Ogallala Aquifer running dry.

[Guest guest]

The article states that farmers fear how much the water level has dropped and that the Dust Bowl will return. They may be right but last time the ground water was still there which allowed the region to recover. This time it will be gone so it might not. This is bad news not only for farming but many cities and waterways in the area.

Also, it isn't only farming and cities that are drawing water from it. Some companies are doing the same. They are sucking up all the water they can basically for free, putting it in bottles and selling it for a premium. A few years back there was a scandal because water was being sold in bulk to China. Now it has to be bottled but still plenty is going overseas. This is a real oversight of water rights laws. These companies are draining the aquifers without cost and making a lot of money but they will ruin the area perhaps forever once the groundwater is gone.

Note: for those who don't understand the dynamics of a well, it goes something like this. Imagine the well as a line going down into the ground. It intersects the water table, or the level in the ground where there is always water, and continues deeper down to ensure water supplies in drier weather and for the future. Now, as the well is used, the water table around the pipe drops. Imagine that as a dip in the line. This dip can get so pronounced that it looks like a gravity well diagram. If the weather is dry enough long enough, or because of other factors, the water table can dip below the well. Even before that happens the well will produce less water and water that is often muddy or otherwise contaminated. Eventually it will stop producing which will mean digging a new and deeper well.

This is happening in many parts of the country like in California. Some farmers are digging up to 2,000 feet down to draw another year or two of water. Of course, that means the deep water will be gone probably for good as well. This has also happened in Africa where the UN started a well drilling program in the 1960's or 1970's. The farmland and villages did very well for a few years but soon the crops dried up, as did the trees, because the water table dropped so much. This meant the people moved and new wells were dug. The only winner was the desert that followed in their wake. I also know of localized places in North Carolina and elsewhere this was happening some years ago.

Quote:

'It was a booming town when I grew up,' Judy Shipman, who manages the bank, says. 'We had three restaurants, a grocery, a plumber, an electrician, a building contractor, a doctor. We had so much fun, growing up.' Like all the townsfolk, she knows why the fun has gone. 'It's the decline in the water level,' she says. 'In the 1950s a lot of wells were drilled, and the water went down. Now you can't farm the land.'

Those wells were drilled into a geological phenomenon called the Ogallala Aquifer. It is an underground lake of pristine water formed between two and six million years ago, in the Pliocene age, when the tectonic shifts that pushed the Rocky Mountains skywards were still active. The water was trapped below the new surface crust that would become the semi-arid soil of the Plains, dry and dusty. It stretches all the way down the eastern slope of the Rockies from the badlands of South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle. It does not replenish.

Happy is the canary in the coalmine because the Ogallala is deepest in the north, as much as 300ft in the more fertile country of Nebraska and Kansas. In the south, through the panhandle and over the border to New Mexico, it is 50-100ft. And around Happy, 75 miles south of Amarillo, it is now 0-50ft. The farms have been handed over to the government's Conservation Reserve Programme (CRP) to lie fallow in exchange for grants: farmers' welfare, although they hate to think of it like that.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/8359076/US-farmers-fear-the-return-of-the-Dust-Bowl.html

[Guest guest]

" The article states that farmers fear how much the water level has dropped and

that the Dust Bowl will return. They may be right but last time the ground water

was still there which allowed the region to recover. This time it will be gone

so it might not. This is bad news not only for farming but many cities and

waterways in the area. "

People are ignorant and probably believe that heavy rainfalls will replenish the

wells. They forget that the water that got into those aquifers threaded its way

there through microscopic pores in the rocks over millions of years.

The other thing that causes them not to worry is that if we didn't have the

technology to get to the water, or to find it, we wouldn't have it. The thing

is, it needs to be there. Imagine having an aquifer whose water is supporting

all the rock above it, and then having that water disappear. There would be

collapses in the weak spots. It happens with sink holes all the time, and can

happen in larger aquifers too.

It's like squeezing a sponge dry, but a sponge so big that it collapses under

its own weight without the water to support it.

Administrator.

