Through The Sandglass

A Reverence for Rivers (3): Piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights

 

We only have ONE hydrologic system, dammit!

School kids know that (it's in all their textbooks), geologists, geophysicists, geomorphologists, environmental scientists and ecologists, climatologists and meteorologists, resource scientists, most engineers, and a hell of a lot of people on the street know that. It is, however, a fact that seems to have escaped multitudes of politicians, policy-makers, regulators, at least one US presidential candidate, and, of course, commercial enterprises - whether out of profound and inexcusable ignorance or under the influence of vested interests and lobbies is open to question.

But it remains a fact. The entire hydrologic system - rain drops, clouds, springs, creeks, rivers, lakes, snow, ice, run-off, evapotranspiration and groundwater - is interconnected. Mess about with one bit and other parts will be affected - it's complex, but it is one single system.

The title of this post is a quotation from John Wesley Powell, a voice of knowledge and rationality that we could benefit from today - more of that, quite possibly, in a future post. Over 120 years ago, addressing an audience of (booing) vested interests in irrigation at any cost, he said:

When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all this arid region.  I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these arid lands.

This occasional series, A Reverence for Rivers, is dedicated to Luna Leopold and perhaps I should add John Wesley Powell. In a the previous episode I quoted from a piece, written over sixty years ago by Leopold and his colleague Harold Thomas:

There are enough examples of streamflow depletion by ground-water development, and of ground-water pollution from wastes released into surface waters, to attest to the close though variable relation between surface water and ground water.

Man has coped with the complexity of water by trying to compartmentalize it. The partition committed by hydrologists—into ground water, soil water, surface water, for instance—is as nothing compared with that which has been promulgated by the legal profession, which has on occasion borrowed from the criminal code to term some waters "fugitive" and others, a "common enemy." The legal classification of water includes "percolating waters," "defined underground streams," "underflow of surface streams," "water-courses." and "diffuse surface waters"; all these waters are actually interrelated and interdependent, yet in many jurisdictions unrelated water rights rest upon this classification.

This jurisdictional and regulatory problem of compartmentalization of water resources contrary to the facts of the way the system works has given rise to many of the profound problems we face today. So I thought it might be helpful to set out some of the facts of the relationships between ground and surface waters and the consequences of ignoring them - bear with me, this may be a summary but it's not going to be short!  

First, the interested reader can do no better than to go (as is so often the case) to the USGS. Published nearly 20 years go, Circular 1139 is titled Ground Water And Surface Water: A Single Resource. The synopsis is as follows:

As the Nation's concerns over water resources and the environment increase, the importance of considering ground water and surface water as a single resource has become increasingly evident. Issues related to water supply, water quality, and degradation of aquatic environments are reported on frequently. The interaction of ground water and surface water has been shown to be a significant concern in many of these issues. For example, contaminated aquifers that discharge to streams can result in long-term contamination of surface water; conversely, streams can be a major source of contamination to aquifers. Surface water commonly is hydraulically connected to ground water, but the interactions are difficult to observe and measure and commonly have been ignored in water-management considerations and policies. Many natural processes and human activities affect the interactions of ground water and surface water. The purpose of this report is to present our current understanding of these processes and activities as well as limitations in our knowledge and ability to characterize them.

USGS Circular1376, published in 2012, incorporated material from 1139 and proceed to document in considerable detail Streamflow Depletion by Wells—Understanding and Managing the Effects of Groundwater Pumping on Streamflow. Again, a straightforward summary:

Groundwater is an important source of water for many human needs, including public supply, agriculture, and industry. With the development of any natural resource, however, adverse consequences may be associated with its use. One of the primary concerns related to the development of groundwater resources is the effect of groundwater pumping on streamflow. Groundwater and surface-water systems are connected, and groundwater discharge is often a substantial component of the total flow of a stream. Groundwater pumping reduces the amount of groundwater that flows to streams and, in some cases, can draw streamflow into the underlying groundwater system. Streamflow reductions (or depletions) caused by pumping have become an important water-resource management issue because of the negative impacts that reduced flows can have on aquatic ecosystems, the availability of surface water, and the quality and aesthetic value of streams and rivers.

Both of these publications should be required reading for anyone, anywhere who is even remotely involved in water management and policy-making.

So let's start with a simple and fairly self-explanatory image from the USGS:

Ground-water flow paths vary greatly in length, depth, and travel time from points of recharge
to points of discharge in the groundwater system.

Groundwater, streams and wells all interact and influence water flow, but the rates of that flow vary over several orders of magnitude, from days to millennia. The architecture and physical characteristics (permeability and so on) of the aquifer system are always complex in reality and the distribution of lower permeability (confining) layers will dramatically influence the direction, amount, and rate of flow. 

In places where the water table "outcrops" - i.e., intersects with the surface - there will be a spring (as at Havasu Falls, the image at the head of this post, ultimately feeding the Colorado River), a lake or groundwater feeding the flow of a river through its bed and banks. The relationship between the water table and a body of surface water is critical - a stream can be "gaining" flow from groundwater discharge or "losing" it by flow into the water table (depletion):

Groundwater discharge into streams and rivers is commonly the major contribution to their flow which is only augmented by rainfall and surface runoff.

Different segments of a river or stream may be typically gaining or losing and this will vary with the season - if the water table falls, the river may become "disconnected" from the water table, or, in times of flood, the river level may rise higher than the water table and effectively charge storage in its banks until the level falls back to normal.

All these variations occur quite naturally depending on time and place, and the system may be stable for long periods of time. But start pumping groundwater in the vicinity of a river and the system is de-stabilized. As the caption to this next USGS illustration describes, "In a schematic hydrologic setting where ground water discharges to a stream under natural conditions (A), placement of a well pumping at a rate (Q1) near the stream will intercept part of the ground water that would have discharged to the stream (B). If the well is pumped at an even greater rate (Q2), it can intercept additional water that would have discharged to the stream in the vicinity of the well and can draw water from the stream to the well (C)."

 To quote again from the USGS:

The first clear articulation of the effects of groundwater pumping on surface water was by the well-known USGS hydrologist C.V. Theis. In a paper published in 1940 entitled "The Source of Water Derived from Wells," Theis pointed out that pumped groundwater initially comes from reductions in aquifer storage. As pumping continues, the effects of groundwater withdrawals can spread to distant connected streams, lakes, and wetlands through decreased rates of discharge from the aquifer to these surface-water systems. In some settings, increased rates of aquifer recharge also occur in response to pumping, including recharge from the connected surface-water features. Associated with this decrease in groundwater discharge to surface waters is an increased rate of aquifer recharge. Pumping-induced increased inflow to and decreased outflow from an aquifer is now called "streamflow depletion" or "capture."

So there is a critical interaction between groundwater and surface water by complex flows that take place over days, centuries and millennia, and wells can cause major changes to that interaction - streamflow can be severely depleted, water tables lowered and aquifer water volume maintenance totally disrupted. 

For here is the first of what USGS Circular 1376 intriguingly documents as "common misconceptions." That is: 

Misconception 1. Total development of groundwater resources from an aquifer system is “safe” or “sustainable” at rates up to the average rate of recharge.

This is fundamental, because we hear all the time that aquifers are being "mined" as a result of volumes pumped exceeding the recharge rate from rainfall up in the hills - it's really not as simple as this. Because streams and rivers are frequently depleted by losing water to an aquifer, particularly when wells are pumping from that groundwater supply, it is this source that is the dominant way in which an aquifer is recharged, not by water from the hills. 

