Mighty Rio Grande Now a Trickle Under Siege | Hacker News Reader

Mighty Rio Grande Now a Trickle Under Siege

nytimes.com

18 pointskevinchen15 comments

Last I was at the Rio Grande, I was surprised that there were many spots where you could simply walk across without really getting your ankles fully wet.

I wonder what the compounding negative effects of these actions will be. With reservoirs and rivers drying up from over-pumping and drought, non-regenerative aquifers are also being depleted being pumped along with the regenerative ones, which only drys and permits greater thermal load of the ground without a method for heat dissipation, which causes even greater net loss evaporation and also prevents cloud formation and rain. It's really kind of a positive feedback loop with a bad outcome.

That describes pretty much the entire American Southwest. The Mohave was a grasslands when Columbus arrived.

Source for this? I did some quick digging and this seems to indicate that the Mojave desert has been a desert for several thousand years.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1007/geologic.html

I couldn't find any source for the OP's statement either.

Really wish people would back up their statements with a quick reference when it's proposed as a fact and not an opinion.

http://www.ecoseeds.com/mojave.html

The Mojave had extensive low-altitude conifer forests during the Boreal Holocene age, but took on its current characteristics (IIRC) about 8,000 years ago. Poster might be thinking of the cold and wet conditions of the Little Ice Age, which was a periodic climatic anomaly and thus not a useful basis for comparison.

This scares me a lot, especially living in Colorado. I hate to be one of those "No Vacancy" people, but our aquifers simply can't support any more people here. It seems crazy when you start diverting water from the other side of the continental divide just to keep Denver growing. Same goes for California; just because you want to live there doesn't mean you should, just because you want to farm there doesn't mean it makes any sense and isn't incredibly destructive. The land was never capable of supporting what they're doing out there long term, and when you start diverting water from else where, you need to sit and ask yourself, "am I doing something really stupid?"

For the amount of water and other resources we have in the West, I wonder sometimes if there just are way too many people living out here in general.

Wouldn't the cheapest way to move water about just be a big pipe from somewhere with water to spare?

This comes up every time there is a drought in the south of the UK compared to the north. It really is hard to mentally comprehend the colossal amounts of water that a river is moving.

Just make the pipe colossal. Or multiple smaller pipes that distribute the load. Throw a node.js server behind it and you'll get scale! Don't forget to use Mongo also.

That could just work! You could probably serve every tap in the North of England. As long as only one person wants turns their tap on at once.

I think the difference is that in the UK we have a heritage of building canals that can service as a utility. The Canal system has largely been forgotten but it could be a useful network again.

A canal system wouldn't work for the USA but for a smaller landmass like England it could work.

There just aren't that many available water sources to draw large amounts of water from, and El Paso is going to be pretty much at the bottom of the list when it comes to irrigation supply. The Colorado is already oversubscribed, and tapping new water sources creates political backlash from locals who don't want to see their water going to other counties or states. Finally, pipelines are expensive beasts in a time when the federal government isn't interested in eating the costs and state governments can't easily wait for counties to pay back out of water sales.

Water is a bit odd in that it's ridiculously cheap even where it's scarce, so the financial incentive to build massive water-diversion projects isn't all that great absent a specific political or governmental imperative. It's also dubious that it's worth diverting water to places that are naturally scarce (or where wasteful policies have drawn down aquifers and other groundwater sources). Pushing the carrying capacity of a region well beyond its natural levels is a fraught enterprise, especially if the regions haven't shown themselves to be particularly good at managing their current water stocks.

Personally, I'm betting that in 20 years the Great Lakes rust belt is going to be enjoying a hell of a resurgence.

I moved to Michigan partly for this reason. Plenty of water. Long term.

We wanted room to stretch out and grow a huge garden.

> going to be enjoying a hell of a resurgence

Its already happening. A lot of young people are moving here, buying a nice house for cheap and working remotely. Lot's of small entrepreneurs cropping up.

Water has a mass of 1 g/cm^3, or 1 kg/L, or 1 Mg/m^3.

Covering a 440-acre farm (about the median farm size in the US) to a depth of one inch requires over 44000 metric tons of water.

Oil pipelines have a transport capacity of millions of metric tons per year. A water pipeline of the same order of magnitude in capacity could give 227 farms the irrigation water equivalent of just one extra inch of rain per year.

The energy cost of moving that water downhill is actually negative. But rivers already do that. So your pipeline is probably moving that water uphill. Using the approximation that lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 meter is about 10 joules, lifting 10 million metric tons 100 meters is 10 Tj, or about the output of a tractor-trailer engine, running continuously, all year long.

Pumping it up from the elevation of St. Louis to the elevation of Denver is about 1500m vertically, and costs about the output of a diesel locomotive, running continuously, all year long.

That commodity typically costs $0.40 per ton in the US, only after it is completely processed for potability and delivered to the customer. Agricultural users expect to pay less.

This is probably well within the realm of our current technological possibilities, and may even be profitable economically, but you cannot even approach this politically. The cheapest way to move water is therefore to foment an armed rebellion with water rights as the casus belli. Then you can install an all new regime which likewise cannot be changed because too many millions of people depend on it remaining the same.

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