What do Saudi Arabia and California have in common?

[Lonestar]

They both are deserts emptying/emptied their aquifers.

A decade ago, reports began emerging of a strange occurrence in the Saudi Arabian desert. Ancient desert springs were drying up.

The springs fed the lush oases depicted in the Bible and Quran, and as the water disappeared, these verdant gardens of life were returning to sand.

“I remember flowing springs when I was a boy in the Eastern Province. Now all of these have dried up,” the head of the country’s Ministry of Water told The New York Times in 2003.

The springs had bubbled for thousands of years from a massive aquifer that lay underneath Saudi Arabia. Hydrologists calculated it was one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.

So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried, forcing them to drill ever deeper. They soon were drilling a mile down to continue tapping the water reserves that had transformed barren desert into rich irrigated fields, making Saudi Arabia the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat.

But the bounty didn’t last. Today, Saudi Arabia’s agriculture is collapsing. It’s almost out of water. And the underlying cause doesn’t bode well for farmers in places like California’s Central Valley, where desert lands also are irrigated with groundwater that is increasingly in short supply.

So what what happened? And what can the United States, China and the rest of the world learn from Saudi Arabia?
The government allowed wealthy landowners to dry up its groundwater in just three decades.

Saudi Arabia’s mysteriously disappearing water came to light around the turn of the century. By 2002, the government even formed the Ministry of Water to search for answers. But the Sherlock Holmes of this story came from a surprising background.

A Saudi banker turned water detective put together the pieces in 2004 and published the now seminal report “Camels Don’t Fly, Deserts Don’t Bloom.” Elie Elhadj’s investigation revealed the culprit: Wealthy farmers had been allowed to drain the aquifers unchecked for three decades.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Saudi landowners were given free rein to pump the aquifers so that they could transform the desert into irrigated fields. Saudi Arabia soon became one of the world’s premier wheat exporters.

By the 1990s, farmers were pumping an average of 5 trillion gallons a year. At that rate, it would take just 25 years to completely drain Lake Erie.

The Saudi government’s policy largely enriched the ruling elite and resulted in a near total depletion of its precious aquifers, Elhadj wrote.

“A combination of money and water could make even a desert bloom, until either the money or the water runs out,” Elhadj said. For Saudi Arabia, it was the water.

Now the water is nearly gone. Most of that underground water came from ancient aquifers that are deeply buried and won’t naturally refill for tens of thousands of years.

In the historic town of Tayma, which was built atop a desert oasis mentioned several times in the Old Testament, researchers in 2011 found “most wells exsiccated.” That’s academic speak for “bone dry.” The once-verdant Tayma oasis that had sustained human life for millennia — archaeologists have found stone tablets there dating back 2,500 years — was drained in one generation.
A parched Saudi Arabia is bowing out of the wheat farming business.

The government announced next year’s wheat harvest will be the country’s last. The Saudis are drinking desalinated water from the ocean — a process too expensive to use for irrigating farmland.

Agricultural production is in a free fall. The country has less than half the farmland it did in the mid-1990s, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Its fling as a major food exporter was nothing but a brief mirage in its long history. Instead, the government announced that to feed its 30 million people, it will rely almost entirely on crops imported from other countries.

Sound familiar? The United States is also using up groundwater at an alarming rate.

Like Saudi Arabia, California’s agriculture relies heavily on water pumped from the ground — accounting for about 65 percent of its water use during these drought years, according to hydrologists. Even during normal years, arid regions in the Central Valley receive about the same rainfall as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — 4 to 5 inches annually.

For the past two years, stories similar to Saudi Arabia’s have been bubbling up in the Central Valley, which produces about 10 percent of America’s agriculture. Wells are going dry, farmers are forced to chase water ever deeper underground, and the ground is sinking.

California scientists warn that they have little idea how much groundwater is left, or how long it would take aquifers to refill even if all the pumping stopped now.

Some California aquifers have been so depleted by irrigated farmland that the state is now pumping water that trickled down more than 20,000 years ago. Rainwater won’t recharge these ancient aquifers. When it’s gone, it’s gone — at least for the next 800 generations or so. Across the world, humans have pulled so much water out of the ground that it’s contributing to sea level rise.

