Scientists tapping ‘secret’ fresh water under ocean

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Drilling under salt water off Cape Cod extracted samples from massive, aquifer stretching from New Jersey to Maine

#Aboard Liftboat Robert (North Atlantic)

Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a US government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find. It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.

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”.

They found it, and will be analysing nearly 50,000 litres (13,209 gallons) of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins — whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination. The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It’s bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it’s even feasible.

The Ancient Mariner told us so

Why try? In just five years, the UN says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centres that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate. The fabled Ancient Mariner’s lament, “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,” looms as a warning to landlubbers as well as to sailors on salty seas.

In Virginia alone, a quarter of all power produced in the state goes to data centres, a share expected to nearly double in five years. By some estimates, each midsize data center consumes as much water as 1,000 households. Each of the Great Lakes states has experienced groundwater shortages.

Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close to running out of fresh water for its nearly 5 million people in 2018 during an epic, three-year drought. South Africa is thought to have a coastal undersea freshwater bonanza, too, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same.

Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, are among places where stressed freshwater supplies coexist with prospective aquifers under the ocean.AP

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