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.”
Don’t worry, scientists. There’s a world that’s thirsty for you, just waiting to be tapped. Go forth, and research! It’s the end of the world, after all! Get in!
Meta
I was just going to write their name in the comment, your post is much better!
Good News: You’ve got a new source of fresh water.
Bad News: Extraction will cause groundwater-related subsidence of the nearby shoreline, causing rapid erosion and lower elevations. Multiple shoreline properties may be lost.
Multiple shoreline properties may be lost.
Depending on the area, I don’t think I’m going to care much about some rich millionaires’ second homes being destroyed. Sure, I don’t want to see the erosion and decay of the landscape, but, you know…
thing is, if multiple shoreline properties may be lost, then owners of these properties may have something to say against extracting the water ¯\(ツ)/¯
You can also kiss goodbye to the beach, too.
I can think of some places to look in Florida and Scotland.
I non sarcastically love how everyone is so cynical here 😂
I’m tired, boss. Grifters are wasting all our resources to prop up capitalism when all we need is a few well placed “Go get the fuck out of here”-s.
Obscene amounts of resources and energy being burned up to give us
Artificial general inteligencea really stupid chat bot that is constantly wrong.Artificial general intelligence built by people who don’t have any. Sounds great, give them half a trillion dollars!
I don’t. I find the constant negativity quite draining, and I don’t want to spend too much time here as a result.
Do you like self righteous smugness? We have an abundance of that as well.
There’s a lot of people in these comments who seem to think energy is free, and reverse osmosis is magic.
In other news, a line of data centres is now being planned to stretch all the way from New Jersey to Maine
Do these people not realize reverse osmosis has been a thing for decades; we don’t need to find new fresh water sources but actually stop polluting as that makes water purification more difficult and expensive
We are talking about humans here. By nature, we are not polutting, we are the pollution.
Reverse osmosis takes a ton of energy, and creates brine as a byproduct, which is difficult to get rid of.
There are already lots of viable strategies for getting rid of brine, they are just more expensive than the naïve approach of having a big pipe on the shore spewing it into the ocean. Diluting it with seawater seems to be the most viable right now.
I wonder if something like a 10 km underwater pipe with small holes in it that only let out a little bit of brine at a time would work. Might be a hassle to lay, at least to start, but I think that once it is in place it could operate without maintenance for decades. And piping is not really that expensive. Perhaps there are already researchers studying it, or it has been proven to not work. It seems like such an obvious idea.
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.
Brine and fresh water. Costs energy to separate, makes energy letting them recombine.
Keep in mind that current sewage treatment programs remove none of the medications and drugs we pee into our toilets > that end up in lakes and rivers > that end up in the ocean.
Has the nanoplastic problem of reverse osmosis been solved?
Billions of dollars to get to it when they could install a desalination plant >.>
Why are we like this?
Because desalination is incredibly energy intensive, that’s why.
In a world with renewable energy.
The world doesn’t run on renewables. If the energy mix contains even a bit of fossil fuels, then any extra demand props up fossil energy that could be shut down.
I’d also like to point out that when you say “the energy mix” you’re not meaning the energy mix used by this project.
If any of our energy is from fossil fuels then increasing the use of energy increases the use of fossil fuels. Even if a new project uses 100% renewable energy it will increase the amount of fossil fuels used until we’ve eliminated them completely.
Renewable doesn’t mean free, you know.
Cool. Come talk to me when finding water is hard, as opposed to just shipping a sufficient quantity to wherever you need it.
If there’s a spot where a major center is next to one of these and nothing else, I suppose it could have a niche. I’m guessing the microbes and geological history are the main thing they’re excited about, though.
Man… I learned how to boil salt out of seawater in the boy scouts. You’d think we could just do that, but at a larger scale.
Do you have any idea how energy intensive that would be?
The sun does it for free. Solar stills are very effective.
Good news! Boiling water also creates energy!
converts
Ahem.
I’m gonna find a way to destroy matter and energy just to spite you. 😤
Just accelerate the entire universe evenly, nothing gains kinetic energy relative to anything else, the change is undetectable and the energy used to accelerate everything is so iretrivable you can’t even prove it ever existed.
I’d like to see your empirical data. Have you considered sheer forces on other dimensions? I suspect it may be multiverse climate change as others heat up.
If you heat it to many times it’s boiling point, sure.
Has it occurred to you there may be a good reason this isn’t done at scale already?
Desalination plants exist. The main reason it’s not more common is that nobody wants to pay for it or have them near their homes (NIMBY bastards).