Compared to Saudi Arabia, which relied mostly on its ancient aquifers, California has far more renewable resources like lakes, rivers, reservoirs and shallow aquifers that are recharged by mountain rainwater and melted snow.

Still, NASA hydrologist Jay Famiglietti wrote in the Los Angeles Times in March that California “has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.”

If California’s groundwater were to run out, it could result in a 65 percent reduction in irrigation and resulting crop losses during drought years like now.

Famiglietti’s assessment echoed the 2004 Saudi report, saying the US government needs to immediately start better managing groundwater.

A few months earlier, in November, Famiglietti wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change that many countries, including the United States, are on the same path as Saudi Arabia. “Groundwater supplies in some major aquifers will be depleted in a matter of decades. The myth of limitless water and free-for-all mentality that has pervaded groundwater use must now come to an end,” he said.
And elsewhere in the world?

China is home to one of the major at-risk aquifers cited by Famiglietti.

The aquifer system in northwest China has been experiencing similarly ominous signs as Saudi Arabia did a decade ago. Wells are going dry and water tables are dropping fast. The Earth Policy Institute estimates China is feeding 130 million people — about a tenth of its total population — by overpumping and depleting its sinking aquifers. When the aquifer system runs out, analysts say, China will need to rely on foreign farmland to feed 130 million people, equivalent to about 1 in 3 Americans. They will be competing with the 30 million Saudis already relying on imported food.

A global domino effect has begun. As one country runs low on water, it turns to another, putting more strain on those water reserves. Last year, both China and Saudi Arabia had record-high agricultural imports from the United States.

Almarai, one of Saudi Arabia’s two main dairy producers, purchased 15 square miles of farmland in the Arizona desert to grow alfalfa for export back to the country. Alfalfa is so water intensive that it requires three to four times more irrigation than wheat. That water comes from the Colorado River, where reservoirs are at an all-time low, threatening the drinking water for Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego.

In 2013, with the financial and political backing of China’s government, a Chinese company purchased America’s largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, securing 1 in 4 American-raised pigs, plus the water-hungry grains those 30 million pigs consumed. It was the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company. By buying food from overseas, these countries are in effect importing water — increasingly American water — in the form of corn, soy, nuts and meats.

The United States has no national plan to monitor the effect these water exports are having on its aquifers. The Saudis did the same thing. And it cost them dearly. As Elhadj wrote in 2004, what Saudi Arabia did was “synonymous with shipping away the country’s finite water resources.”

California is now threatening restaurants with a $500 fine if they serve drinking water to customers — unless a customer requests the water. But the entire state — all 38 million people — drink only about one-tenth of 1 percent of the state’s annual water use. In comparison, farmers, who face no water restrictions, use about 7 percent of its annual water to grow almonds for export overseas.

If there is a lesson emerging, it is this: Wells run dry. Mismanagement flows eternal.

Man, this drought talk is depressing as hell. There's little doubt in my mind that the ship has sailed in terms of reversals and now we're at mitigation. What do we do?

[Darmalus]

Man, this drought talk is depressing as hell. There's little doubt in my mind that the ship has sailed in terms of reversals and now we're at mitigation. What do we do?

Remain on political cruise control with short sighted policies, wait until climate change and aquifer collapse obliterate the current farms and ecology. Water the cities with desalination plants, maybe engineer some drought loving crops when it finally becomes profitable.

Unless desire for change comes from within the farmer political/economic block, I see nothing changing.

[Joun_Lord]

I wonder if it would be possible to refill the aquifers with desalinated sea water. Doing something outlandish and creating nuke powered desalination plants (preferably in geologically stable areas) and then trying to pump the water back into the ground. Or using solar power stations to do so, California and Saudi Arabia are awfully sunny and with the current and impending collapse of their agriculture land will be available.

Realistically short of doing something off the wall like that I doubt there's much to do. The trains done left the station of reversing the dry up naturally. The water conservation programs that Hollywood cunts are bitching about or supporting while having massive green lawns and fountains are too late and I'm not even sure if SA is attempting to do a similar program with their wealthy water hogs.

Their probably needs to be national plans to monitor water usage, tamp down on wasteful exports, and starting fining resource wasters in resource starved areas. That will happen about the time when our increasingly Chinese owned pigs fly.

