California’s central valley aquifers may be gone in 2030s, Ogallala 2050-2070

Preface. Clearly the human population isn’t going to reach 10 billion or more. California grows one-third of the nation’s food, the 10 high-plains states over the Ogallala about a quarter of the nations food, and exports a great deal of food other nations as well.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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AP (2023) Warning about aquifer’s decline sets up big fight in Kansas. The Associated Press.

Kansas water experts are sounding an alarm decades in the making: Farmers and ranchers in the state’s western half must stop pumping more water out of a vast aquifer than nature puts back each year or risk the economic collapse of a region important to the U.S. food supply.

Kansas produces more than 20% of the nation’s wheat and has about 18% of the cattle being fed in the U.S. The western third of Kansas, home to most of its portion of the Ogallala, accounts for 60% of the value of all Kansas crops and livestock. That’s possible because of the water. Since widespread pumping began around 1940, much of the Ogallala has lost at least 30% of its available water and more than 60% in places in western Kansas.

December 15, 2016. Groundwater resources around the world could be depleted by 2050s. American Geophysical Union.

Human consumption could deplete groundwater in parts of India, southern Europe and the U.S. in the coming decades, according to new research presented here today.

In the U.S., aquifers in California’s Central Valley, Tulare Basin and southern San Joaquin Valley, could be depleted within the 2030s.

Aquifers in the southern High Plains, which supply groundwater to parts of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, could reach their limits between the 2050s and 2070s, according to the new research.

New modeling of the world’s groundwater levels finds aquifers—the soil or porous rocks that hold groundwater—in the Upper Ganges Basin area of India, southern Spain and Italy could be depleted between 2040 and 2060.By 2050, as many as 1.8 billion people could live in areas where groundwater levels are fully or nearly depleted because of excessive pumping of groundwater for drinking and agriculture, according to Inge de Graaf, a hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.

“While many aquifers remain productive, economically exploitable groundwater is already unattainable or will become so in the near future, especially in intensively irrigated areas in the drier regions of the world,” said de Graaf, who will present the results of her new research today at the 2016 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

Knowing the limits of groundwater resources is imperative, as billions of gallons of groundwater are used daily for agriculture and drinking water worldwide, said de Graaf.

Previous studies used satellite data to show that several of the world’s largest aquifers were nearing depletion. But this method can’t be used to measure aquifer depletion on a smaller, regional scale, according to de Graaf. In the new research, de Graaf and colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands used new data on aquifer structure, water withdrawals, and interactions between groundwater and surrounding water to simulate groundwater depletion and recovery on a regional scale. The research team used their model to forecast when and where aquifers around the world may reach their limits, or when water levels drop below the reach of modern pumps.

Limits were considered “exceeded” when groundwater levels dropped below the pumping threshold for two consecutive years. The new study finds heavily irrigated regions in drier climates, such as the U.S. High Plains, the Indus and Ganges basins, and portions of Argentina and Australia, face the greatest threat of depletion.

Although the new study estimates the limits of global groundwater on a regional scale, scientists still lack complete data about aquifer structure and storage capacity to say exactly how much groundwater remains in individual aquifers. “We don’t know how much water there is, how fast we’re depleting aquifers, or how long we can use this resource before devastating effects take place, like drying up of wells or rivers,” de Graaf said.

Hayes D, Hayes G (2015) Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment. W.W. Norton & Company.

The Ogallala is one of Earth’s largest aquifers, the water used in the 10 great Plains states that provides a third of all groundwater used to irrigate to grow a fifth of our food and 40% of the grain for grain-fed beef . Over the last century, however, we’ve pumped out two-thirds of the total water, enough to fill Lake Erie. Many geologists expect most of the Ogallala to run out of water in 25 to 30 years, and perhaps run out of “usable” water as soon as 2020. The fossil water in the Ogallala is not renewable. Over the years, water levels have fallen by more than one hundred feet in parts of four states. The “tragedy of the commons” is writ large over the Ogallala. Like climate disruption, aquifer depletion is the type of problem that human minds aren’t well designed to handle: The problem spans generations, conditions are only gradually worsening, and most people find it in their short-term interest to behave in ways that benefit them but harm future generations. Underground water ignores property lines, so there’s no way to conserve the water under your land unless all your neighbors do the same. Therefore, it seems logical to pump out as much water as hard and fast as you can, because otherwise your neighbors will pump it out (Hayes).