Tag: water

Earth Water

All the water in the world (1.4b km3) and all the air in the atmosphere (5140 * 10e18 kg) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

2008-10-30:

An “atlas of hidden water” has been created to reveal where the world’s freshwater aquifers really lie. “The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.”

Useful to predict the wars of the future.
2013-12-07:

The volume of this water resource is 100x greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s subsurface in the past century

2020-11-24:

The mantle transition zone (MTZ) at a depth of 410 to 660 km is considered to be a potential water reservoir because its dominant minerals, wadsleyite and ringwoodite, can contain large amounts of water up to 3 weight %. To fit the observed mantle viscosity profiles, ringwoodite in the MTZ should contain 1 to 2 wt % water. The MTZ should thus be nearly water-saturated globally.

The MTZ is estimated to hold 3x the amount of water as the world’s oceans. This makes books like Flood more plausible. earlier estimates thought it was more like 2x:

Evidence suggests the middle of Earth’s mantle holds as much water as the planet’s oceans. If scientists can prove without doubt that the middle mantle is filled with water, it calls into question theories that suggest water arrived on Earth from comets.

See also 2.8t Tons of Fresh Water Under the Ocean

Low-salinity submarine groundwater contained within continental shelves is a global phenomenon. While low-salinity groundwater is thought to be abundant, its distribution and volume worldwide is poorly understood due to the limited number of observations. The data suggest a continuous submarine aquifer system spans at least 350 km of the US Atlantic coast and contains 2.8t tons of low-salinity groundwater.

2025 innovation Areas

  1. Personalized medicine
  2. Distributed energy
  3. Pervasive computing
  4. Nanomaterials
  5. Biomarkers for health
  6. Biofuels
  7. Advanced manufacturing
  8. Universal water
  9. Carbon management
  10. Engineered agriculture
  11. Security and tracking
  12. Advanced transportation

i like universal water and distributed power. without those, the rest is pretty meaningless.

Asteroid mining

A 0.5km diameter asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion in nickel, iron and platinum-group metals.

a few quintillion worth of elements up for grabs
This is what worthwhile start ups look like: solving hard problems, not trivial toys.

Great to see Planetary Resources — a company I invested in launch officially today. Their first mission: to mine asteroids for the benefit of humanity! Check out the video below. What could you do with a huge amount of currently rare materials on earth? Or a lot of raw material for building things in space?

this goes into considerable detail about the plans for asteroid mining.

why we need asteroids as gas stations. that is, until we can switch away from chemical propulsion.

Planetary Resources has shifted the company’s focus to a more mundane space resource: water. Water found on or near asteroids could be processed into fuel to extend the useful lives of aging commercial satellites. “I still consider that mining. We’re going to take the resources of space and turn them into a usable material.”

Waterville

In order “to prevent this heritage from disappearing,” a local planning and design group, calling itself Waterpower, “asked a series of Italian and foreign designers to make projects for the renewal of the deserted water and paper mills. There was one condition: that they take the ‘power of water’ as the poetic metaphor and technological guideline of their projects, turning the valley into an eco-sustainable environment.”

repurposing mills in Valle dei Mulini with architecture

Exowater

Bright new deposits seen in 2 gullies on Mars suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past 7 years.

Terraforming just got 1% easier 🙂 Also, in other news, what’s the big deal? Water has been found on mars for some time:


2007-03-16: Lots of water on Mars

Mars has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 10m of water if everything thawed out.

2007-04-11: Extrasolar water atmospheres

We now know that water vapor exists in the atmosphere of one extrasolar planet and there is good reason to believe that other extrasolar planets contain water vapor

2011-10-26: First extrasolar water world? Gliese 581d.
2013-12-05: More detailed studies of extrasolar atmospheres

The presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare the profiles and intensities of these signatures on multiple worlds. The 5 planets — WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b — orbit nearby stars.

2013-12-26: Europa has a 201km high water vapor plume. Marked down as a prime tourism destination.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter’s moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon’s surface.

2014-09-11: Extrasolar ice

A team of scientists has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System. Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

2014-11-23: Europa has an ocean 100km deep, with 3x as much water as earth. Looks like NASA is getting serious about a mission there. That mission will be a defining moment for this century: Imagine what will happen if they find life. See also this amazing overview picture:

2015-04-10: Looks like the Mars water estimates vary:

Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that underneath the dust there are glaciers composed of frozen water. New studies have now calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers. It is the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than 1 meter of ice.

2016-11-28: There’s now about 12 of them in the solar system

Pluto is a wondrous world indeed. Another new finding makes it even more remarkable: evidence for a subsurface ocean of water. This had also been reported on previously by AmericaSpace, but the new update strengthens the case. A water ocean on Pluto? How is that even possible? Well, first it is a subsurface ocean, similar to ones on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, among others. Temperatures on the surface are much, much too cold for liquid water (water ice is hard as rock and at lower latitudes near the equator, temperatures on Pluto can reach almost -200 degrees Celsius), but deep below the surface seems to be a different story.

