[HN Gopher] Blue gold turned into sand: will the waters return t...
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Blue gold turned into sand: will the waters return to the Aral Sea?
Author : zeristor
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-09-19 09:37 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theperspective.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theperspective.se)
| lordgrenville wrote:
| How feasible is it to restore the whole thing to pre-1960 levels?
| If they stopped cotton farming and opened up the dams, would the
| ecosystem naturally heal?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| What is your timeline?
|
| It took a couple of generations for the lake to get in this
| poor condition. It will likely take at least that long for it
| to be restored since the area has become more arid.
|
| If left totally alone with all natural flows enabled it will
| eventually fill. That assumes that water is not used for
| irrigation along the way. If you allow continued irrigation of
| thirst crops then your recovery is delayed or disabled.
|
| The countries that share responsibility for the health of this
| lake need to work together to design a long-term regional plan.
| This will probably put a lot of families who depend on
| agriculture out of work and displace them.
|
| In the long term though it will allow fishermen the opportunity
| to return to an active fishery that supplies healthy food
| options for local consumption or for export.
|
| Solving the issue of accumulated soil contaminants could partly
| be handled in stages using plant filters along the lake edge as
| the lake level rises slowly. Managing contaminants in
| agricultural areas where runoff feeds the lake could also be
| accomplished in stages by alternating swaths of plants that
| sequester contaminants with other agricultural crops so that
| over the region, all the land has a remediating crop at least
| once a year.
|
| Maybe? I don't know. It will take a while no matter how you do
| it.
| gedy wrote:
| From the article it sounds like the countries talk around that
| by "bringing life back", etc but not stopping the agriculture.
| narrator wrote:
| This story would be more balanced if they also included pictures
| of all the land irrigated by draining the Aral Sea. By only
| showing one side, it makes it look like there are no tradeoffs to
| refilling it.
| zeristor wrote:
| Reading the post on the Scottish island of Gruinard, led to me
| finding out about the Soviet bio-weapons site of Aralsk 7 which
| was similarly built on an island for isolation, only the Aral Sea
| which surrounded the island has since shrunk hugely:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vozrozhdeniya_Island
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| He, didn't work out that well. I was actually surprised that
| some eastern parts of the sea reflooded in recent years. But
| considering the short amount of time where the water vanished I
| doubt there is much hope. I believe the pollution is also
| considerable, with or without soviet bio weapons.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The pollution seems like a bigger problem all around.
| ncmncm wrote:
| They could float solar on it to cut the evaporation rate,
| presuming there is anything to float on.
|
| Same for the Great Salt Lake in Utah. As it is they are panicking
| about the arsenic dust that will be blown over the city from the
| dry lake bed.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| The governor of Utah has a large farm growing alfalfa. This
| crop requires large amounts of water, much of which is
| exported. 82% of the water used in Utah goes to agriculture. So
| rather than reducing his own water consumption, he's been on TV
| telling Utahns to "pray for rain" - so his personal crop won't
| fail.
|
| Western _water use_ and _water rights_ are broken. They can 't
| be fixed as long as they are massive welfare projects. The book
| _Cadillac Desert_ covers the history and politics of why this
| is so.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| The problem in your first paragraph is much broader than
| water rights. Politicians get money and favors from other
| people and corporations based on access to the office, they
| own and trade in shares and a lot of other things.
|
| It's not like the governor would suddenly not be lobbied by
| farmers and others interested in water extraction if he
| didn't own his own farm.
| prottog wrote:
| > Western water use and water rights are broken. They can't
| be fixed as long as they are massive welfare projects.
|
| Absolutely! There is a government-imposed ceiling on the
| price of water in the West, way below what the market would
| bear. No wonder the Colorado hasn't reached the ocean in
| years.
| allemagne wrote:
| In my understanding, it's all true that:
|
| - Alfalfa is an especially water-thirsty crop
|
| - The vast majority of Utah's water goes to agriculture
|
| - The Great Salt Lake is rapidly diminishing, endangering
| over 2.7 million people
|
| - The Cox family owns an alfalfa farm in Fairview
|
| - Cox told Utahns to "pray for rain":
| https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/06/03/gov-
| spencer-...
