Dry Wells in Northern California Bring Home the Costs and Stresses of Drought

Though it was a sudden death, happening overnight during a record-smashing June heat wave, the demise of Maralee and Noal Childs’s household water well was not entirely unexpected.

The Childses live in Glenn County, an agricultural area of northern California that is latticed with irrigation canals and blanketed with almond and walnut orchards. A relentless interval of hot, dry weather, made worse by heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, has turned this section of the state into a cauldron of flame, dust, and smoke. 

The signs of ecological stress from this drought course through the Childs’s rural neighborhood, located eight miles northeast of the town of Orland. A nearby creek hasn’t held water for nearly two years, a sign that groundwater levels were dropping. They bought their house and 10-acre property in 1985, a month before they were married. The well itself is even older, dating back more than a century. As far as they know, across 106 years it had never run dry. Until the night of June 16.

Climate Change Is Intensifying the Water Cycle, New IPCC Report Finds
 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of the world’s leading climate scientists, released its sixth climate assessment on Monday. The 1,300-page paper is the most comprehensive, up-to-date report yet on the physical science of climate change, synthesizing the findings of thousands of recent publications.

The report paints an alarming picture of the future of fresh water. It concludes that man-made contributions to a warming planet are far-reaching. It finds more evidence that severe weather events are linked to carbon in the atmosphere and are becoming more extreme. And it shows that certain trends such as rising seas and shrinking ice sheets will continue even if carbon pollution were halted immediately. But it also indicates that by swiftly and drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the worst effects of climate change can be prevented, avoiding worst-case outcomes for water availability.

Three River Communities, Worlds Apart, Tell Stories of Indigeneity in the Age of the Anthropocene 
 
On the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, the Dry River separates two regions that have divergent histories. St. Vincent’s larger cities–the more technologically developed southern communities of Georgetown, Kingston, and Biabou–are quite different from those on the opposite side of the dry meander.
 
Sometimes referred to as “Over the River” territory, or “OTR” for short, the island’s northern parts also go by the name written on a sign that juts from the sprawling landform’s parched banks: “Carib Country.” Their story on this island–though foremost one of beauty, cultural pride, and resilience–is heavily shaped by colonialism and environmental racism. 

“We Can’t Have Land Back Without Water Back”

Growing up in Sandia Pueblo, on the banks of the Río Grande in New Mexico, Julia Bernal heard tales about the world of her ancestors. Her father recounted a moment from his youth when he almost biked into the river, not realizing the water had stretched so far beyond its banks.

But standing at that same spot with her father earlier this year, the river of his youth was barely imaginable to Bernal. The combined effects of the Cochiti Dam upstream and climate change have cut the river’s flow to a fraction of what it once was, and the overflowing banks from her father’s childhood are bone dry.

The director of Pueblo Action Alliance, an activist group, Bernal is acutely aware that in arid areas like her home in the American Southwest, the fight for Indigenous rights starts with one crucial resource: water.

HotSpots H2O: Argentina’s Paraná River Drops to 77-Year Low, Resulting in Economic Loss and Wildfires

The Paraná River stretches through the heart of central South America, arising in Brazil and extending over 3,000 miles through Paraguay and Argentina. The continent’s second-longest river behind the Amazon, the Paraná is a workhorse, supporting rainforest diversity, Indigenous ancestral homes, and Argentina’s economy: over 80 percent of the country’s farm exports, primarily wheat and soy, are transported via the waterway.  

But today the Paraná’s water level is the lowest since 1944, the result of a prolonged drought upriver, in southern Brazil. The eye-test alone tells a consequential story: scattered boats, stuck askew and half-sunken in soggy soil, sit abandoned along shored-up meanders; the green lushness of the delta’s marshes, lagoons, and occasional islands have faded. Last year, NASA satellites captured jarring aerial views of the basin, demonstrating the river’s drastic thinning. 

What’s Up With Water — August 9, 2021

Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at: 

• In science news, researchers find that the number of people who have recently moved into flood zones globally is much higher than previously assumed. 
• In Canada, the federal government is pledging more money to provide clean water to Indigenous peoples. 
• In the western United States, the consequences of a severe drought continue to unfold. 

This week, Circle of Blue reports on how wastewater treatment plants can lower their carbon pollution, and why the United States is playing catch-up in this field. 

Study Surveys Global Risk of Dry Wells

Wells serving many of the world’s rural households, farms, and factories are at risk of running dry if groundwater levels in their areas continue to decline.

According to an analysis of 39 million wells earlier this year, between 6 percent and 20 percent are no more than five meters below the top of the water table. The math in these scenarios is unforgiving.

These wells at the brink of the water table could be vulnerable to long-term groundwater declines, in addition to seasonal fluctuations, reckoned in this study at about 1 meter on average globally, though even that was a conservative estimate.

Drilling a deeper well is often an inadequate solution, co-author of the study Debra Perrone told Circle of Blue. It might spur a race to the bottom and worsen local groundwater drawdowns. Because more electricity is needed for pumping, deeper wells increase operating costs. However, the analysis found that deeper wells are not being drilled in all areas. In some places, new wells are just as vulnerable to declining water tables. 

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