2017-04-26: Most habitable planets are waterworlds

We find that most habitable planets have surfaces that are over 90% water. If Earth is indeed unusually dry for a habitable planet, then one might wonder what the mechanism was. Does the Solar system have some distinguishing feature that was responsible? For example, perhaps the low eccentricities and inclinations of Solar system planets are inefficient at promoting water delivery. It also appears feasible that the Earth has an unusually deep ocean basin. The gravitational potential associated with its surface fluctuations is much higher than any other body in the Solar system. In turn, this may suggest that the Earth has unusually strong tectonic activity, and consequently, an abnormally strong magnetic field.

2018-08-17: Another Mars water estimate

The radar investigation shows that south polar region of Mars is made of many layers of ice and dust down to a depth of ~1.5 km in the 200 km-wide area analyzed in this study. A particularly bright radar reflection underneath the layered deposits is identified within a 20 km-wide zone.

2018-08-18: More data on exoplanet water

Our data indicate that 35% of all known exoplanets which are bigger than Earth should be water-rich. These water worlds likely formed in similar ways to the giant planet cores (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) which we find in our own solar system. The newly-launched TESS mission will find many more of them, with the help of ground-based spectroscopic follow-up. The next generation space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, will hopefully characterize the atmosphere of some of them. This is an exciting time for those interested in these remote worlds. This is water, but not as commonly found here on Earth. Their surface temperature is expected to be in the 200-500 Celsius range. Their surface may be shrouded in a water-vapor-dominated atmosphere, with a liquid water layer underneath. Moving deeper, one would expect to find this water transforms into high-pressure ices before we reaching the solid rocky core.

2018-12-29: Korolev crater

ESA’s Mars Express mission recently photographed the Korolev crater on Mars, filled almost to the brim with water ice. When I first saw this image I thought, oh cute!, assuming the crater was maybe 10m across. But no, it’s 82km across and the thickest part of the ice is over 1600m thick.

2021-10-12: Exoweather:

JWST is a dream come true for exoplanet astronomers. It’s the most ambitious space telescope ever built. I like to say that the JWST will be 10000x better than the Hubble Space Telescope. A 10x bigger mirror, so with more light-gathering power you can observe things that are fainter; 10x more wavelength coverage — well into the infrared where Hubble stops. Having the infrared wavelength coverage will let us push to much cooler and thus potentially more habitable planets than we’ve been able to study before, and it helps us see through the clouds on these planets. There’s also 10x better stability, and 10x better spectral resolution. That means we can see the exact wavelengths in the planet’s color spectrum that are getting absorbed by molecules in its atmosphere, which lets us determine the chemical composition of atmospheres more precisely. There is no planet known where JWST will have the sensitivity required to detect biosignatures like this. Oxygen is really challenging to detect because the features are small compared to other molecules. For observable planets that are in the habitable zone of their stars, even if there is much more oxygen than is present on Earth, we would still need 10s of transits of the planet in front of the star to detect it. Any added difficulty, like clouds in the atmosphere or instrumental noise from JWST, would make it prohibitive. We would basically need to get lucky in every possible aspect to have a prayer of seeing oxygen, and in my experience exoplanets are always tougher than expected. I’m really optimistic that we’ll see some of the easier-to-observe molecules, particularly CO2. While that isn’t a biosignature, it’s still an important piece of the puzzle of habitability.

2023-05-13: About 20 Water Objects in the Solar System

Re-analysis of data from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, along with new computer modeling, has led NASA scientists to conclude that 4 of Uranus’ largest moons likely contain an ocean layer between their cores and icy crusts. Their study is the first to detail the evolution of the interior makeup and structure of all 5 large moons: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, and Miranda. The work suggests 4 of the moons hold oceans that could be 10s of km deep.

Peak Water

With water privatization, maybe the waste in places like Las Vegas can be curtailed?
2007-10-22:

N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the hydrological fantasy project of a certain class of US water engineers. In fact, Reisner talles us, N.A.W.A.P.A. would “solve at one stroke all the West’s problems with water” – but it would also take “a $6-trillion economy” to pay for it, and “it might require taking Canada by force.” He quips that British Columbia “is to water what Russia is to land,” and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam.

The coming water war in the US is drawing closer.
2007-11-12:

Perdue isn’t the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as “Days of Prayer for Rain” to “humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.”

Tools. If they had raised water prices sufficiently to stop people washing their SUVs, they would not have to humiliate themselves now.
2008-04-23:

Pretty good, but why don’t they come out and say that the southwest of the US is fucked? I guess that would not go down well with their sophomoric “gadget guy” audience.
2008-06-06:

In California, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

It begins.
2008-07-19: Price water properly, and the scourge of Las Vegas will get swallowed by the desert, as it should be. Instead, the failed policies of the oil shock era are being repeated.

