Water can be found above, on and under ground

MySanAntonio.com ^ | 07/24/2002 | Albert Flores -- KENS 5 Meteorologist

[Willie Green]

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

Whether you want to call it providence, the work of a higher being or alien intervention, we are lucky to be living on a planet that has an abundance of a very important substance to us as humans, water.

I know we always talk about the importance of our aquifer, but I thought we might talk about the general abundance of water on the planet.

While taking an oceanography course, I was enlightened about the amount of water that is available to us, and the even larger amount of water that is not. The total water supply on the planet is 326 million cubic miles. A cubic mile of water equals more than 1 trillion gallons.

Floating around in the atmosphere is about 3,100 cubic miles of water, mostly in the form of water vapor. If it began to rain around the entire globe at once, the Earth would be covered with only about one inch of water. The good ol' U.S. of A. gets a total volume of about four cubic miles of precipitation each day, which works out to be about 4 trillion gallons of water.

You might wonder where the atmosphere gets so much water to share with the rest of us. Each day, 280 cubic miles of water evaporate back into the atmosphere. Fortunately, it is redistributed back around the globe via trade winds and jet streams.

The unfortunate truth is that a great deal of that global water is not fresh and not available for use. Of the fresh water on the planet, a great deal is stored underground — more than is available in lakes and rivers on the surface.

It has been estimated that more than 2 million cubic miles of fresh water is stored in the Earth. Most of this fresh water is within one-half mile of the surface. In comparison, only 60,000 cubic miles of water is stored as fresh water in lakes, inland seas, and rivers.

If you really want to find a large amount of fresh water to use, try the glaciers and icecaps, where you can find as much as 7 million cubic miles of water.

So why not harvest all this fresh water? Most of it can be found in the Polar Regions and Greenland. The cost of bringing that water to the populated areas of the globe would be so high that we would end up paying dollars per gallon instead of the pennies we now pay to our local utilities.

There is always the desalination process: Take sea water, put it through a processing plant that takes all the salt and other minerals out, and you get all the fresh, drinkable water you would want and a ton of other minerals you could sell.

Send questions to: Ask Albert , P.O. Box TV-5, San Antonio, TX 78229 or e-mail askalbert@mysa.com

[Willie Green]

Additional info: Nuclear Desalination

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Cool Water

All day I've faced the barren waste
without the taste of water..... cool water
Ole Dan and I with throats burned dry
and souls that cry for water.... cool, clear water

The nights are cool and I'm a fool
Each star's a pool of water.... cool, clear water
And with the dawn I'll wake and yawn
and carry on to water.... cool, clear water

The shadows sway and seem to say
tonight we pray for water.... cool, clear water
And way up there He'll hear our prayer
and show us where there's water.... cool, clear water

Keep a movin' Dan don't you listen to him Dan
He's the devil, not a man he spreads the burnin' sand with water
Say Dan can't you see that big green tree
where the water's runnin' free, it's waiting there for you and me

And water.... cool, clear water

Dan's feet are sore he's yearnin' for
Just one thing more than water.... cool, clear water
Like me I guess he'd like to rest
Where there's no quest for water.... cool, clear water

[Consort]

It can also be found on the brain.

[narby]

A good come-back to the lefties out there now trying to scare up a "water crisis". They don't call this the "blue planet" for nothing.

[FreeLibertarian]

A good come-back to the lefties out there now trying to scare up a "water crisis". They don't call this the "blue planet" for nothing.

Yes, but potable (drinkable) water is another story in the Southwest. A critical water shortage is definetly on the horizon in New Mexico.

[Karl_Lembke]

A good come-back to the lefties out there now trying to scare up a "water crisis". They don't call this the "blue planet" for nothing.

Most of that water isn't usable. Even ground water isn't all usable. When we extract water from an aquifer, we have to be careful not to take too much, lest the aquifer subside, and lose capacity. Once subsidance occurs, the lost capacity is never regained.

Alternatives to using fresh water include desalination (almost competitive with natural supplies, and nuclear energy would make it more so), and water recycling.

Water recycling is extremely doable, except for the "YUK" factor. Los Angeles takes in about 600 million gallons of potable water per day (MGD), and dumps about 400 MGD of sewage. Recycle that sewage (which is, ironically, about 99-44/100% pure water), and L.A. cuts its water damand by 66%!

Alternatively, quit subsidizing rice growing in the state. Charge something closer to free-market prices for water, and farmers will cut back. Right now, because water costs them so little (about $15 an acre-foot, compared with about $100 for municipal water purchases), farmers waste enough to drench Los Angeles.