The sources of water to a well are reductions in aquifer storage, increases in the rates of recharge (inflow) to an aquifer, and decreases in the rates of discharge (outflow) from an aquifer. The latter two components are referred to as capture. In many groundwater systems, the primary components of capture are groundwater that would otherwise have discharged to a connected stream or river in the absence of pumping (referred to as captured groundwater discharge) and streamflow drawn into an aquifer because of the pumping (induced infiltration of streamflow)...

Reductions in aquifer storage are the primary source of water to a well during the early stages of pumping. The contribution of water from storage decreases and the contribution from streamflow depletion increases with time as the hydraulic stress caused by pumping expands outward away from the well and reaches one or more areas of the aquifer from which water can be captured. At some point in time, streamflow depletion will be the dominant source of water to the well (that is, more than 50 percent of the discharge from the well) and after an extended period of time may become the only source of water to the well. The time at which streamflow depletion is the only source of water to a well is referred to as the time to full capture.

So, if you choose to define and manage, through regulation and policy, groundwater and surface water as two entirely separate systems, you choose a recipe for disaster - you are more often than not severely double-counting and thereby overestimating your resources and you are not managing the system at all. And yet this is exactly what California, Arizona and, indeed, all the arid States of the Western US (not to mention other States and other countries) have been doing for more than a century. This has been superbly documented in ProPublica's piece, "Less Than Zero: Despite decades of accepted science, California and Arizona are still miscounting their water supplies." That analysis, part of their extensive "Killing the Colorado" series of reports, has also been summarised in the New York Times:

John Bredehoeft, a leading hydrogeologist and former director of the federal government’s Western states water program, bluntly emphasized the importance of basic honesty in counting water.

“If you don’t connect the two, then you don’t understand the system,” he said. “And if you don’t understand the system, I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to make any kind of judgement about how much water you've got to work with.”

Until state officials do, it seems unlikely that there will be any real solution to managing the Southwest’s strained water resources for the future.

But there's another, fundamental, problem - if you can't measure, monitor, document, you can't manage - and the data are essentially not there to measure, monitor and document. For example, California, again from the New York Times:

Although the state has not updated the surveys in the last three decades, the Department of Water Resources recently reported that across most of the state groundwater levels have dropped 50 feet below historical lows, with levels in many areas in the San Joaquin Valley more than 100 feet below previous historic lows.

In California, the state’s water agency has said that the failure to account for how groundwater withdrawals affect the state’s rivers is a major impediment to a true accounting of its resources. In April [2015], authorities reported that less than half of the state’s local water agencies had complied with a 2002 law that made them eligible for state funds only if they set up groundwater management plans and determined if a connection between surface water and groundwater existed. That connection does not exist uniformly and varies depending on local geology. Only 17 percent of the state’s groundwater basins had been examined.

Indeed, California still doesn't require that water pumped from underground be measured at all, much less factored into an overall assessment of total water resources; it’s merely an option under a new law signed last September.

California’s new groundwater legislation does require local water authorities to come up with sustainable groundwater plans, but they don’t have to do that until 2020, and they don’t have to balance their water withdrawals until 2040.

To all intents and purposes, the only way we have to analyse these issues is through computer modelling - very clever and sophisticated, but, at the end of the day it is modelling, not analysis of real-world data. But assembling meaningful real-world data is not easy on a local scale and the time-frame of aquifer behaviour is a long one. Make your way through USGS Circular 1376, and you will find several regional-scale analyses of groundwater/streamflow interaction based on the statistical analysis of data, and the authors document in detail the challenges of field studies, stating that

Statistical studies such as these can be used in general to evaluate the large-scale effects of basinwide pumping on streamflow reductions. They cannot, however, account for the specific effects of pumping at individual wells, nor can they help with understanding how specific management actions might affect future depletion. Such analyses require the use of analytical or numerical models.

So we are largely stuck with modelling. It is, nevertheless, a powerful tool, and several examples are presented in the USGS document. Since we are particularly interested in water and arid lands, here is a very relevant - not to mention fascinating, sobering, and perhaps surprising - example. The situation, that of a hypothetical desert-basin aquifer with a through-flowing river along the east side of the basin, is summarised here (remember that 1 acre-foot of water equals 1233 cubic meters):

There is natural recharge from the west and, under natural conditions, inflow from the river to the aquifer in the north and outflow from the aquifer to the river further downstream. Two wells are drilled into the aquifer, one five miles from the river, the other ten. Each well then pumps at a rate of around 750,000 cubic meters per year, and continues to do so for 50 years when pumping then ceases. The analysis treats each well separately - they are not both pumping at the same time. So let's consider the effects of streamflow of the well closer to the river (but still five miles away). What we are looking at are plots of the resulting increase in flow from the river into the aquifer, decrease in flow into the river from the aquifer and the total changes to river flow (depletion):

Over the period of pumping, the river's flow is decreased by almost 25%, depriving downstream users of water. After pumping stops, the river's flow begins to recover - but note the timescale: the river has still not returned to its natural flow rate after 150 years. And nearly half of the total volume of depletion will occur after pumping stops. The effects of the more distant well are only slightly more modest - but they last much longer and the maximum depletion occurs several years after the well stops pumping.

Now this "hypothetical desert-basin aquifer" may remind you of somewhere - the Ranegras Valley of Arizona, perhaps? Where the Saudi conglomerate, Almarai, are growing alfalfa for export back home? Except that this hypothetical example only covers the effects of one well pumping: Almarai operate 18 wells, each one capable of pumping 4 or 5 times the lonely well in our hypothetical desert valley, and they have received permission to drill 8 more.

Now of course there is no flowing river in the Ranegras Valley, but there is Brouse Wash, ephemeral, yes (although prone to flash flooding), but clearly with water not far below the surface, given the vegetation and the occasional stock pond visible on Google Earth:

So the Brouse River probably flows just below the surface of the wash, and, if it flows at all, will not be doing so much longer as its water supplies the alfalfa.

The Brouse does, I believe, eventually supply modest volumes of water to the Colorado, and, interestingly, while I was researching and preparing this post, Matthew Miller and his colleagues at the USGS published a paper titled "The importance of base flow in sustaining surface water flow in the Upper Colorado River Basin", summarised by Science Daily. The research covered the upper Colorado basin (i.e. upstream from Lee's Ferry and the Grand Canyon) where 90% of the river's flow originates and the work documents that 60% of that flow is provided by groundwater. Subsequently, more than 80% of that groundwater is lost, by evapotranspiration and diversion for irrigation, before it reaches the lower river (where, amongst other problems, Lake Meade has recently been reported to be at its lowest level ever). The abstract for the paper puts it very succinctly:

The Colorado River has been identified as the most overallocated river in the world. Considering predicted future imbalances between water supply and demand and the growing recognition that base flow (a proxy for groundwater discharge to streams) is critical for sustaining flow in streams and rivers, there is a need to develop methods to better quantify present-day base flow across large regions....

Our results indicate that surface waters in the Colorado River Basin are dependent on base flow, and that management approaches that consider groundwater and surface water as a joint resource will be needed to effectively manage current and future water resources in the Basin.

Or, as Matthew Miller himself is quoted as saying, "In light of recent droughts, predicted climate changes and human consumption, there is an urgent need for us all to continue to think of groundwater and surface water as a single resource."

It couldn't have been put better - if you have made it through this post, thank you! And many thanks, as always, to the USGS.

Camels don't fly, deserts don't bloom

 

Back in November last year, I described how, very controversially, Arizona is exporting its water in vast quantities to Saudi Arabia, via alfalfa to feed Saudi cattle. In that post I quoted from the work of Elie Elhadj, who has compellingly documented the rape of the Kingdom's groundwater resources:

In 2004, Elie Elhadj of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), King’s College London published a blunt analysis of the extraordinary history of the destruction of the country’s water supplies. Titled “Camels Don’t Fly, Deserts Don’t Bloom: an Assessment of Saudi Arabia’s Experiment in Desert Agriculture” the report paints a catastrophic picture.

