- 1 year ago
Hundreds of millions of people around the world could run out of water soon. Experts are desperately searching for solutions to stave off "Day Zero" when the taps will run dry. But the recent discovery of a massive aquifer hidden beneath the U.S. coastline may offer the greatest hope for humanity.
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Whether you're a student, educator, policymaker, or simply curious about global education, you'll find valuable insights and compelling stories here.
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00:01It's the simplest thing.
00:03A glass of clean, fresh water.
00:06Every single person on Earth, all 7.2 billion of us,
00:11needs a few of these each day.
00:14But there are more people all the time.
00:17The climate is shifting.
00:19Pollution is rising.
00:21All of these threaten clean, fresh water supplies
00:25around the world.
00:27The cities of Cape Town, Cairo, Mexico City, Tokyo,
00:33Sao Paulo, Beijing, Melbourne, and London
00:38are all at risk of running short of water.
00:42And soon.
00:44Hundreds of millions of people are in danger
00:48of losing their clean, fresh drinking water altogether.
00:53The hunt for new supplies is going on right now across the world.
00:59The pressure on global supplies of fresh water is mounting.
01:14The reasons why are clear.
01:17Number one, the population of the world is growing.
01:22There are 7.3 billion people on the planet now.
01:26In 10 years, that number will rise by 1.2 billion to 8.5 billion.
01:33According to a new UN report, by 2050, the number will be almost 10 billion people.
01:42Every single person will need clean, fresh water to drink,
01:48grow food, and stay clean.
01:51In other words, to live.
01:55Water, as everybody knows intuitively, is needed for any aspect of your life.
02:04You need to drink water, you need to bathe, and other sanitation needs.
02:10You need water to produce energy, to mine coal or oil or gas.
02:17To produce electric power requires a lot of water.
02:21Your food requires a lot of water.
02:24In fact, irrigating crops to grow our food takes up about 70 or 80% of all the water used throughout the world.
02:32So when you're looking at a water crisis, the first thing that comes to my mind is what's going on with irrigated agriculture in that area.
02:44There are two basic ways to get water for human needs.
02:51One way is to dig wells down into the water table and bring it up.
02:58The other is to catch seasonal rainwater and snowmelt flowing in rivers and collect it in reservoirs.
03:08All over the world, hundreds of millions of people rely on these sources of water to grow crops, to drink, and for basic sanitation.
03:18Globally, half a million seasonal dams catch rain and snowmelt runoff.
03:25When the dams fill in the wet season, people downstream have water to drink and grow crops.
03:34Some of that water sinks into the ground, replenishes the water table, and recharges wells.
03:43Now the atmosphere is warming, and the global climate is behaving erratically, unpredictably.
03:53The seasonal arrival of enough rain and snow to fill water needs has become less reliable.
04:00What if rain and snowfall patterns change profoundly?
04:05Or, the rains and snows don't come at all?
04:10Or, extreme rain provides too much rain all at once?
04:15Creating floods of polluted water too toxic to drink or use?
04:23To try and determine where these kinds of water risks are highest,
04:27the World Resources Institute has created the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas.
04:36There's a lot of color everywhere.
04:38The darker colors show where the greatest water stress is in the world.
04:44I would say India and Pakistan.
04:47Those are the places that keep me up the most at night.
04:52The Indus and Ganges River basins are seeing lower water levels coming from the snow melt in the Himalayas.
05:02700 million people depend on that water.
05:07The first place my eye is drawn to is this area in northwestern India and in eastern Pakistan.
05:13It's extremely high stress in most of this region.
05:19This is ground zero for pumping of groundwater to irrigate agriculture.
05:26So, a place that's already high risk on a baseline level then sees a very bad drought.
05:34That's going to lead to a crisis.
05:38And when a crisis happens between two countries that are basically enemies and have nuclear weapons,
05:48this poses a very dangerous situation.
05:54But India and Pakistan are not the only water flashpoint in the world.
05:59In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa came within weeks of day zero.
06:07The declaration of a water emergency and rationing.
06:12Parts of South America are in trouble too.
06:16Sao Paulo, Brazil has a population of over 12 million.
06:21It's the largest city in Brazil and the Western Hemisphere.
06:26And it's running out of water.
06:29In fact, in regions on every continent except Antarctica,
06:35the demand for fresh water is greater than the supply.
06:40When I look at this map of water stress and I see all this red,
06:44what it's telling me is that this use is unsustainable in a lot of these red areas.
06:53It's telling me that we're kind of like a person who's spending his bank account down
07:01faster than it's being replenished with money from his job.
07:05And there's going to be a day of reckoning in a lot of these places
07:08that we see here in red and dark red unless we start moving to much more intelligent uses of water.
07:21More intelligent uses of water, or what happened to Chennai, India, will begin to happen everywhere.
07:27The city of Chennai, India is well over 1,500 years old.
