Some Good News. It's Been Awhile.

One of the gravest threats of climate breakdown is drought.  Pretty much every living thing won't without adequate amounts of water.  Animals die. Crops don't grow. It's a mess.

But what if we've been sitting atop a virtually inexhaustible source of clean freshwater just waiting to be tapped?

Studies over the past two decades have found evidence of several oceans’ worth of water locked up in rock as far down as 1,000 kilometers, challenging the assumption that water arrived from space after Earth’s formation. A study reported in January 2017 based on isotopes from meteorites and the mantle found that water is unlikely to have arrived on icy comets after Earth formed.

Another study, reported in New Scientist the same month, showed that Earth’s huge store of water may have originated via chemical reactions in the mantle rather than coming from space. The researchers ran a computer simulation of reactions between liquid hydrogen and quartz in Earth’s upper mantle. The simulation showed that water forms within quartz but then cannot escape, so the pressure builds up – to such high levels that it could induce deep earthquakes. Rather than hydrogen bonding into the quartz crystal structure, as the researchers expected, it was found to disrupt the structure by bonding with oxygen. When the rock melts under intense heat, the water is released, forming water-rich regions below Earth’s surface. The researchers said that water formed in the mantle could reach the surface in various ways — for example via magma in the form of volcanic activity — and that water could still be being created deep inside the Earth today. If so, that means water is a renewable resource.

The challenge is drawing this deep water to the surface, but there are many verified cases of mountaintop wells that have gushed water for decades in arid lands. This water, which could not have come from the rainwater of the conventional hydrologic cycle, is variously called “deep-seated,” “juvenile” or “primary” water. It is now being located and tapped by enterprising hydrogeologists using technological innovations like those used in other extractive industries – but without their destructive impact on the environment.

Mark Burr, CEO of Primary Water Technologies, claims that locating “primary water” does not require drilling down thousands of feet. He says that globally, thousands of primary water wells have been successfully drilled; and for most of them, flowing water was tapped at less than 400 feet. It is forced up from below through fissures in the Earth. What is new are the innovative technologies now being used to pinpoint where those fissures are.

Did I mention that it's also clean?

What these researchers call “primary water” or “deep seated water” is classified by the National Ground Water Association (NGWA) simply as a form of “groundwater,” since it is in the ground. But whatever it is called, these newly tapped flows have not been part of the hydrologic cycle for at least the last century. This is shown on testing by the lack of the environmental contaminants found in the hydrologic water cycle. From the time when atomic testing began in the Pacific, hydrologic water has contained traces of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used as a fuel in thermonuclear bombs. Primary water shoots up tritium-free —clean, fresh and usually drinkable without filtration.

Enough water to supply us for 6,000 years based on today's consumption rates. Sounds great, eh? But wait. If we start drilling wells everywhere to tap into this pristine primary water and start irrigating crops, filling our swimming pools, bath tubs and tea kettles, what then? There's the rub.

What we've done is to add even more water to the hydrological cycle.

We already have too much water. It's just in the wrong places, especially the atmosphere. A warmer, more humid atmosphere is a giant problem. It fuels severe weather events - hurricanes, tornadoes, atmospheric rivers - that are already savaging countries in every corner of the world.

How do we add massive quantities of new water, primary water from the Earth's upper mantle without worsening the increasingly destructive hydrological cycle of the Anthropocene?  Would it have a discernible effect on sea level rise, storm surge and coastal erosion? What about ocean salinity and the impact of even more freshwater on oceanic currents?  The Atlantic Conveyor is already in peril.

The primary water crowd are trying to solve a problem we don't really have while doing very little to solve the problem we do have.  We don't have a shortage of water. There's plenty of water. It's just not where we need it thanks to climate change.  It arrives in destructive torrents in some places (Britain, Germany, America's Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard, China, Turkey, etc.) and doesn't show up at all in others. Ours is a problem of balance or the loss of it.

This reminds me of my first news job. Part of my duties was to attend the news services' teletype feeds, scanning the scrolls for newsworthy items. The first thing I was taught was to be leery of stories about medical breakthroughs, especially cancer cures. They were invariably long on hype and incredibly short on realism. They were damaging, giving the afflicted and their loved ones false hope of cures that never delivered. Cruel sensationalism.

Here we've got a story about a vast untapped supply of pristine water, the solution to combatting drought, but it too appears built on false hope.