That experiment in desert agriculture is now essentially over, and Saudi Arabia relies almost entirely on imports of crops and cattle feed. In order to satisfy this need, the country's huge food and agriculture business, Almarai, buy farming land elsewhere in the world - including in the Arizona desert. Since I wrote that post, Almarai have added to their assets by buying land on the other side of the Colorado River in south-eastern California. Both California and Arizona are now in their fourth year of severe to exceptional drought.

After I quoted from his work, Elie contacted me and we commenced an email conversation that led to a fascinating and highly enjoyable meeting and discussion. He told me that he was in touch with a group of students at Arizona State University who were making a short video on the issues of exporting water to Saudi Arabia, and that video is now on line - it's extremely well done and worth watching:

Camels Don't Fly, Deserts Don't Bloom from Cassie Ronda on Vimeo.

There is an interesting cast of characters (in addition to Elie Elhadj himself): local residents who have seen the water levels in their wells drop 50 feet in four years, a lawyer for Almarai who, when talking about any link between water problems and agriculture, cheerfully states that "I don't think that's the case", local people agreeing that some form of regulation is needed as long as their water usage is not regulated, and Kathleen Ferris of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State, who comments that "It's almost impossible to manage groundwater without some kind of regulation." Such a statement may seem blindingly obvious, but the fact is that, in La Paz County Arizona there are no regulations whatsoever - anyone can arrive, drill as many wells as they want, and deplete the groundwater resources to whatever extent pleases them. 

This is madness. Consider the likely reaction of our old friend the alien scientist, flitting around the earth on a resource analysis mission and observing this scene:

 

"Wait a minute. There's the huge canal that they built to take water from the dwindling and over-exploited flow of the Colorado River, specifically to supply the city of Phoenix where groundwater supplies had been drastically depleted, and, right next to it are fields of water-sucking alfalfa grown to be exported as feed for Saudi cattle - this is no way to run a planet."

Yes, this may be madness for Arizona and California, but it's only part of a global-scale pattern of unsustainable insanity - and we should not be quick to judge Arizona. In a recent issue of the New Scientist, there was an interview with Arjen Hoekstra, a professor of water management at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, and founder of the Water Footprint Network. Hoekstra and his colleagues have developed a careful and extensive method of measuring water footprints, expressed as per capita usage country-by-country, and allocating the proportion of blue, green and gray water:

The WF is a measure of humans’ appropriation of freshwater resources and has three components: blue, green, and gray. The blue WF refers to consumption of blue water resources (surface and ground water), whereby consumption refers to the volume of water that evaporates or is incorporated into a product. The blue WF is thus often smaller than the water withdrawal, because generally part of a water withdrawal returns to the ground or surface water. The green WF is the volume of green water (rainwater) consumed, which is particularly relevant in crop production. The gray WF is an indicator of the degree of freshwater pollution and is defined as the volume of freshwater that is required to assimilate the load of pollutants based on existing ambient water quality standards.

 The title of the interview is "We can avoid a water crisis, but the fix will be hard to swallow" and, when asked "How is the UK doing in terms of water use?", he replied:

Because it imports so many goods, three-quarters of the UK’s water consumption is actually outside of its borders. And about half of that usage is not sustainable. For example, the UK imports rice and olives from southern Spain and sugarcane from Pakistan, regions where water is overexploited. This means groundwater levels are declining and rivers dwindling or drying up. That’s bad news for the exporting countries and for the UK, because these food sources will ultimately fail.

In terms of the broader region, Europe is the biggest net importer of water-intensive commodities in the world, much of it from water-scarce regions. In fact 40 per cent of Europe’s water footprint is outside the continent. A large part of that is unsustainable.

So let's not get too smug about Arizona, but, rather, worry about the large-scale problem. In terms of water footprint, domestic use is only a small part of the total - in Europe, the average consumer’s domestic use is typically only 1 to 2 per cent of their total water footprint. It's agriculture, what food we demand, where we choose to get it from, and how much we're prepared to pay for it that is the overwhelming factor. As Hoekstra comments

All food has a big water footprint, because agriculture is the largest water consumer. Grains generally have a water footprint in the order of 1000 litres per kilogram. Beef is, on average, 15,000 litres per kilogram. Both are big numbers but you can see that meat is in a league of its own. So your diet, and particularly how many animal products you eat, has a big impact on your personal water footprint.

Take a look at that link - it's at the same time fascinating and alarming.

But it's the blue water footprint that is of particular interest here and, fortunately, in one of his publications, Hoekstra breaks down specifically the blue water footprint by country and internal versus external, i.e., indigenous versus imported. Take a look at the whole, intriguing, paper where the graph appears in the supplementary materials. I have cropped the complete graph to start with the UK on the left and highlighted the UK, China, the US, Spain, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia - plus the world average in green.

Blue water footprint of national consumption for countries with a population larger than 5 million, shown by internal and external component (cubic meter per year per capita,1996–2005)

Take a good look at this graph and think through the overwhelming complexity of the issues. Countries whose footprint is relatively small may be dominantly importing other peoples' water - take the UK, for example. Countries whose footprint is large may be mainly consuming their own water but depleting and exporting it (see the US for example). There's an incredible set of questions and issues embedded in this graph, and add to this, overlay, Hoekstra's illustration of just the major global water flows:

Virtual water balance per country and direction of gross virtual water flows related to trade in agricultural and industrial products over the period 1996–2005. Only the biggest gross flows (>15 Gm3∕y) are shown.

By this measure, the US is not a net water importer. But then how much of its own water does it export? And then look at Europe.

I'm going to leave it there - you could write a book about it. In fact, Hoekstra has. To say that this is a thorny problem is a massive understatement - arguably has the makings of shorter-term crisis than climate change. What can we do about it? Well, in Hoekstra's words from the New Scientist interview, the fix can be hard to swallow:

We in northern Europe should realise that we are actually quite well off with water, and ask why we import water-intensive goods from water-scarce areas. It doesn’t make sense that we produce so little of our own food.

Isn’t this an inevitable effect of global markets?

Yes. We lose our own agriculture because elsewhere you have free water, cheap land, cheap labour. But it is not truly cheap; it is at the expense of the people over there, their land and their water. And in the long run, our own food supply is at risk. We need to change the rules of the market by discriminating in favour of sustainable production. It is a global challenge for agriculture, power generation, trade and economics, which we must work together to address. It’s a big deal, and it will only get bigger.

Our societies need to think long and hard about this - and read Hoekstra's latest paper: "Four billion people facing severe water scarcity."

 

It's not just Namibian fairies

 

Described as one of the last great enigmas or mysteries, the so-called fairy circles of the arid lands of Namibia remain to be explained. Theories abound, and the fairies have stimulated "lively" academic debate, if not discord. The circles occur in their millions in a band of dry grassland stretching 1800 kilometres south from the Angolan border - but it's now clear that Australia has its own fairies.

In both places, countless circles dot the landscape like a pox of some kind:

Fairy circles in the Marienfluss Valley of Namibia.