07:38It sits on the southwest coast on the Bay of Bengal, a tourist mecca.
07:45It's one of the most visited cities in all of India.
07:49It also has one of the largest municipal economies in the country.
07:54Nicknamed the Detroit of India.
07:59One third of all the cars made in India are made in Chennai.
08:05And in June 2019, the city of Chennai ran completely out of water.
08:13The reservoirs dried up and there was no water at all running in the municipal water system.
08:19It's a very large city, the size of maybe a New York.
08:26And this is a city which, in June of 2019, saw all four of its major reservoirs go to zero.
08:36Zero, Zippo, as in dry beds of the reservoirs.
08:40And this population of 10 million people only can get water from tanker trucks that are coming in.
08:49Trains with boxcars.
08:51They have no other source of water and that's just kind of keeping people with the core amount of water they need for drinking water and sanitation.
08:59A lot of businesses have had to shutter.
09:03This is a place with a lot of tourism.
09:06It's the second largest IT center in India.
09:10It's kind of catastrophic from both a humanitarian and an economic perspective for this city.
09:16The catastrophe took some time to build.
09:22Between 2001 and 2019, the population of Chennai grew out of control from 4.5 million to 11 million.
09:33That meant more demand for water.
09:35In 2015, there was a killing flood as the annual monsoon dumped huge amounts of water on Chennai.
09:48Too much water, polluted and unsafe to drink.
09:53And the city only treats 15% of its wastewater.
09:58Then the monsoon failed for a couple of years.
10:03With no rain, what little water there was finally ran out.
10:10But it wasn't just lack of rain that brought Chennai to its knees.
10:15It was no rain on top of everything else.
10:23That is, more people.
10:26Bad water management.
10:28A disrupted climate.
10:30And changing rain patterns.
10:31When patterns become unreliable, they can bring too much rain.
10:38Or they can bring nothing at all.
10:41This is the perfect storm for water stress.
10:46Water stress is just a fancy term for the amount of water you use in any place with respect to how much water is available.
10:55So, at some point, you're using more water than is sustainably available through a periodic rainfall.
11:03And you're stressing the water because too many people are trying to use too few resources.
11:08Most of India is water stressed.
11:09The UN estimates that India has only 30 days' supply of water at any one time.
11:22It makes the system vulnerable, especially to drought.
11:26Sometimes you have enough water, but your water is too dirty to use because you're dumping untreated wastewater into your rivers.
11:36Sometimes it's drought.
11:39Sometimes it's flooding.
11:41And it wipes away housing and infrastructure.
11:46And it causes problems for water quality because a lot of this flood water is coming into contact with highly polluted areas on land.
11:55So, there are a variety of problems.
11:58Not everybody is suffering from any one of them.
12:03A lot of people are suffering from at least one or more of these problems.
12:11While governments and individuals wrestle with water issues, a global hunt for new water supplies is going on.
12:19And cities like Chennai that sit on coastlines got some surprising and hopeful news.
12:30In 2019, when Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory announced they had discovered a giant new freshwater aquifer just off the northeast coast of the U.S.,
12:44water managers around the world paid attention.
12:51So, you'll find aquifers pretty much anywhere beneath the surface.
12:55It's basically a body within the rock or the sediments of fresh water.
13:01So, anyone who has a well for their water in the house is tapping an aquifer.
13:06It's not like an underground lake.
13:08It's not an open body of water.
13:09It's within the rock and the sediment.
13:12So, it's more like a sponge.
13:14So, if you think of going to a beach close to the shoreline and digging a hole,
13:18and when you get into the water, you see the water saturated within the sand and coming out.
13:23It's more like that.
13:27This aquifer is unusual, though.
13:30It's under the ocean, not under the land.
13:33A submarine aquifer that lies 600 feet under the continental shelf.
13:40It extends from the shore out to about 50 miles.
13:45And stretches from New Jersey to southern New England.
13:49The scientists who found it estimate it holds one and a half times the volume of water in Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes.
13:59How do you find water buried in the continental shelf?
14:06The science team used electromagnetism.
14:10Imagine this is the Earth, okay?
14:14And way out in space, we have the sun emitting solar particles, charged particles, that come and interact with the Earth's magnetic field and create electrical currents in the ionosphere above us.
14:26Because the Earth is able to conduct electrical current, the currents that are going above us are able to induce current flow in the Earth.
14:37How electrical currents flow depends on the conductivity of the material they flow through.
14:44So they built a system to detect how current flows deep in the seafloor.
14:54Current flows well through seawater, but not through fresh water.
14:59By reading just how the current flows in the subsurface, they believed they could spot any fresh water.
15:06Behind the ship, we tow a transmitter, which is fairly simple. It's a couple of pieces of pipe through which we pass current and a waveform.
15:18And that signal diffuses out through the seawater, through the seafloor, and is measured by these instruments on the bottom.
