For Drinking Water in Drought, California Looks Warily to Sea
CARLSBAD, Calif. — Every time drought strikes California, the people of this state cannot help noticing the substantial reservoir of untapped water lapping at their shores — 187 quintillion gallons of it, more or less, shimmering so invitingly in the sun.
Now, for the first time, a major California metropolis is on the verge of turning the Pacific Ocean into an everyday source of drinking water. A $1 billion desalination plant to supply booming San Diego County is under construction here and due to open as early as November, providing a major test of whether California cities will be able to resort to the ocean to solve their water woes.
Across the Sun Belt, a technology once dismissed as too expensive and harmful to the environment is getting a second look. Texas, facing persistent dry conditions and a population influx, may build several ocean desalination plants. Florida has one operating already and may be forced to build others as a rising sea invades the state’s freshwater supplies.
In California, small ocean desalination plants are up and running in a handful of towns. Plans are far along for a large plant in Huntington Beach that would supply water to populous Orange County. A mothballed plant in Santa Barbara may soon be reactivated. And more than a dozen communities along the California coast are studying the issue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/science/drinking-seawater-looks-ever-more-palatable-to-californians.html
That's nice, but we are doomed.
The Earth has lost a quarter of its water
Although water covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface, water is actually a rare substance that represents just 0.05 percent of the Earth's total mass.
Water has nevertheless played a crucial role in the emergence of life on Earth. Without water, the Earth would in all likelihood be a dead planet.
The amount of water on the planet has not always been the same, however. A research group at the Natural History Museum of Denmark has discovered this by measuring how hydrogen isotope ratios in the oceans have changed over time.
"The water that covered the Earth at the dawn of time contained more of the lighter hydrogen isotope than the heavier hydrogen isotope, known as deuterium, than it does today,” says Emily Pope, a post doc, who has played a central role in the study.
http://sciencenordic.com/earth-has-lost-quarter-its-water
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