now try to pollute it. and, how will they get the water to the people, i don’t think they have pipelines to the villages.
Read recently that one the size of Manhattan Island broke off some glacier or other up in those parts. Hell, they could even help defray costs by making it a reality TV show while they tow it to the Gulf coast.
“That’s a whole lot of water and may be useful in helping solve America’s problems with current an future droughts.”
I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard for NATO to get together and spread a little ‘democracy’ down there.
Not in Africa. This is one area where it's actually an advantage to be an African.
The various busybodies who afflict their pet causes on you guys are moralizers at heart. Speaking cynically for a moment, this moralization is normally a strength because it removes the "nudgings" from practical criticism and makes them seem an imperative. Who subjects moral decisions to a cost-benefit analysis? Even thinking about it is kinda creepy.
So, moralization works far better than pragmatism. It puts the opponents on the defensive and often disarms them. Normally, the only defense that works (except as a stopgap) is to credibly show that the moralizers are themselves hypocrites.
(I use "moralizers" because busybodies of this sort are politicals at heart. Moral reasoning, however sound, does not dissuade them. What dissuades them is public pressure, particularly public pressure motivated by moral outrage.)
Now in Africa, you have a group of people that the entire moralizer circuit considers disadvantaged: the underdogs. If the liberals have any principle that's non-negotiable, it would be "sympathy for the underdog." Moralizing liberals, consequently, will not go a'bannin' any activity that's undertaken by the disadvantaged underdog, however "immoral" by their standards.
Case in point: in southern Nigeria, homosexuality is illegal. If one man sticks his wing-wang into another man's evacuation chamber, both men can be sent to the hoosegow for up to 14 years. Yep, there have been protests about it from the usual suspects. But, with the sole exception of President Obama (and the Brits) threatening to withhold foreign aid in response to a Nigerian bill criminalizing gay marriage, there's been only talk and no action.
Why? Because African governments can deter the usual moralizers and even infect them with a bad conscience with these three words: "racism," "imperialism," "neo-colonialism." Those three words enter into many ready ears at the United Nations. They also enter into many ready ears in America itself, and would enter into more if the Nigerians adapt the playbook of the Vietnamese Communists.
What goes for Nigeria goes for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. If anything, moreso because the Nigerian economy is currently booming.
So, if that aquifer is developed, the viros will likely be stymied outright. Picking on a generally-accepted underdog will make them look really bad.
400 years supply in Africa but two and a half weeks if it were in NY.
There is irrefutable evidence that proves the Sahara was once covered by the Ocean.
In fact, there is an area called "Valley of the Whale" because of all the whale bones and other ocean specie fossils that have been found there.
I’m sure they’ll still need thousands of young naive Americans to go over there to dig wells for them and teach them to farm and not poo into the wells.
They should bottle it, advertise premium drinking water and sell it worldwide at an exorbitant rate. They could create jobs for their population and use part of the profits to build a desalination plant to produce water for in country use.
That’s true of much of the world, isn’t it? I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but here in NC, surface water drives groundwater out. Counterintuitive I know, but having been involved with putting a well in at a lake house, I can say that it’s a definite challenge and the well was unusually deep.
” Now in Africa, you have a group of people that the entire moralizer circuit considers disadvantaged: the underdogs. “
Hmmmm... Remember the DDT ban, and the thousands (tens? hundreds of thousands?) of deaths from Malaria in sub-saharan Africa??
I remember reading years ago of a gigantic aquifer beneath the Sahara.
Impossible not to wonder if this is why we’ve been sending some Marines to Africa, ostensibly as “advisors” to do “training.”
Even the mountains that form the Vegas Valley (here) have aquatic fossils, on top of them!
I was just expanding on your original point.
They won’t be able to drill any wells, as this would disturb the habitat of the tri-anus desert wombat.
signed, all tehe greenies
Tectonic plate action. It was how all mountain ranges were formed.
“the stored water could last 400 years based on current rates of consumption”
well. like that - “current rates of consumption”, is going to happen now that everyone knows it is there - NOT
settled areas WILL grow in population in the area and whole new settlements will likely be started as well; on this news, population and water consumption in the area WILL grow, for sure
We have all the water we need, all we have to do is build desalinization plants in the Gulf of mexico, off the coast of CA and off the East coast. There is no need to steal water from Africa.
There will be a war over the water find. What will China do to try and cash in on this find and the war? What kind of scheme will China cook up to profit from this and as usual with everything the Chinese do, leave the natives stripped to the bone?