[salm]

So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried

Puzzled. Yeah, right. Because nobody has ever warned you about the dangers of massively exploitating natural resources.

[Darmalus]

As I understand it, the ability to repair an aquifer is related to how much damage has been done. When a aquifer gets drained, material compacts into the now dry space and becomes impermeable. Once completely drained an aquifer is gone effectively forever as far as human time scales are concerned.

So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried

Puzzled. Yeah, right. Because nobody has ever warned you about the dangers of massively exploitating natural resources.

Never underestimate the ability of people to ignore/forget information they don't want to hear.

[Patroklos]

I wonder if it would be possible to refill the aquifers with desalinated sea water. Doing something outlandish and creating nuke powered desalination plants (preferably in geologically stable areas) and then trying to pump the water back into the ground. Or using solar power stations to do so, California and Saudi Arabia are awfully sunny and with the current and impending collapse of their agriculture land will be available.

Realistically short of doing something off the wall like that I doubt there's much to do. The trains done left the station of reversing the dry up naturally. The water conservation programs that Hollywood cunts are bitching about or supporting while having massive green lawns and fountains are too late and I'm not even sure if SA is attempting to do a similar program with their wealthy water hogs.

Their probably needs to be national plans to monitor water usage, tamp down on wasteful exports, and starting fining resource wasters in resource starved areas. That will happen about the time when our increasingly Chinese owned pigs fly.

I think a better plan is to not waste money pumping it into the ground and use it on the surface in place of ground water. You could even create a short term incentive plan to switch to plant water exclusively with the caveat you have to use from now on as long as its available with market rates kicking in after a few years for pretty much forever.

[Joun_Lord]

I think a better plan is to not waste money pumping it into the ground and use it on the surface in place of ground water. You could even create a short term incentive plan to switch to plant water exclusively with the caveat you have to use from now on as long as its available with market rates kicking in after a few years for pretty much forever.

That doesn't fix the problems associated with draining the aquifers such as ground displacement (sinkholes and shit), lowering of the water table allowing salt to get into water supplies near costs not too mention fucking up rivers and streams, and probably having a bad effect on plant and animal life dependent of water coming from close to surface aquifers or streams effected by aquifer depletion.

Of course desalination planets should be used for Hugh Mann consumption but they need to also be used to fix environmental fuck-ups if they can even be fixed.

[Patroklos]

Sure it does, not using ground water means it will not refill on its own. The drought is only part of the problem and a temporary one. The problem is us, humans, using up the water resources even during non droughts and barely slowing down when there is one. California is hardly the only aquifer under pressure, and most of those others are not experiencing drought. WE are the extra demand on the system.

[FedRebel]

I wonder if it would be possible to refill the aquifers with desalinated sea water.

How would you desalinate?

The process is incredibly expensive and resource intensive, and the quantities you'd require would require nuclear power...dozens of plants spread across the shoreline,

How likely is it that California would go glowing green?

Anyways, it'd be an incredibly massive undertaking that will cost lots of money, where's California going to get it?

[Simon_Jester]

Man, this drought talk is depressing as hell. There's little doubt in my mind that the ship has sailed in terms of reversals and now we're at mitigation. What do we do?

Remain on political cruise control with short sighted policies, wait until climate change and aquifer collapse obliterate the current farms and ecology. Water the cities with desalination plants, maybe engineer some drought loving crops when it finally becomes profitable.

There are significant parts of the world where it is cost-effective to grow crops on literally nothing except rainwater. Or a minimum of irrigation water coming from upstream in the same river valley you're growing the crops in.

The problem, quite simply, is that places like the Arabian peninsula (!), the Central Valley, and the western part of the Great Plains (formerly known as the Great American Desert) were never among those places. There's a reason agriculture simply did not exist on a significant scale in those regions until the 20th century- because it is impossible to ever grow crops there on that scale without massive civil engineering projects to make water available.

One of the first casualties, I think, is going to be growing crops for animal feed.

I wonder if it would be possible to refill the aquifers with desalinated sea water. Doing something outlandish and creating nuke powered desalination plants (preferably in geologically stable areas) and then trying to pump the water back into the ground. Or using solar power stations to do so, California and Saudi Arabia are awfully sunny and with the current and impending collapse of their agriculture land will be available.