15:25They tried the system out, off the coast of New Jersey.
15:32Years before, oil companies had drilled there, looking for oil, and reported finding water.
15:40So they knew it was there.
15:42The system worked.
15:44It detected the water clearly.
15:46They went up off the coast of southern New England to try the system there.
15:53No one knew what they would find.
15:56The data came in from the instruments as a stream of numbers.
16:01Chloe Gustafson, at Lamont-Doherty, did the computations and crunched the numbers.
16:08So what we get is this colorful image where the yellowy-orange portions show where the orange is.
16:16And then these sort of squiggles on top of it are data that shows the rock structure.
16:26The shoreline is over here, and this is out seaward towards the edge of our continental shelf.
16:34And here we're seeing our aquifer extending from the shore all the way out to about 90 kilometers offshore.
16:42And when we have our structural data set as well, we can see that there are these layers that are capping the aquifer and sort of holding it down in place.
16:56So they found a giant aquifer under the continental shelf that stretches from New Jersey to New England.
17:03Seeing the body of water beneath New Jersey was comforting.
17:10We knew it was there.
17:12Seeing the body off of Martha's Vineyard, I think, was the ah moment because that was something that we had all thought was there.
17:20We didn't know it, but here we are. We're the first ones to really see it and show that it exists.
17:28So there's a little bit of uncertainty in how fresh the water is.
17:33But it certainly is much fresher than salt water.
17:36So from a desalination point of view, the amount of energy needed to turn it from what it is into potable water is going to be significantly less.
17:49Desalination is a technology designed to remove salt from seawater to make it fresh and safe for drinking.
17:56Today, 18,000 desalination plants around the world produce 22.9 billion gallons of fresh water a day by removing salt from seawater.
18:11Some 300 million people rely on that water for some or all of their daily needs.
18:19Desalination with today's technology is your last-ditch solution.
18:24And it's really only an alternative for wealthier communities.
18:31You don't see a lot of poor countries with desal.
18:34It's mostly Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Singapore.
18:41Melbourne just had to put in an emergency desalination plant.
18:45We have a desalination plant in Southern California.
18:48Southern California is investing billions of dollars in desalination plants.
18:58There may be no choice.
19:01All the elements for water stress are present.
19:05The region relies on snow melt from far away in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
19:12Intense agriculture consumes much of it as it flows south.
19:19The growing population of Southern California takes the rest.
19:25Add a prolonged drought and a changing climate.
19:29It costs 100 million dollars to build a desalination plant.
19:38For just 300,000 people.
19:41There are 24 million people in Southern California.
19:46The numbers are huge.
19:48But the economy is strong enough to pay for it.
19:53In foreign places, we're seeing day zeroes.
19:58Where cities are running out of water or close to running out of water.
20:03And they're trying to figure out what to do.
20:07And people in cities are waiting in line sometimes to get water that's trucked in.
20:13This is happening in places like Mexico City.
20:19You can see, as we've seen in Yemen or in Iraq, horrible health problems with hundreds of thousands of people hospitalized.
20:32And you can see cholera outbreaks.
20:35So a lot of really bad things happen when water runs out.
20:39You see conflict happening in water-scarce places.
20:44You see health migrations of people from places that are drying out.
20:50You know, in rural areas.
20:53So that's what a drier future looks like.
20:59The discovery of a giant aquifer of almost fresh water off the U.S. East Coast won't solve the water problems of the world.
21:07But the science teams at Woods Hole and Lamont Doherty have developed a technique that can be used around the world to find other aquifers.
21:19They will study the connection between onshore freshwater aquifers, offshore aquifers, and the impact on marine ecosystems.
21:33But for cities like Chennai, India, Cape Town, South Africa, and San Diego, California, and the islands of Australia and Malta, just to name a few,
21:48it could mean new supplies of fresh water to face a hotter, drier world.
21:54It's not uncommon in science, I think, that we start out with trying to address a basic problem and that we end up finding something that has much bigger implications.
22:07It's a basic geologic process that's of interest to some of us, but it clearly could potentially impact on all of society.
22:16It's the simplest thing. A glass of fresh water. Unless you don't have it.
22:27It's the best electron-like ĐĐ°Đ» Grundy.
22:28It's the easiest way to connect with some of us.
22:29It's the easiest way to connect with these different environments.
22:31It's the easiest way to connect with these different backgrounds.
22:32How does the world know that DIYs have come in these different ways?
22:33How does the world know that there are...
22:34...they can't wait for the world to connect with you these four different places.
22:35I wouldn't go there.
22:36I won't go there.
22:37I don't have a lot of time in design about this yet.
22:38I don't have a lot of time in that way.
22:39In the design of the city of the city, I think, I think the state of New Jersey,
22:40I can use this one day in 10 years,
22:42I think that it's going to be a great deal.
22:43I'm a little bit older than with you, but I think of a bit.
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