The groundwater beneath our feet, out of sight, hidden under soil and bedrock, is a golden resource, supplying our farms with irrigation water, and providing our cities with drinking water. Its invisibility and infrequent mentions in the mass media, belies its importance in keeping our society running. Perhaps because of this unseen significance, we have, all over the world, been overdrawing aquifers.
Forty percent of California’s water comes from the ground. A century of overdrawing the water has led to the water table to drop hundreds of feet. In the Central Valley, breadbasket to the US, so much water has been taken out of the aquifers for farming that the bedrock has collapsed, and the ground sunk. In the photo below you can see where the ground was in 1925, 1955, and 1977.
Professor Helen Dahlke, of the University of California of Davis, has been leading the (re)charge to replenish California’s groundwaters. She has teamed up with farmers, to guide the excess water from the winter rains to flood farms, thus creating temporary wetlands. Over days and weeks, that water then sinks down to replenish the aquifers.
In this podcast Helen Dahlke shares about her research, the groundwater situation in California, the quest to replenish its aquifers, the droughts and intermittent large rains, the wetlands and floods, and the interdiscplinary efforts to bring back nature-based solutions to our water needs all over the world.
…..
If you want to download and listen to this podcast on your phone, look for the Substack app in the app store, and then download it. There is an app for Android and one for Iphone. On the app look for this podcast, then click on the Substack icon button on the bottom right corner to download it onto your phone. There is also a Climate Water Project channel on Apple podcasts and Spotify where you can download the podcast.
….
You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you would like to support the writing and recording of this newsletter/podcast, and help further various efforts to restore our water cycles that I am working on, you can also get a paid subscription.
Readings:
“A Farmers Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge” .Wired magazine article: https://www.wired.com/story/farmers-quest-beat-californias-drought-flood-climate-change/
“As Rains Soak California, Farmers Test How To Store Water Underground” . NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/01/12/509179190/as-rains-soak-california-farmers-test-how-to-store-water-underground
The plan to replenish our groundwater : Helen Dahlke interview