Welcome to the Sunday Discussion segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Sunday Discussion will feature a serious topic that needs to be featured and talked about. You can “discuss” it on your own social media networks as comments are banned here on Geek Alabama.
More than half of all Americans live within 50 miles of a coast. The middle of the country was almost empty until we found water under the ground. Now that water is running out.
The Ogallala Aquifer sits beneath eight states, supplies about a quarter of the water used for US agriculture, and supports roughly 20% of the country’s corn, wheat, cotton, and cattle. It took tens of thousands of years to fill.
We’ve been draining it for less than a century. A Kansas State University study projects 69% of the Kansas portion will be gone by 2060.
In this video I draw it on the map, mark the towns and crops it built, and then start erasing, because that’s what’s already happening on the ground.
John Wesley Powell warned Congress this land couldn’t support intensive settlement back in 1878. He was right. The aquifer was the thing that made him temporarily wrong. And now the map is redrawing itself back to something closer to what he described.
Categories: Discussion Talk Stuff