(Google Earth image, ~ 650m across)

The circles are rimmed with (more or less) growing grass, vary in size up to several metres across and would seem to grow. Within them their is nothing but bare earth. Explanations include ostriches, rolling zebras, underground gas (or dragons' breath), footsteps of the gods, microbial activity, poisonous plants, termites, and the competition for scarce water. It's the last two that form the main rival hypotheses. As far as biologist Norbert Juergens of the University of Hamburg is concerned, it's termites. But Stephan Getzin of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig disagrees - for him and his colleagues, fairy circles result from the way plants organize themselves in response to water shortage. Here's the abstract of this group's paper:

Vegetation gap patterns in arid grasslands, such as the “fairy circles” of Namibia, are one of nature’s greatest mysteries and subject to a lively debate on their origin. They are characterized by small-scale hexagonal ordering of circular bare-soil gaps that persists uniformly in the landscape scale to form a homogeneous distribution. Pattern-formation theory predicts that such highly ordered gap patterns should be found also in other water-limited systems across the globe, even if the mechanisms of their formation are different. Here we report that so far unknown fairy circles with the same spatial structure exist 10,000 km away from Namibia in the remote outback of Australia. Combining fieldwork, remote sensing, spatial pattern analysis, and process-based mathematical modeling, we demonstrate that these patterns emerge by self-organization, with no correlation with termite activity; the driving mechanism is a positive biomass–water feedback associated with water runoff and biomass-dependent infiltration rates. The remarkable match between the patterns of Australian and Namibian fairy circles and model results indicate that both patterns emerge from a nonuniform stationary instability, supporting a central universality principle of pattern-formation theory. Applied to the context of dryland vegetation, this principle predicts that different systems that go through the same instability type will show similar vegetation patterns even if the feedback mechanisms and resulting soil–water distributions are different, as we indeed found by comparing the Australian and the Namibian fairy-circle ecosystems. These results suggest that biomass–water feedbacks and resultant vegetation gap patterns are likely more common in remote drylands than is currently known.

 Note "no correlation with termite activity."

The patterns are fascinatingly regular and there has been a suggestion that the geometry of organisation is, bizarrely, directly equivalent to that of skin cells. Robert Sinclair, who heads the Mathematical Biology Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan, and his collaborator, Haozhe Zhang, were the first to identify this strange analogy. 

Two apparently unrelated systems on vastly different scales -- fairy circles in the Namibian desert (left) and microscopic skin cells (right) -- appear to share a similar pattern, which is very, very unusual.

Credit: Image courtesy of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology - OIST

 

From the Science Daily report:

Both the majority of fairy circles and majority of cells have six neighbors. But the similarity gets even more specific -- the percentage of fairy circles with four, five, six, seven, eight and nine neighbors is essentially the same as the skin cells. "I didn't expect it to be so close," Sinclair said. "We spent a lot of time checking because it really looked too close to believe."

... The researchers suspect the patterns might be similar because both skin cells and fairy circles are fighting for space. If true, scientists might one day be able to glean information about systems just by analyzing patterns. For example, they could search for signs of life on other planets or moons, where images are usually the only data initially available.

Finding such a pattern could also benefit ecology and biology in general. Understanding processes on one scale could illuminate what is happening at the other end of the spectrum. "Otherwise, we need a whole new theory for each type of system we study, and may miss general principles, or, as some say, not see the forest for the trees," Sinclair said.

Self-organising systems and patterns are widespread and intriguing - I can't help but think of so-called "patterned ground," the permafrost polygons of the periglacial regions, the patterns on Mars (and now on Pluto), and various strange behaviours of granular materials...

Oh, and in aid of conservation in the NamibRand Nature Reserve, you can, if you wish, adopt a fairy circle. 

[Image at the head of this post credit, Stephan Getzin. The BBC has a very good piece summarising this mysterious phenomenon]

Theeb

 

"Epic" "intimate" "brutal" "riveting" "spellbinding" "spectacular." The adjectives come tumbling out of the reviews - but please see this movie for yourself. Described as an "Arabic Western" and a "coming of age story," I suspect that this is one of those rare films that stimulates a unique reaction in every viewer. 

Directed by British-born Jordanian Naji Abu Nowar, the story is set during the First World War at the time of the Arab Revolt, and, given that it was filmed in and around Wadi Rum, the instinctive reaction is "ah, Lawrence of Arabia." But, other than the location and the historical context, these films have absolutely nothing in common. "Theeb" is filmed entirely with Bedouin people for whom this is their first experience of acting; it is their story and, most of all, it is the story of a young Bedouin boy caught up in a strange and frightening journey and through whose eyes we perceive the events.

Theeb ("wolf") is played by Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat. Abu Nowar has commented that he "never actually liked [Jacir] as an actor as he was so shy and quiet and I never considered him, but he has this crazy thing that when you put him on camera he a different person. Immediately it became obvious. And so he was the first person we cast and we never looked back or at anyone else." It is indeed not only this kid's extraordinary performance but the kid himself that makes this movie, and, together with Abu Nowar's unique and sensitive directing skills, creates an intangible grip on the viewer. And this grip lasts for the entire film - at the end I could not fathom how one hundred minutes had just gone by.

Watch the trailer:

 

In a fascinating interview, Abu Nowar comments that:

The time in which the film is set is the single most important period in Middle-Eastern history. That’s when the end of a 400 year empire came to be and radical redrawing of the map which we are still suffering from today. With all the issues going on in Iraq, Syria, with the Kurds and the Turks, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Yemen. All of these issues we hear about today are a direct result from that single moment in history. So, it was such a crucial moment and such an existential crisis for the region and I like the mirror of the character going through a similar sort of crisis.

and

For myself I wanted to make something that felt authentic to the Bedouin. And so I tried to listen to them as much as possible and incorporated their feelings and thoughts as much as I could. All of it was just exciting for me. I love their poetry. I love their stories and so it was why it comes about in that way. In no way was I trying to enforce a cinematic understanding of storytelling onto subject matter, it is really the subject matter informing it.

And I think that is why is has that feel because it is really genuine. Sometimes the best thing you can do as a director is to step out of the way and not put you two cents in and let people do their thing. I do that and I like getting surprised by what they come up with. That’s the enjoyment of it. There were things all along the way, for example the sound design adding little tiny moments here and there that you pick up and generally just member of the team surprising you. It was a lot of fun.

"Theeb" premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival on 4 September 2014, where Abu Nowar won the award for Best Director. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, making it the first Jordanian nomination ever. 

Herewith, a selection of reviews: Rotten Tomatoes (5 stars), Huff Post, New York Times, and The Guardian. Read them, enjoy them, but please find this film and watch it.

Sunbathing in the microscopic desert jungle

The desert has its own palette, distinctive and at the same time subtle yet dramatic. There are many factors at work creating the patterns and hues of arid lands - obviously the kind of sand, the kind of rock, the vegetation, minerals and salts, desert varnish - but there are also artists at work that we can't see and barely understand: microbial communities.

We can see the mosses and the lichens, but the vast ecosystem of bacteria and fungi operates essentially invisibly; we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the desert to reveal the ubiquity and importance of microbial life in environments we often describe as "lifeless." These are communities labelled "cryptic" by biologists, a useful term disguising the fact that they are something we really don't understand very well. I found this definition helpful, from a piece in Nature a few years ago titled "Body doubles" by Alberto G. Sáez and Encarnación Lozano:

Have you ever approached someone whom you thought you knew, talked to him with familiarity, only to find out later that he was a complete stranger, albeit remarkably similar in appearance to the person you had in mind, such as a twin brother? Well, taxonomists are similarly puzzled when they come across two or more groups of organisms that are morphologically indistinguishable from each other, yet found to belong to different evolutionary lineages. That is, when they discover a set of cryptic species.

The microscopic cryptic communities of arid lands form the well-known "desert" or "cryptobiotic" crusts that we now realise play key roles in the ecosystem, cycling carbon dioxide and nitrogen, providing resources for plant life, controlling drainage and the hydrologic behaviour of the soil, and reducing erosion - and hence, atmospheric dust. 

