Fossil water is ancient water trapped in deep aquifers that take millennia to recharge, rather than the standard seasonal rainfall recharge. So, once you use it…it’s gone.
For regions that have become dependent upon fossil water for agriculture, this is a big problem. The Ogallala Aquifer currently feeds western Kansas and the Texas Panhandle, but that won’t last much longer. Some areas have already run dry, and regardless of less water-intensive crops and more efficient irrigation, the aquifer’s days are numbered.
This is the least consequential aquifer we’re discussing, but even this one plays a massive role in U.S. wheat and food production.
Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from, I guess, middle Slide Canyon. I’m approaching upper slide and behind me we’ve got Bath Mountain and the glory that is Slide Canyon. We are in northeast Yosemite, and hopefully we’re gonna get some sun today. Anywho, as long as I’m up here, I decided to do a video on some coming agricultural crises.
This is going to be a short series because there’s multiple angles to this. But the first piece I want to talk about is something called fossil water. Water that is, fossil water is pulled from an aquifer that does not recharge with the normal seasonal cycles. So normally it rains, you get runoff, it seeps into the ground, goes into an underground aquifer and springs, and it recharges every season. So you can tap it, I don’t think as much as you want, but pretty heavily. Fossil water is deeper, and it’s typically in a more arid zone, and it doesn’t recharge from the surface at the same rate. So instead of recharging in weeks to months, it’s millennia. So we’re going to talk about three regions here that are affected, because all of them are going to cease to be agriculturally producing zones within the next 20 to 30 years. And based on what happens, it could really happen next year, because a lot of this is driven by stuff at the surface.
The problem is honestly drilling for water in these zones. I mean, yes, there’s water down there. Yes, you can use it for agriculture, but you can only use it once. And so what we’ve seen in multiple parts of the world is the tapping of the zone in increasing volume. And the problem is honestly kind of legal, because if there’s a surface water dispute, there are negotiations, there are laws, there are regulations. It goes to court, there are sequestration of rights in order. And that’s primarily what’s going on in say the Colorado River basin. Not that it’s going great, but that’s probably what’s going on. But if you can just drill, then it’s just a race to the bottom of the tank. And that’s not something that can be easily regulated. So the first zone to consider is the Ogallala Aquifer in the United States, specifically in western Kansas, going down into the Texas Panhandle. Also goes up into, say, Nebraska and the Dakotas, although it’s really the southern section that’s in trouble. For the most part, we’re talking about zones that have been depleted to the degree of something like 200m. And most of these zones, if they’re not already going dry, are going to go dry within the next decade. We’ve already seen some efforts by places specifically in Kansas to shift to lower use irrigation. So instead of those big circular irrigation things that are huge water users and wasters to go to, say, drip irrigation and switching crops.
The problem is, remember, the aquifer recharges in millennia, so switching from a high water crop to a low water crop doesn’t buy you much time and might buy them 30 to 60 years if they’re really, really lucky. And then, as we’ve already seen in a number of places in Texas, the land will just go follow because you won’t be able to grow anything there.
This will have a big impact, because this is a zone that produces a lot of wheat that directly or indirectly feeds literally tens of millions of people, but it’s nothing compared to the other two. We’ll do that part of the video from further up the canyon.