[Guest guest]

The Ogallala is believed to have been formed millions of years ago when an inland sea was trapped between the rising Rockies and the rising plains. The water basically got folded under and millions of years of earth built up on top.

Given what I've read about the region, it also seem to make more sense to have kept the area for cattle ranching or better yet commercial buffalo herds. There were millions of buffalo at one time and the meat is supposed to be healthier than beef, at least these days anyway. We could have had a good supply or free-range meat out there. Grain farming could have been kept for other regions and really less would be needed in this cases because the animals would get most of what they needed from nature itself.

In a message dated 3/10/2011 3:03:03 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

People are ignorant and probably believe that heavy rainfalls will replenish the wells. They forget that the water that got into those aquifers threaded its way there through microscopic pores in the rocks over millions of years.

[Guest guest]

The Ogallala is believed to have been formed millions of years ago when an inland sea was trapped between the rising Rockies and the rising plains. The water basically got folded under and millions of years of earth built up on top.

Given what I've read about the region, it also seem to make more sense to have kept the area for cattle ranching or better yet commercial buffalo herds. There were millions of buffalo at one time and the meat is supposed to be healthier than beef, at least these days anyway. We could have had a good supply or free-range meat out there. Grain farming could have been kept for other regions and really less would be needed in this cases because the animals would get most of what they needed from nature itself.

In a message dated 3/10/2011 3:03:03 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

People are ignorant and probably believe that heavy rainfalls will replenish the wells. They forget that the water that got into those aquifers threaded its way there through microscopic pores in the rocks over millions of years.

[Guest guest]

" Given what I've read about the region, it also seem to make more sense to have

kept the area for cattle ranching or better yet commercial buffalo herds. There

were millions of buffalo at one time and the meat is supposed to be healthier

than beef, at least these days anyway. We could have had a good supply or

free-range meat out there. Grain farming could have been kept for other regions

and really less would be needed in this cases because the animals would get most

of what they needed from nature itself. "

The original natural prairie grasses which have since been plowed under had a

higher caloric value perfectly suited for buffalo, and it required no

fertilizers to grow. If we restired the praries, you could keep large herds of

buffalo on small pieces of land, and not contaminate the soil with fertilizers,

but this is a common sense solution, and so no one will pay attention to it.

Administrator

[Guest guest]

" Given what I've read about the region, it also seem to make more sense to have

kept the area for cattle ranching or better yet commercial buffalo herds. There

were millions of buffalo at one time and the meat is supposed to be healthier

than beef, at least these days anyway. We could have had a good supply or

free-range meat out there. Grain farming could have been kept for other regions

and really less would be needed in this cases because the animals would get most

of what they needed from nature itself. "

The original natural prairie grasses which have since been plowed under had a

higher caloric value perfectly suited for buffalo, and it required no

fertilizers to grow. If we restired the praries, you could keep large herds of

buffalo on small pieces of land, and not contaminate the soil with fertilizers,

but this is a common sense solution, and so no one will pay attention to it.

Administrator

[Guest guest]

There is some kind of move to put a very large swath of the prairie to a "natural" condition, but I don't trust the objectives of this project. What they are trying to do is create a monster of a national park that will be off limits to economic activity. What is needed now more than the increasing amount of land ending up in parks, and there is a lot of that happening at state and federal levels, is more land put into agriculture use and smart use at that.

This would mean restoring prairie grasses and doing more natural ranching in on the plains and shifting grain production and such to other parts of the country. But the governments seem more interested in buying up land and putting it off limits for any kind of use. Naturally this displaces people, kills agriculture and harms state and counties as the tax bases shrink because of loss of productive land use and supported jobs.

In a message dated 3/10/2011 1:09:48 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

The original natural prairie grasses which have since been plowed under had a higher caloric value perfectly suited for buffalo, and it required no fertilizers to grow. If we restired the praries, you could keep large herds of buffalo on small pieces of land, and not contaminate the soil with fertilizers, but this is a common sense solution, and so no one will pay attention to it.Administrator