Deep in Earth's past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.

This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.

It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist.

“We need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society,” Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines, told Associated Press journalists who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform. The research teams looked in “one of the last places you would probably look for fresh water on Earth.”

  • Null User Object@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    There was an article the other day about a new plant in Japan that takes the brine from a reverse osmosis plant, and reverse osmosisizes [?] it again back into treated waste water to generate electricity. As I recall, it’s not full scale and meant more as a test/demo/proof of concept, but apparently it works ok for a first attempt.

      • Null User Object@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        14 hours ago

        No. My memory is that the English language article was a bit unclear on the details and had several indications that the author didn’t actually understand the technology, but someone said a Japanese language article did a better job of explaining it.

        Brine and fresh water doesn’t make any sense, because you’re spending energy to create fresh water with the brine as the waste. Just turning around and recombining it to make evergy again is stupid. You can’t even get back as much energy as you used to make the fresh water.

        But, spending the energy to create the fresh water, letting people use that water as normal, collecting their waste water as normal, treating the waste water as normal, and then, instead of just dumping the treated waste water into the sea, recombining it with the brine to make energy makes a ton of sense.