Among the leading researchers shedding light on these cryptic communities is Ferran Garcia-Pichel at Arizona State University's School of Life Sciences. For example, in 2013, togather with international colleagues, he published a paper titled "Temperature Drives the Continental-Scale Distribution of Key Microbes in Topsoil Communities." Science summarises the work as follows:

Soil microorganisms make up a substantial fraction of global biomass, turning over carbon and other key nutrients on a massive scale. Although the soil protects them somewhat from daily temperature fluxes, the distribution of these communities will likely respond to gradual climate change. ... [We] surveyed bacterial diversity across a range of North American desert soils, or biocrusts—ecosystems in which photosynthetic bacteria determine soil fertility and control physical soil properties such as erodability and water retention. Most of the sites were dominated by one of two cyanobacterial species, but their relative proportions were controlled largely by factors related to temperature. Laboratory enrichment cultures of the two species at different temperatures also showed temperature as a primary determining factor of bacterial diversity. It is unknown if temperature will affect the distribution of other soil microorganisms, but the marked shifts of these two keystone bacterial species suggest further change is in store for these delicate ecosystems.

The work, only available behind the Science paywall, was helpfully reported by Live Science. The two dominant "keystone" bacterial species are  Microcoleus vaginatus and M. steenstrupii, the former preferring cooler conditions whereas the latter likes things hot. As temperatures vary, things become competitive and warming conditions result in the mysterious steenstrupii taking over. Now, because these communities are microscopic and cryptic, we can only measure such effects - and detect which organisms are in the soil - through sophisticated DNA analysis. It is further results of this kind of painstaking and careful work that Garcia-Pichel and his colleagues have just published in Nature. With Estelle Couradeau, also at Arizona State, as the lead author, the paper describes - startlingly - how "Bacteria increase arid-land soil surface temperature through the production of sunscreens." Microcoleus vaginatus and M. steenstrupii are far from alone, and, amongst their companions are tribes of cyanobacteria such as the hundreds of species belonging to the genera Scytonema and Tolypothrix. These little critters dislike the sun and apply a biosynthetic sunscreen, scytonemin, an alkaloid pigment that strongly absorbs solar radiation and dissipates this energy as heat. This sunscreen can be seen as patches of darker colour covering areas of desert crust, as in this photo by Garcia-Pichel from the recent report on Science Daily.

This pigmentation may protect some members of the bacterial community, but it can locally warm up the surface by as much as 10 degrees C (18 degrees F). This has a dramatic effect on the health of the cool-loving Microcoleus vaginatus, but is welcomed by M. steenstrupii, who come to dominate as the sunscreen develops, at the expense of vaginatus. As Garcia-Pichel comments:

... we can show that the darkening of the crust brings about important modifications in the soil microbiome, the community of microorganisms in the soil, allowing warm-loving types to do better. This warming effect is likely to speed up soil chemical and biological reactions, and can make a big difference between being frozen or not when it gets cold... On the other hand, it may put local organisms at increased risk when it is already quite hot.

And this has to be happening on a global scale. As Estelle Coradeau suggests, "Because globally they cover some 20 percent of Earth's continents, biocrusts, their microbes and sunscreens must be important players in global heat budgets. We estimate that there must be some 15 million metric tons of this one microbial sunscreen compound...warming desert soils worldwide."

But because we have only a poor understanding of what exactly these desert crusts are and how they work, their roles in local ecology and global systems are impossible to define. It is only through the meticulous work of Ferran Garcia-Pichel and his team, together with others such as Jayne Belnap of the USGS in Moab, Utah, that we can begin to unravel the extraordinary nature and contributions of these long-ignored microbial desert communities. As Belnap has commented:

These are the only game in town to prevent dust storms and erosion, so they're really, really critical parts of this ecosystem. Yet we've never asked the question, 'who's really in there, and what's going to happen there as things shift?'

and, as reported in a piece on Belnap in High Country News, the palette and patterns of our arid lands owe much to an invisible living world: 

She also remains convinced that the dark shadows on the desert are the true — and fragile — foundation of the Colorado Plateau. "Whenever we pull on the thread of what makes the system tick," she says, "we end up with soil crusts on the other end."

[See also Belnap's USGS site at www.soilcrust.org. Crust photos credit: Linda and Dr. Dick Buscher, Live  Science "The Mysterious World of Cryptobiotic Soil."]

 

 

Back to the Bagnold dunes - stunning images

Curiosity, that hard-working field geologist, just keeps on delivering - this is surely the selfie to end all selfies (please). The rover continues to bustle around the Bagnold dunes, sending back extraordinary images, taking samples and sieving (Ralph Bagnold would appreciate that activity). Take a look at this screenshot from an incredible 360° interactive video:

The laws of physics - and The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes - are the same everywhere. This beautiful image of the avalanching slip-face of the "Namib dune" (the glorious full resolution can be enjoyed here) could be from a desert anywhere:

The detail and the dynamics are stunning, avalanches and sand sculpture more than 70 million kilometres away:

The sieving that Curiosity has been doing delivers the smaller than 150 micron fraction to the on-board instruments for analysis and simply dumps the larger grains.

Curiosity then gets out its hand lens and takes a close look:

From the NASA description of this image:

The larger-grain portion dumped onto the ground became accessible to investigation by other instruments on Curiosity, including imaging by MAHLI and composition analysis by the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) and Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer instruments. Laser-zapping of the dump pile by ChemCam caused an elongated dimple visible near the center of this view.

The MAHLI images combined into this focus-merged view were taken on Jan. 22, 2016, after dark on the 1,230th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars. The illumination source is two white-light LEDs (light-emitting diodes) on MAHLI. They shone down on the right side of the image, so shadows are toward the left. The focus-merge product was generated by the instrument autonomously combining in-focus portions of eight separate images taken at different focus settings.

The dark appearance is purposeful: The camera team chose an exposure setting that would prevent most of the white grains in this otherwise very dark sand from being over-exposed.

Perhaps it's just a sign of being of a certain age, but all this fills me with indescribable wonder.
 

A Reverence for Rivers (2)

Turn on the tap in your kitchen so that it's running at a typical (if not particularly conservative) rate of around three US gallons per minute. Ensure that your drain is working well and leave it flowing for 17 years. By then you will have used the amount of water that the State of California consumes in one minute. 

Return after one year and you will have used roughly the volume of groundwater extracted from the Central Valley in one minute.

Last month, I started what I intended to be a series of posts stimulated by "A Reverence for Rivers," the title of the address given by the great hydrogeologist, Luna Leopold, to California Governor Jerry Brown's Drought Conference held nearly thirty years ago. Leopold threw down some challenges in the "philosophy of water management" to an audience that represented all the stakeholders in management of the state's water supplies at a time of what was then a record drought. Today, those records continue to be broken as California enters its fifth consecutive year of drought, and, for much of the state, the third year of "extreme," never mind "exceptional" drought. Yes, some relief is being provided by El Nino precipitation, but that does nothing to change the drought crisis - as shown by the US Drought Monitor image above. At the end of 2014, a NASA analysis indicated that "It will take about 11 trillion gallons of water (42 cubic kilometers) -- around 1.5 times the maximum volume [potential capacity] of the largest U.S. reservoir -- to recover from California's continuing drought." That was a year ago and it's only got worse. At the time of that report, some rains had arrived, but

“It’s not time to start watering your grass,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the lead researcher of the new analysis. “Looking at the numbers, it’s probably going to take about three years to fill the hole.”

