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.”
I was just going to write their name in the comment, your post is much better!
Meta
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…
You can also kiss goodbye to the beach, too.
We will make new beaches. With cocaine, blackjack, and hookers. In fact, the beaches will all be pure Bolivian cocaine, as fresh and crisp and clean as the driven February snow. We shall fiuck on the beaches, we shall fuck on the landing grounds, we shall fuck in the fields and in the streets, we shall fuck in the hills; we shall cum, and cum, and cum.
thing is, if multiple shoreline properties may be lost, then owners of these properties may have something to say against extracting the water ¯\(ツ)/¯
I can think of some places to look in Florida and Scotland.
I non sarcastically love how everyone is so cynical here 😂
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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.
In other news, a line of data centres is now being planned to stretch all the way from New Jersey to Maine
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.
Renewable doesn’t mean free, you know.
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.
There’s a lot of people in these comments who seem to think energy is free, and reverse osmosis is magic.
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.
