Dinosaur Pee

Do you know where your drinking water comes from?  Many people think that it comes from the kitchen sink faucet or the refrigerator filter nozzle.  When I lived north in this state, my drinking water came from the Potomac river.  It was pumped to a filtration plant where they added things like chlorine (a chemical poison) to kill any nasties that might be growing in it before it reached my stomach.  It tasted OK and it smelled OK and we survived.  We did have to let the chlorine out-gas before we added it to our Koi pond, though.

Many of the nearby well populated communities in the area pulled their water from underground.  They went down just deep enough to get to the first water table, as that is the cheapest when you are pumping for a city.  This water was less than 100 years old.  It was water was made from filtered rain, but went through some pretty disgusting soil before it was collected and then treated by the water plant.  It could have come from some grandpa's toilet!

Today my water comes from an aquifer about 400 feet beneath my land.  A geologist told me the other day that my water is very old and goes back to dinosaur times!  It has sat in that underground lake for many thousands of years.  It probably was created from rain washing over dinosaur poop and pee before we were a twinkle in evolution's eye!  It is very safe to drink, and if you do not mind the hydrogen smell that occurs when we get lazy and do not treat the pipes, it is water that can be added directly to fish ponds or drinking glasses.  I find this mind-boggling.  According to the USGS "Ground water may flow through an aquifer at a rate of 50 feet per year or 50 inches per century, depending on the permeability of the soil above it. But no matter how fast or slow, water will eventually discharge or leave an aquifer and must be replaced by new water to replenish or recharge the aquifer.  Thus, every aquifer has a recharge zone or zones and a discharge zone or zones."  These aquifers vary.  "Rocks that yield freshwater have been found at depths of more than 6,000 feet, and salty water has come from oil wells at depths of more than 30,000 feet.

Water is a finite resource.  We have become addicted to corn for food, food additives and energy, a crop that sucks up water like a sponge and we plant it across the land.  The drought across the U.S. has left water tables in Texas and Kansas and Colorado almost empty now.  Farmers go deeper and suck up sandy water and ruin their pumps in their desperation to grow a crop.  Yes, they are switching to milo and other crops that require less water, but it may not give us enough time to replenish that underground water source.  Refilling that large aquifer would require hundreds if not thousands of years of rains.  There has been a 30 foot decline in the water level.

We are now moving into the Anthropocene epoch, a term coined by scientists because we are changing the climate and resources of our planet so rapidly.  An International Geosphere-Biosphere Program paper says, “On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years.” It adds, “Tens of thousands of large dams now distort natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over thousands of years."  We are sinking river deltas and removing wetlands which are natural barriers to inland flooding and you can see this on the news everyday.  People in North Dakota are now fighting over water resources (even though they are still in abundance) to continue expanding their fracking industry which makes them one of the primary energy states in the nation.  Let us hope they run out of gas before they tap into the Great Lakes.

Some even blame some of the tragedy in Syria to the lack of water management.  Their dictator (he who shall not be named) took land and gave it to his friends and they farmed it so vastly and carelessly that they ran the small farmers off their land because they could no longer get water from the ground.  Then drought ravaged 60% of the land even more moving 800,000 farmers and herders into poverty.

Water is precious and we must protect and use it wisely.  Writing this has made me thirsty.  I am going to go drink some dinosaur pee.