The NASA team found that the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, key water sources for cities and farms, lost 4 trillion gallons of water each year since 2011, most of it from farmers tapping the underground supply because rivers and reservoirs were low.

How can California still find itself in this amount of trouble when, nearly thirty years ago, in his first incarnation as drought Governor, Brown declared that “this is an era of limits and there are some very hard choices to be made”? One of the reasons that I have only now embarked on this episode of the series of posts is that there are no easy answers, and research and fact-checking leads only into a black hole of conflicting data, never mind the labyrinthine political abyss of western water politics, policy and history. It is clear that, post 1997, Brown and some of the more enlightened interests in California attempted to embark on reform and future drought preparation - but many of the choices proved to be too hard. Yes, there were initiatives to reduce domestic and municipal consumption and these lasted, although Brown, in his second drought incarnation, still had to declare a State of Emergency in January 2014, and a year later, the first ever state-wide mandatory water reductions. Individual Californians and communities have dramatically reduced their consumption (with the notable exception of Beverly Hills celebrities and billionaires), but by far the largest proportion of the 38 billion gallons per day consumed by California goes to agriculture - and therein lies the rub. 

Exactly how much water does Californian agriculture use? Well, incredibly nobody really knows and nobody has the day-to-day measurements to know. You can easily, depending on the sources and assumptions, find estimates from 40% to 80% of total water use. In order to find a single group of statistics that have some credibility, it's worth consulting a report put out by the Congressional Research Service in June 2015. Attempting to rationalize the data differences, it is titled California Agricultural Production and Irrigated Water Use and begins:

California ranks as the leading agricultural state in the United States in terms of farm-level sales. In 2012, California’s farm-level sales totaled nearly $45 billion and accounted for 11% of total U.S. agricultural sales. Five counties—Tulare, Kern, Fresno, Monterey, and Merced—rank among the leading agricultural counties in the nation.

Given current drought conditions in California, however, there has been much attention on the use of water to grow agricultural crops in the state. Depending on the data source, irrigated agriculture accounts for roughly 40% to 80% of total water supplies. Such discrepancies are largely based on different survey methods and assumptions, including the baseline amount of water estimated for use (e.g., what constitutes “available” supplies). Two primary data sources are the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). USGS estimates water use for agricultural irrigation in California at 25.8 million acre-feet (MAF), accounting for 61% of USGS’s estimates of total withdrawals. DWR estimates water use withdrawals for agricultural irrigation at 33 MAF, or about 41% of total use. Both of these estimates are based on available data for 2010. These estimates differ from other widely cited estimates indicating that agricultural use accounts for 80% of California’s available water supplies, as reported in media and news reports.

The differences result from arcane variations in the definitions of the words "use," consumption," "withdrawals," and "application." Welcome to the rabbit-hole of terminology, both technical and political. Oh, and also welcome to the "acre-foot."  An acre-foot is a volume of water equal to 325,851 gallons (around 1200 cubic metres) and represents the amount of water needed to flood an acre of land one foot deep. In the US, it is the long-standing measure of water volume.

Since Brown's initiatives following the 1970s drought, water use has dropped, partly as a result of domestic frugality, partly following increased efficiency irrigation systems - and the brutal realities of maintaining agriculture in a semi-arid land. However, the USGS reports that California in 2010 remained the chart-topper of all US states for water consumption - more than half again as much as the runner-up, Texas. And the USGS estimates that agriculture accounts for 60% of the state's thirst.

Any, even brief, review of media reports will reveal that to say that this is a controversial topic is a gross understatement. Vested interests, lobbies, open and hidden agendas, battle for dominance in issues scarcely tainted by facts or science. And these arguments also take place in a virtually policy-free environment - water regulations and laws in the arid Western US are labyrinthine, opaque, complex beyond normal comprehension and certainly unfit for purpose, particularly in California. In 1991, during yet another drought, Peter Passell, an economics writer for the New York Times, wrote that California's water system - infrastructure and laws - "might have been invented by a Soviet bureaucrat on an LSD trip... While this infrastructure was built with state and Federal money, the benefits are by tradition (and, hazily, by law) reserved for the private interests who lobbied for its construction." 

California's surface water supply system resembles nothing more than a Heath Robinson contraption or a Rube Goldberg machine, deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion. But at least the State Government has some ability to regulate it. In a normal year that's an ability to attempt to manage and allocate perhaps 70% of the state's water consumption. In a typical drought year that drops to less than 40%. In extreme drought conditions, the state can - and does - dramatically reduce surface water allocations but then where does the other 60-70% come from? Groundwater. Over which the government has virtually no control whatsoever. It doesn't even have the knowledge or the data to manage its groundwater, never mind the legal ability to do so.

And here is the vital fact that is mostly ignored or unknown in political and commercial circles, largely because it's highly inconvenient: surface water and groundwater are part of the same system, the hydrological cycle - mess with one and you mess with the other. 

Over 60 years ago, Luna Leopold and his colleague, Harold Thomas, wrote an article titled "Ground Water in North America: The fast-growing demands on this natural resource expose a need to resolve many hydrologic unknowns." Here's an extract:

There are enough examples of streamflow depletion by ground-water development, and of ground-water pollution from wastes released into surface waters, to attest to the close though variable relation between surface water and ground water.

Man has coped with the complexity of water by trying to compartmentalize it. The partition committed by hydrologists—into ground water, soil water, surface water, for instance—is as nothing compared with that which has been promulgated by the legal profession, which has on occasion borrowed from the criminal code to term some waters "fugitive" and others, a "common enemy." The legal classification of water includes "percolating waters," "defined underground streams," "underflow of surface streams," "water-courses." and "diffuse surface waters"; all these waters are actually interrelated and interdependent, yet in many jurisdictions unrelated water rights rest upon this classification

Water habitually does not subscribe to our efforts at compartmentalization according to special interests in irrigation, industrial use, recreational use, municipal use; or to allocations of fields for the chemist, for the geologist, for the sanitary engineer, for the physicist, for this or that government agency, any more than it does to separation into areas bounded by property lines, county lines, state lines, or even some river-basin boundaries. As the areas of heavy demand expand toward each other and the necessity for water management increases, these artificial boundaries and classifications will have to yield more and more to the realities of the hydrologic cycle.

Ah yes, the lessons we have learned in 60 years. In an article in July of last year for the New York Times, Abrahm Lustgarten, an environmental reporter for ProPublica, summarized a report he had written for the site (the whole piece is well-worth reading). From the summary, titled "How the West Overcounts Its Water Supplies": 

In California, the state’s water agency has said that the failure to account for how groundwater withdrawals affect the state’s rivers is a major impediment to a true accounting of its resources. In April, authorities reported that less than half of the state’s local water agencies had complied with a 2002 law that made them eligible for state funds only if they set up groundwater management plans and determined if a connection between surface water and groundwater existed. That connection does not exist uniformly and varies depending on local geology. Only 17 percent of the state’s groundwater basins had been examined.

Indeed, California still doesn’t require that water pumped from underground be measured at all, much less factored into an overall assessment of total water resources; it’s merely an option under a new law signed last September.

California’s new groundwater legislation does require local water authorities to come up with sustainable groundwater plans, but they don’t have to do that until 2020, and they don’t have to balance their water withdrawals until 2040.

So fierce was the pushback by the agriculture industry against any regulation of underground water that the new law, somewhat perversely, explicitly barred any attempt by the state to count the groundwater withdrawals as coming from one overall water supply until local agencies had at least 10 more years to come up with — and implement — their plans.

