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Comment by cookingmyserver | Hacker News Reader

Is the ground water near a coast line brackish?

Yes, I know there are parts of Orange County that have water injection wells that pump water into the ground along the coast to keep fresh water in the aquifer to prevent it filling with brackish water. Some googling around shows it might be called the Talbert Seawater Intrusion Barrier.

I remember touring the sanitation plant when I was took an environmental science class in high school. They said they did fourth stage water treatment then injected the treated water into the aquifer. They are right near Talbert. It is going to be difficult to fight this tide.

Also if you are Mike Posey please blink once.

Yes, and it's an increasing problem for coastal communities.

https://www.miamidade.gov/global/water/conservation/saltwate...

Climate change is going to cause a lot of increasing problems. Brackish groundwater, loss of drinking water, fires, flash floods in areas that have never experienced them or been designed to cope with them, large scale flooding, loss of farmland, loss of commercial areas including ports and transport hubs, tornadoes, hurricanes, and larger and more damaging storms - generally creeping loss of habitable infrastructure, and increasing damage to supply chains.

Anyone who thinks owning a property somehow insulates them from change is going to be in for nasty surprises.

If anything, owning a property ties one to the fate of a geographic location, and the oncoming climate change means the function and utility of lots of geography will change rapidly.

Depends on many factors but brackish groudwater does exist near coastlines either naturally or via intrusion from human over pumping. Example of the latter from LA: https://www.wrd.org/content/regional-brackish-water-reclamat...

On the Florida and Texas coasts the groundwater is brackish, and with the increasing sea levels from AGW, that salinity is intruding further and further inland.

But sea levels haven't increased very much in either of those places (yet). Certainly not enough to be responsible for the observed effect.

What happens is the freshwater aquifers are drained giving the salt/brackish water space to intrude.

Draining aquifers and lower levels of rainfall in FL are definitely also contributing (as are things like the Turkey Point plant near Miami) but the moderate sea level increases in FL and parts of the Gulf coast are also having an effect on rising salinity in aquifers. Increased storm surges and sea level rises have driven salinity further inland. So you're right that are also other factors, but one root cause is the effect of rising sea levels. Consider what's happening in Miami carefully.

https://cnsmaryland.org/2020/11/23/salt-levels-in-floridas-g...

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