Indeed, I was just making the point that they were under water at some point in time.
What a good break, now they can triple their population in 20 years.
Okay.
“Now if they could only figure out well drilling.”
I have friends in Uganda who routinely drill water wells over 100 feet deep using hand tools.
Can you?
Bookmark
What’s the vegas over under on how long till they start pooping in it?
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Thanks SeekAndFind.Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution.Evolution in Your FaceLake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years! |
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“I’m sure they’ll still need thousands of young naive Americans to go over there to dig wells for them and teach them to farm and not poo into the wells.”
I’m one of your “young naive Americans” who went over there “to dig wells for them and teach them to farm and not poo into the wells” only I’m no longer young (64) and I TAUGHT them to dig wells. They already knew the part about not “pooing”. (To be truthful, I kinda failed the “naive” part; at the time, I was 32, married, a father of three and a USMC Vietnam vet.)
One of my most fond memories is about taking a group of my seminary students and other instructors to see the first well I had made, six years earlier. We walked by three mud & thatch huts on the way to this family well. At each hut, the lady of the house came out, saw us and proclaimed, “Oh! We praise God for this well!”
Life has great rewards for the “naive”.
“I’m sure they’ll still need thousands of young naive Americans to go over there to dig wells for them and teach them to farm and not poo into the wells.”
I’m one of your “young naive Americans” who went over there “to dig wells for them and teach them to farm and not poo into the wells” only I’m no longer young (64) and I TAUGHT them to dig wells. They already knew the part about not “pooing”. (To be truthful, I kinda failed the “naive” part; at the time, I was 32, married, a father of three and a USMC Vietnam vet.)
One of my most fond memories is about taking a group of my seminary students and other instructors to see the first well I had made, six years earlier. We walked by three mud & thatch huts on the way to this family well. At each hut, the lady of the house came out, saw us and proclaimed, “Oh! We praise God for this well!”
Life has great rewards for the “naive”.
I design developments and utility systems for a living think I am dumb or incapable? I am a PE. Your point is what? Mine being the aquifer has been there for thousands of years and it is 2012 and they(Who did discover it bTW?) just now discovered it. If technology and political stability was a little more widely spread (I blame the lack of adoption of colonial systems by natives here) maybe this problem would have sorted itself out by now. You can’t make someone recognize a superior form of culture. Think for a second here. Anyway this aquifer lies below a salty one. I am assuming encased wells to the depth of the aquifer. Can your buddies do this with hand tools? No depth mentioned in the article.
Very true and my first thought, too. Nonetheless, it could prove a blessing if only it's exploited wisely. Dim prospects for that, I suspect.
“Hmmmm... Remember the DDT ban, and the thousands (tens? hundreds of thousands?) of deaths from Malaria in sub-saharan Africa??”
http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsid.442/healthissue_detail.asp
“THE DDT BAN TURNS 30 — Millions Dead of Malaria Because of Ban, More Deaths Likely”
“I design developments and utility systems for a living think I am dumb or incapable? I am a PE. Your point is what? Mine being the aquifer has been there for thousands of years and it is 2012 and they(Who did discover it bTW?) just now discovered it.”
And I fly helicopters and wear a digital watch, but I could not keep myself alive for 6 weeks in their environment.
Folks in Africa are no more or less intelligent than you or I, they just have a different set of skills. We have been blessed with a stable government and culture and great access to information.
It hasn’t been that long since we were ignorant about resources under the ground.
“Yes, petrol (or gasoline as it is known in the US) was not only a waste product, it was an unprofitable nuisance.
During the mid to late 1800s industrializing countries (such as America) were throwing crude (raw unprocessed) oil into rivers.
In the 1850s, crude oil was tossed into the Kanawha River (West Virginia, USA). Then up until about 1880, petrol (its lighter by-product) was dumped into the Cuyahoga River (Ohio, US).”
http://www.wotwaste.com/waste-articles/industrial-waste/was-petrol-really-once-a-waste-product?print=1&tmpl=component
To be honest, you had to remind me. Now that you mention it, I'm surprised that the African governments didn't defy the ban and try to make DDT in their parts. But, they didn't.
‘Folks in Africa are no more or less intelligent than you or I, they just have a different set of skills. We have been blessed with a stable government and culture and great access to information.’
Every assumption in this sentence is factually in error.
http://www.iq-tests.eu/iq-test-IQ-correlations-700.html
We are not blessed you fool we make our world better. You just don’t get it. Goodbye.
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