“Those who have unlimited water supply don’t particularly like the idea of changing that,” said Fran Pavley, a Democrat and the California state senator who drafted two of the three bills that became the groundwater law. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Thomas Buschatzke, the director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, acknowledged that pumping from wells could dry up streams, but said the current law kept the two resources separate, and “it would be a huge upset to the economy to do away with that.”

But John Bredehoeft, a leading hydrogeologist and former director of the federal government’s Western states water program, bluntly emphasized the importance of basic honesty in counting water.

“If you don’t connect the two, then you don’t understand the system,” he said. “And if you don’t understand the system, I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to make any kind of judgment about how much water you’ve got to work with.”

Until state officials do, it seems unlikely that there will be any real solution to managing the Southwest’s strained water resources for the future.

And, in the words of Jay Famiglietti:

Managing our water in this context will require an overhaul of existing water policy that matches our modern understanding of the water cycle. Surface and groundwater are tightly interconnected and should be managed accordingly. The rule of capture for groundwater worked exceedingly well when we shot bears with muskets. Let's not kid ourselves that we're great stewards when most of our available water -- groundwater -- is still offered up in a land rush.

We must treat and price water as the precious commodity that it truly is. That means conserve, reuse, recycle, and then do it all over again. Enhanced conservation and efficiency is cheap, easy, and incredibly effective.

So, turn on your tap for a year and contemplate the disappearance of groundwater in California's Central Valley every minute. You could at least rush home and turn off the tap - the government of the State of California can't. We'll talk about all this some more in the next episode...  

 

 

2016: the year of the Bagnold dunes

Last month, NASA issued a press release to announce that the Curiosity Rover had reached the “Bagnold dunes” and was preparing to investigate. The image above is from that announcement – the landscape covered is only a few meters across, but it is extraordinary and just seems, instinctively, to be unearthly. As Nathan Bridges of the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, and leader of the Curiosity team's planning for the dune campaign remarked in an earlier discussion of the project:

These dunes have a different texture from dunes on Earth. The ripples on them are much larger than ripples on top of dunes on Earth, and we don't know why. We have models based on the lower air pressure. It takes a higher wind speed to get a particle moving. But now we'll have the first opportunity to make detailed observations.

Indeed. The first detailed examination of extra-terrestrial sand dunes, to take place over the next few months, will be incredibly exciting, and it is only appropriate that those dunes are, if only informally, named after Ralph Bagnold. Readers of this blog and my books will have sensed that Bagnold is something of hero of mine, and I like to refer to him as “the man who figured out how deserts work.” One only wishes that he was still around and that we could hear his reactions to Curiosity, the images, the science and engineering. I am of the generation that still has difficulty not finding this whole project incredible, and I know that Bagnold would have been totally engrossed in the science, the technology – and the people.

In his frustratingly short (but fascinating) 1990 autobiography, Sand, Wind, and War, Bagnold cryptically titled Chapter 17, “Later: 1974-1986”. In it, he writes:

One memorable event in 1977 occurred when I was asked by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to give the keynote address at a meeting of geologists and other space scientists.The meeting was to compare the desert landscapes of Earth and Mars. It was held for a week at Palm Desert, a new, up-and-coming offshoot of Palm Springs in Southern California. The site of the meeting had been specially chosen for the desert character of its surroundings. However, during that week it rained every day. The main thoroughfare through town, labeled Bob Hope Street, was still only dirt. It was all but washed away. 

NASA had recently sent spacecraft to orbit Mars and had succeeded in landing an unmanned craft to take close-up pictures. Those photos of the landscape revealed apparent sand dune forms much like those on Earth, in spite of the vastly different atmosphere. This had already started theories, but it was, and still is, mere guesswork as to what the stuff of the so-called dunes really is. We have no tangible evidence, and won’t have until some of it is brought back to Earth. Is it granular, like sand, or fluffy like snowflakes? And we still have but little idea of the scale of the dune heights…

I spent one evening at a McDonald’s with a small group of young scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It was fascinating for an old man of eighty-one to listen to their casual talk of navigating a spacecraft two hundred million miles away as easily as an aeroplane. Man had not begun to fly at all when I was born.

The Bagnold Dunes lie in Gale crater, and are a stopping point for Curiosity on its journey up the slopes of Mount Sharp. The part of the dune field that the rover has arrived at is shown in this image – the dark band of rippled sand in front of Mount Sharp which looms intriguingly in the background.

Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is another member of the project team, and she introduces it in a great little video. As she comments, the dunes are dark because the sand grains are derived from basaltic rocks, and they cover the older, lighter-coloured, sandstones, some of which are themselves ancient dunes. Curiosity will be conducting fieldwork on what was originally called Dune 2, now the high dune, which is but a part of the much larger dune field. This beautiful image shows the dune, part of the larger dune field, and the journey of Curiosity to its current position:

In the image at the head of this post, we are only looking at a small area of the whole dune, but from imagery over the years by NASA’s orbiting HiRISE camera, it is clear that the dune is active and on the move. As Bethany Ehlman describes, echoing Ralph Bagnold, in the reduced gravity, thin atmosphere, and unknown wind conditions on Mars, exactly how sand grains are transported and dunes migrate is still a mystery. But, thanks to Curiosity, perhaps not for long.

Ralph Bagnold became frustrated by the lack of desert wind data critical for developing his pioneering work on the physics of blown sand (he moved on to the physics of water-borne sediment). But Curiosity is already on the job, gathering the wind data that will help us understand how Martian sand moves. And the Rover has an extraordinary array of other instrumentation at the end of its long robotic arm, including a sand sampler and sieves that will tell the stories of grain size distributions that Bagnold determined were so informative.

At the end of Curiosity's robotic arm is a suite of devices that enable Collection and Handling for In-situ Martian Rock Analysis, otherwise known as CHIMRA. This combination of geological tools, operated remotely hundreds of millions of miles away, is incredible:

Ralph Bagnold was not only a scientist but also an engineer who designed, developed and built his own equipment, unique and exquisitely sophisticated. As we remember him working on field measurements in Egypt’s Western Desert in 1938, it doesn’t take much imagination to visualise him not only impressed with CHIMRA, but enthusiastically contributing to the project.

[for the full image of Curiosity’s view of the High Dune, see  http://mars.nasa.gov/imgs/2015/12/mars-curiosity-rover-high-dune-up-close-fullres-pia20168-figA.jpg]   

 

A Reverence for Rivers (1)

 

From the New York Times:

Los Angeles

Brown Warns of Drought Disaster; Says ‘Hard Choices’ Face California

Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. warned here today that drought-stricken California was “facing a disaster of immeasurable magnitude.”

“The specter of drought has been gathering momentum, not only in California but across the country,” the Democratic Governor declared, adding that people must learn that “this is an era of limits and there are some very hard choices to be made.”

 

Well, yes indeed, but the limits have proved difficult to respect, and the right choices challenging to make – that was a report from March 1977. In January 2014, not far off forty years later, Governor Jerry Brown reprised his earlier role and declared a state of emergency:

We can’t make it rain, but we can be much better prepared for the terrible consequences that California’s drought now threatens, including dramatically less water for our farms and communities and increased fires in both urban and rural areas. I’ve declared this emergency and I’m calling all Californians to conserve water in every way possible.

Given the historic (and largely unpredictable) nature of Californian aridity, it’s inevitable that, if you are a sufficient glutton for punishment to become governor twice, you will experience a couple of droughts. Unfortunately, Jerry Brown has been in charge for two of the worst – indeed, the current drought has broken essentially every historical record. But it is interesting to contemplate how, given the recognition of limits and hard choices forty years ago, we couldn’t be “much better prepared” today.

