4 thoughts on “Gaia’s Riches”

  1. Moreover, the deeper one drills for water, the closer one gets to oil and gas drilling (typically thousands of feet of rock layers separate hydrocarbons from groundwater tapped for consumption), and the greater the chance there is of contamination.

    This is the meat of it. I suspect the study wasn’t done to find new sources of water but to block the potential contamination of water. Obviously, environmentalists will try and block the harvesting of this water too, so the goal here is to use the new water as a pretext to stop the harvest of hydrocarbons.

  2. I’ve always been amused at the thought that we could run out of iron ore on a planet made of iron.

  3. Rather than look at a big figure and marvel, I like to run numbers. Given that we customarily talk about volume of water, I think of it in those terms (rather than mass). So I ran numbers on this, and have to say that I’m impressed.

    Assuming they means short tons, it translates into 6.48E14 gallons. The entire United States uses about 500E6 gallons of fresh water per day. So this is a supply good for 3,550.

    Of course, 500 million gallons a day is about 12% of the annual precipitation on the US, so it isn’t like we’re close to running out anyway. But having a backup sure is nice.

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