Our Environment: Part 11 – We Need Water

I read a story about a group of fishermen from Central America who went to sea one day only to have their boat brake down.  As they drifted in the current, they immediately went into survival mode rationing the food they had.  As their food reserves became low, they would supplement with catching fish – they were fishermen.  At one point they ran out of cooking fuel and so began to dismantle parts of the wooden vessel to burn for cooking.  There was a point where there was no food for the day.  They would go for several days without food, catching fish when they could, seabirds when they landed on the boat, and the occasional sea turtle would hold them for a while.  Though they may not have been in shape to play tennis – they were alive and hoping to cross paths with an ocean tanker.

Then they drifted out of the rain belt.  They had been collecting rainwater all this time but had entered a portion of the ocean where it did not rain.  This changed everything.  Though they could go a month without food – one source indicates you can go up to 50 days, and some up to 70 days – you can only go three days without water.   The fishermen seemed to understand this.  Within a couple of days, they all laid on the bow of the boat awaiting death – they knew this was the end.  As luck would have it, a ship did come by and rescued all five.  But it shows us the importance of water.  Though we sometimes debate which resources are truly needed by humans, we must have water.

Lucky for us we live on a planet whose surface is covered with it.  Jacques Cousteau once said that the planet should have been called “aqua” for there is so little land in comparison – 70% is covered in water.  But, as you know, most of the water within the hydrosphere is salt water, and this will not help.  The kidneys make urine from water less salty than seawater.  So, if you drink seawater, you will urinate more water than you take in and you will die of dehydration.

Only 3% of the water within the hydrosphere is freshwater and 68.7% of that is frozen in glaciers and ice caps, 31% is found as ground water, and less than 1% is found in rivers, lakes, and streams.  Though we live on a planet covered in water, very little of it is in a usable form.

Humans get their needed water from ground water (aquifers) and surface water (rivers and lakes) sources.  With the growing human population, we are overdrawing from both sources.  I saw this firsthand while camping in Arizona.   There is a place on Lake Powell called Lone Rock.  You can drive to the shoreline and camp at the edge of the lake.  The first year we camped there we did just that.  We drove to a point where there was a slight drop from our spot to the shore of the lake.  We came back to this location two years later – went to the same spot where we had camped before – and it had changed drastically.  Now from this spot the slight drop was between 20-30 feet – but not to the shoreline – but rather to a hard sand terrace.  This terrace extended about 100 yards toward the lake before it dropped another 20-30 feet to the shoreline.  It was amazing.  The first year we were there we paddled to Lone Rock (in the middle of the lake).  Now you could almost walk to it.  A local told me he had lived there for 18 years and had never seen it this low.

Lake Powell is the second largest reservoir in the United States.  It was created by placing a damn on the Colorado River to create a water source for the people in that area.  The drastic loss of water can be explained in two ways. One – a growing human population in an area with little water to begin with, and an increase withdraw of this resource.  Two – reduction in rainfall due to climate change.  The American southwest does not get a lot of rainfall to begin with.  We explained this natural process in our fourth article in this series – Life on Land.  Miller and Spoolman note in 2011 that the American southwest receives an average of 16 inches of rain a year.  Despite being an arid area there are several major cities – Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix – with millions of residents who need water.  Add to this the large agriculture operations who need water for their crops.  Most of their water needs are met by rivers flowing from the Rocky Mountains heading to the sea.  These rivers are damned to create reservoirs and the “water grab” begins.  Arguments over who should get this water – farmers, residents, entertainment in Vegas – are common.  The Water Wars have begun.  The population continues to grow, and climate continues to change.

In the American southeast it is different.  We average 48 inches of rain a year.  Our area of the northern Gulf coast is even wetter.  Most think of Seattle as the area with the highest rainfall in the country but in fact the three wettest cities in the U.S. in order are Mobile AL, Pensacola FL, and New Orleans LA.  Pensacola historically gets around 60 inches of rain a year.  But between 2010 and 2020 the average here increased to 70 inches.  The climate models predict that the dry areas of the country will become drier, and the wet areas will become wetter.  This certainly seems to be happening.  So, locally, the issues are not drought and loss – but flooding.

The amazing thing about this is that in an area where there seems to be plenty of water, we are seeing water deficits.  The large amount of precipitation is not recharging the Floridan aquifer (the source of much of our water) but rather falling on impervious surfaces (roads, parking lots, buildings).  This water then causes flooding issues and our answer to this is to drain that rainwater into local surface waters and into the Gulf – not recharging the aquifer.  As strange as it sounds – we are hearing about Water Wars even here.  It is not that we do not have enough water – it is we do not manage it well.

In the next article we will discuss some suggestions on how we might better manage our very much needed water resources.

References

How Long Can You Go Without Food? Verywell Health. https://www.verywellhealth.com/how-long-live-without-food-1132033#:~:text=How%20long%20human%20beings%20can,someone%20can%20live%20without%20food.

Hospice No Food or Water. Oasis Hospice and Palliative Care. https://oasishospice.us/2022/05/17/hospice-no-food-or-water/.

Can Humans Drink Seawater? National Ocean Service. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/drinksw.html.

Where is the Earth’s Water? GRACE: Tracking Water from Space. American Museum of Natural History.  chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.amnh.org/content/download/154153/2561707/file/grace-passage-1-student-version.pdf.

Miller, G.T., Spoolman, S.E. 2011. Living in the Environment. Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning. Belmont CA. pp. 674.