|
| - Cox has come out against water cuts to agriculture:
| https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/07/16/cox-says-its-
| ignorant...
|
| To me this makes it clear that the governor probably has a
| conflict of interest to some degree when it comes to water
| conservation and it's good that it's being called out.
|
| However:
|
| - He has described his farm as "small" in the past. Is he
| just lying/being misleading? I can't really find anything
| written about this. How much of a financial incentive does he
| have personally tied into keeping this farm running?
|
| - My guess is it's probably _not_ worth giving him the
| benefit of the doubt here, but I can 't find whether or not
| his farm is held in any kind of trust or whether he is the
| sole or partial owner of it.
|
| - Utah has several watersheds that don't feed into the GSL:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Basin_watersheds
| as well as a significant portion that drains into the
| Colorado River. Is water usage for the GSL watershed more or
| less geared towards agriculture?
|
| - Fairview is in the Sevier Lake endorheic watershed, which
| makes it seem like at least his farm is not directly related
| to the GSL crisis (which often seems to be an implication).
|
| - Agriculture using far more water than urban use is not
| uncommon at all, in and outside of the Western US
|
| - How much desert agriculture is ultimately acceptable in
| order to save the GSL and effectively conserve for the
| ongoing megadrought? How close are we really to that number?
| How many small towns would be made infeasible without the
| income from farming? Zero? 100,000 people?
|
| This narrative about Cox as a kind of alfalfa magnate who
| stands in the way of water rights seems to be coagulating
| quite a bit, but I honestly don't know whether it's a useful
| heuristic to understanding the dynamics at play or a
| misleading oversimplification. Even outside of what could
| very well be a huge gubernatorial scandal happening in slow
| motion, the entire subject of water usage in Utah seems
| totally underdiscussed. Local news outlets seem to mostly
| stay above surface level and entirely cleave either to this
| mostly urban and left-of-center narrative or the farmer's
| perspective.
| Retric wrote:
| Amounts matter, 82% of water use being for agriculture is
| unusual. Farms near me generally don't have irrigation
| systems for crops because rainfall is enough.
|
| US water rights sit outside the free market and result in
| exactly the inefficiency you might expect.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| It reminds me that back in 1983 they had sandbags running
| down streets directing floodwater into the lake and the lake
| level was rising so fast that there were crews working 24
| hours a day to keep raising the dam so that the interstate
| highway didn't flood. The Union Pacific Railroad has a track
| that crosses part of the lake and they raised the track bed
| several times during that flood episode.
|
| I have photos I took of machinery hauling rock and materials
| from the interstate which was about 25 feet lower than the
| lake surface at the time.
|
| I have wondered why, instead of fighting to hold the lake off
| of the interstate, didn't they just let it go off across the
| salt flats while they built an elevated interstate highway
| section similar to that across Lake Pontchartrain.
|
| The level of the lake would've been lower though the
| shoreline and surface extents of the lake would be much
| larger. By continuously raising the dam level they forced the
| water level higher in the populated area and flooded many
| shoreline attractions.
|
| It's only water. Just let it go. It'll wash off.
| brudgers wrote:
| A quick Google says the Aral Sea is currently about 170,000
| km^2 and the largest solar farm is 160km^2.
|
| I think it would be difficult to reduce evaporation that way.
|
| I think the logistical complications of salt water would
| further impede that approach.
|
| Finally, solar is an industrial technology and would likely
| have a substantial negative environmental impact on an already
| compromised set of ecosystems.
|
| But I could be wrong.
| cracrecry wrote:
| That is a global problem.
|
| The US did the same with its rivers, just look at the Colorado.
| But thanks to that the US can eat, from food produced in places
| like California.
|
| In the future it will be possible to grow food using ten to one
| hundred times less water with technologies like vertical farming
| and cellular cultures that grow cotton and other textiles
| directly. But right now we can't.
| As_You_Wish wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=why+aren%27t+vertical+farms+being+...
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