You could in theory, assuming the aquifers haven't already collapsed as per the earlier post. But it would never pay to do so, because if it's not cost-effective now, nuclear and solar power won't make it more cost-effective. Both nuclear and solar energy look like they're going to be more expensive per kilowatt-hour, after all.

[Darmalus]

As far as repairing aquifers, you have to consider the source of the damage. Pumping up water to feed human civilization. You could completely repair all the aquifers by not draining them, and they will rebuild on their own given time.

Of course, given how so many places are built around the assumption of just magically pulling water out of the ground forever, and how small a well can be physically (and thus concealed) this would be difficult to enforce. But not impossible. I worked at NASA Ames in the Environmental Management Division, one of the things we did was monitor groundwater contamination left over from the early days of Silicon Valley when the solution to waste was just dump it wherever (plus learning the hard way why underground tanks, or even ones sitting on the ground, are a bad idea even if you want to dispose of the waste properly and have the best of intentions). Our probes actually let us tell when people were running wells nearby by how the contamination started shifting in their direction, and sometimes even pinpoint exactly who was doing it. It can be surprisingly hard to convince people dumping water filled with PCBs, mercury and fuel might be bad for their crops or drinking when it's free.

Extrapolating from that, one could theoretically inject something harmless but detectable into the aquifer that would give away illegal pumpers.

Some suspect the American west is entering a "mega drought" (50+ years) based off various evidence dug up (50+ year old trees that grew at the bottom of what are now lakes, among others). It's apparently cyclic and the USA only really started building here when the last one ended. If those genetic engineers could hurry up with drought loving food crops, it'd be appreciated.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Drought or no drought, groundwater or not, supplying water for California's citizens is not difficult, even if they have lavish lawns full of non-native grass. This is a problem created by agriculture and they will be the only casualty. If they're so short-sighted and stupid that they don't push for changes in regulation and instead continue to use outdated techniques that use double the amount of water needed for irrigation because they don't want their water budget cut if they use less, then fuck 'em. Something like 90% of California's water usage is for irrigation, so the rest of us will be just fine.

[Tsyroc]

Drought or no drought, groundwater or not, supplying water for California's citizens is not difficult, even if they have lavish lawns full of non-native grass. This is a problem created by agriculture and they will be the only casualty. If they're so short-sighted and stupid that they don't push for changes in regulation and instead continue to use outdated techniques that use double the amount of water needed for irrigation because they don't want their water budget cut if they use less, then fuck 'em. Something like 90% of California's water usage is for irrigation, so the rest of us will be just fine.

Whenever I go through California I am surprised that I keep seeing irrigation that uses the very wasteful sprayers instead of using drip irrigation. I thought the reason was because the farmers didn't want to invest in the new setup, which is probably still some of the case. Now I know about their "use it or lose it" water budgeting. I've worked at a place where our purchasing budget was like that. Our division bought all sorts of things a couple of years just to keep our budget high enough in the next year so we could afford the cost of spare parts we might need. It was an entirely stupid and wasteful way to budget. It's almost as asinine the other way around too. Being penalized for not being wasteful, or being s.o.l when you actually do need more than you did in years that went well.

[Adam Reynolds]

Whenever I go through California I am surprised that I keep seeing irrigation that uses the very wasteful sprayers instead of using drip irrigation. I thought the reason was because the farmers didn't want to invest in the new setup, which is probably still some of the case. Now I know about their "use it or lose it" water budgeting. I've worked at a place where our purchasing budget was like that. Our division bought all sorts of things a couple of years just to keep our budget high enough in the next year so we could afford the cost of spare parts we might need. It was an entirely stupid and wasteful way to budget. It's almost as asinine the other way around too. Being penalized for not being wasteful, or being s.o.l when you actually do need more than you did in years that went well.

The biggest lunatic thing I see, when I visit my parents in rural northern California, is that despite the drought rice farmers still are flooding fields. While this is the only way to grow rice, it is also an indication that they shouldn't be growing it in CA. They should be growing other grains that don't require being flooded twice a year. Though there is something truly beautiful about watching the sun set over flooded rice fields, that isn't worth a crop that requires thousands of liters of water for a kg of product in a state that isn't naturally a swamp.

Supposedly we will be getting more rain this year, I'll believe that when I see it.