Nixon made the OPEC oil shocks worse by capping prices and using coercive government tools to reduce demand. This is exactly what California is doing with water. Demand exceeds supply. The price to users is too low.

It would be simpler to let water prices rise to a market-clearing price. This would quickly reduce aquifer overdrafts, while leaving sufficient water to support ecosystems and the species they support. It would also mean that most Californians would see prices increase a lot.

2010-09-26:

There’s no black magic going on here, just basic math. Part of the problem is an ongoing 12-year drought that’s limiting inflow from snow melt in the Rockies. But, as seen throughout Lake Mead’s history, droughts come and go. The really worrying issue here is on the demand side. Decades of population growth have led to increased water demand in the Southwest. Take, for instance, Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from Lake Mead.

2011-12-14: Las Vegas and similar places have always been an abomination. With the water gone, this will become clear even to the dullest defender of sprawl.

Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens – tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes – people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us.

2012-07-31: All that constantly washing your car / sprinkling your pointless lawn / fountains in Vegas shit is coming down hard. I wonder if the massive relocation and water rationing can happen without a civil war.

The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years. Those conditions will become the “new normal” for most of the coming century.

2012-09-15:

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in 5 years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

2014-05-10:

Representatives from the US and Mexico agreed to a complex, multi-part water deal that will give them desperately needed flexibility for weathering the drought. More surprisingly, the 2 nations will join the team of environmental organizations to release a flood of 130b liters of water into the Delta’s ancient floodplain, and chase it with a smaller, permanent annual flow to sustain the ecosystem.

2015-01-07: What happens when the water table disappears. California hasn’t seen anything yet.

Only this isn’t the way the water went dry in Fairmead. No disrespect to the reverend, but the way it went dry is that 1 day last June, Annie Cooper was looking outside her kitchen window at another orchard of nuts going into the ground. This one was being planted right across the street. Before the trees even arrived, the big grower — no one from around here seems to know his name — turned on the pump to test his new deep well, and it was at that precise moment, when the water in his plowed field gushed like flood time, that the Coopers’ house went dry.

The kitchen faucet, the fancy bathtub, the washing machine, the toilet — all drew back into themselves. A last burble. Their old domestic well, sitting 85m deep, could no longer reach the plummeting aquifer, could no longer compete with the new farm wells sunk 100s of m deeper.

2015-02-12:

between 2050 and 2100, droughts in the Southwest and Great Plains will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries that wiped out the Pueblo Indians

2015-03-14: Let’s see whether California gets real, and innovates itself out of this situation. The alternatives are terrible.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

2017-05-07:

Bangalore has a problem: It is running out of water, fast. Cities all over the world, from those in the American West to nearly every major Indian metropolis, have been struggling with drought and water deficits in recent years. But Bangalore is an extreme case. Last summer, a professor from the Indian Institute of Science declared that the city will be unlivable by 2020. “The projections are relatively correct. Our groundwater levels are approaching 0.”

2015-05-11: Agriculture are water criminals

While California Is Dying Of Thirst so it’s good to see a summary that’s a lot better researched: if we wanted to buy out all alfalfa growers by paying them their usual yearly income to just sit around and not grow any alfalfa, that would cost $860m per year and free up 5.3t liter, ie pretty much our entire shortfall of 6t liter, thus solving the drought

2018-08-23:

Besides California, the other American place in water jeopardy is the High Plains, which sits on top of an aquifer called the Ogallala. The Ogallala is sometimes described as an ocean of groundwater. One of the largest known aquifers in the world, it runs from South Dakota to Texas, more or less in the shape of a monkey wrench. Near the top, in places, it is 300m deep, and at the lower end, in places, there are areas where it is as shallow as 1m. The Dust Bowl, which played out above the Ogallala, was, in a way, a period phenomenon. All the water necessary to sustain the crops that now cover the plains was always there, but 1m deeper than Depression-era farmers could reach with windmill pumps. Electric pumps, which only became widespread by the end of the thirties, made it accessible. For decades farmers thought the Ogallala was inexhaustible. By 1975 the amount of water taken each year from the aquifer equaled the flow of the Colorado River, and now the annual draw is ~18x that amount. Farmers have been pumping out 1-2m a year in places where 1cm is being added. As far as continuing to be useful, the Ogallala might be exhausted by 2070. A reasonable estimate is that it would take 6 ka for rain to replenish it.

2019-06-18:

During the summer, the Midwest will see drought conditions similar to what California, Greece, or Italy have. A mediterranean climate seems nice, as a concept: temperate winters and warm, dry summers, guaranteed to get you an even tan. If you’re a farmer trying to grow corn it means something very different: You need more water. Because the warmer the air is, the more water plants require.