The 1977 news report was covering a two-day “Governor’s Drought Conference attended by about 800 water district officials, farmers, ranchers and other interested persons,” among the last category being the keynote speaker, Luna Leopold. The son of the influential conservationist and author, Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Luna became one of the world’s leading hydrologists during the latter half of the last century. He revolutionised and quantified for the first time the science of fluvial geomorphology and changed the way we think about rivers, how they and their landscapes work, and their role in the grand scheme of things – “Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children’s lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land.” He was, incidentally, also a close friend of, and collaborator with, my hero, Ralph Bagnold – I have a recording of the address he gave at Bagnold’s memorial service, his words made all the more compelling by the deep resonance of his voice.

But, back to the Los Angeles Convention Center in March 1977. You can’t help but be impressed that Brown invited Leopold to give the keynote address, but it seems likely that the governor and the ranchers were somewhat bemused to be told, in the speaker’s first, undoubtedly resonant, words, about Herodotus. 

Leopold titled his address A Reverence for Rivers. The full text is available online, but I shall extract from it here because I – and I hope that I’m not alone - find it not only provocative but as relevant today as it was nearly forty years ago. It’s stimulating food for thought – and a few posts.

Here are his opening words:

In the years around 450 B.C., that is about 2,400 years ago, the most widely travelled of the time was Herodotus. His book The Persian Wars differs from any previous written history in that he was conscious of the influences of geography, climate, and social custom in the direction of development of political and economic history of a state.
In all the intervening time, we seem not to have learned how the political and economic aspects of our lives are related to geography and climate, nor have we been able to bend social custom to accept the constraints placed on us by geography and climate.

“In all the intervening time” since 1977, we don’t seem to have learned a great deal either.

He goes on discuss our approach to renewable and non-renewable resources and comments that “it can hardly be called management”:

The management of resources cannot be carried out successfully if it is looked upon as just another facet of economics, administration, and politics. Yet the latter view describes rather accurately our present approach to resource use (it can hardly
be called management).

Being the scientist that he was, he asserts that “renewable resources”

... are parts of operating natural systems that can be deranged with very troublesome results. The hydrologic system of precipitation, streamflow, sediment, dissolved salts, ground water and evapotranspiration is typical of a system that can be deranged. Moreover, such operating systems are subject to natural fluctuations resulting from climate and geography. These fluctuations can be lessened but not eliminated.

I love that wording – the troublesome results from deranging natural operating systems. He goes on to acknowledge to his drought-stricken California audience that “none of us knows how to put into operation a philosophy of water management,” but suggests that a crisis offers some advantages in attracting attention to a problem and that “there may be some merit in examining some of the elements that might be included in such a philosophy.”

He recognised that his audience might not be instinctively sympathetic to “philosophic points of view” and proceeded to counter three possible “contrary arguments”:

(1) Our technology can fix it; (2) It is politically impossible; and (3) It is an example of the impractical idealism of crackpot environmentalists.

I will return to Leopold’s discussion of the first two, but his response to number three is a potent summary of his own philosophy and something that resonates today – at least with me:

… there is a balance or harmony in natural systems which, dictated by the laws of physics, has gradually developed during the 4 billion years of Earth's history. The maintenance of this balance is not only to the advantage of human organization,
but should be the object of both our wonder and our admiration. The desire to preserve this harmony must also be incorporated into any philosophy of water management, and I will call this, as did Herodotus, a reverence for rivers. If this is environmental idealism, then let it be said that I am an idealist.

So where, exactly, does Herodotus fit in to all this? Quite how Luna Leopold’s audience responded is lost in the mists of time, but he described how

Speaking of the Persians who dominated Asia Minor in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus said, "They never defile a river with the secretions of their bodies, nor even wash their hands in one; nor will they allow others to do so, as they have a great reverence for rivers." It is the last phrase that deserves our attention. The river is like an organism; it is internally self-adjusting. It is also resilient and can absorb changes imposed upon it, but not without limit.

So, having cast a somewhat different light on Brown's "era of limits," he concluded that

Man's engineering capabilities are nearly limitless. Our economic views are too insensitive to be the only criteria for judging the health of the river organism. What is needed is a gentler basis for perceiving the effects of our engineering capabilities. This more humble view of our relation to the hydrologic system requires a modicum of reverence for rivers.

Given the derangement of our planet’s river and sediment systems that we have accomplished, before and after 1977, you have to wonder whether we – now stuck in the Anthropocene – have any reverence at all. But I believe that, for whatever difference it might possibly make, it’s still worth listening to Luna Leopold.

To be continued…

[Image at the head of the post Lucy Nicholson/Reuter/Baltimore Sun, caption: "Discarded shopping carts lie   in the dry Tule river bed in Porterville, California October 14, 2014. In one of the towns hardest hit by California’s drought, the only way some residents can get water to flush the toilet is to drive to the fire station, hand-pump water into barrels and take it back home. The state’s three-year drought comes into   sharp focus in Tulare County, the dairy and citrus heart of the state’s vast agricultural belt, where more than 500 wells have dried up."

Image above, Kelly M. Grow/California Department of Water Resources: The South Fork of the Feather River feeding Lake Oroville on Sept. 5, 2014.]

 

Exporting the desert – you may not want to read this

 

Among the possible reasons for not reading this might be

1. It seems to be too absurd to be true
2. It’s true, but it’s not a problem
3. You are careful about your blood pressure and the integrity of your digital device

March, 2014, a press release from the Saudi Arabian food and agricultural company, Almarai:

Almarai is pleased to announce that it has completed, on March 6th 2014, the purchase of 9,834 acres of farm land in Vicksburg, Arizona, USA, through its fully owned subsidiary Fondomonte, Arizona LLC, composed of 3,604 acres of freehold land, 3080 acres of agriculture lease hold land and 3,150 acres of grazing lease hold land.

Within the total land subject to this transaction, 4,430 acres are currently irrigated using the best modern methods such as dripping irrigation. This transaction forms part of Almarai's continuous efforts to improve and secure its supply of the highest quality alfalfa hay from outside KSA to support its dairy business. It is also in line with the Saudi Government direction towards conserving local resources. In addition to this purchase, Almarai is committed to invest into the necessary infrastructure, including a bailing system and logistics and transportation equipment necessary for the efficient supply of alfalfa hay from its US based facility into KSA.

The total consideration for this transaction amounts to US$ 47.5 million, equivalent to SAR 178.1 million, and will be financed from the company's own resources.

Almarai are a huge operation – remarkably, they maintain a herd of 157,000 cattle in Saudi Arabia – with a net income in 2014 of $450 million. They produce everything from milk and yoghourt to infant formula via poultry, bread and juice. But they have a resource problem: water.

These farming operations are, after all, taking place in Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t that long ago that the country had substantial reserves of groundwater, sufficient for considered and rational development. Dramatically insufficient, however, to support the the attempt, since the 1970s, to become self-sufficient in wheat production, with at one point 20 per cent of its oil revenues devoted to supplying the necessary water. It is now abandoning this goal, but the country’s water use tripled between 1980 and 2006, aquifer levels dropped dramatically and groundwater became brackish in many areas. This determination to make the desert bloom is startlingly illustrated by NASA images of Wadi As-Sirhan near the Jordanian border in 1986 and 2013 (the green circles are centre-pivot irrigation “fields” fed from wells a kilometre deep):

 In 2004, Elie Elhadj of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), King’s College London published a blunt analysis of the extraordinary history of the destruction of the country’s water supplies. Titled “Camels Don’t Fly, Deserts Don’t Bloom: an Assessment of Saudi Arabia’s Experiment in Desert Agriculture” the report paints a catastrophic picture. For example:

The water saved from abandoning the growing of 2.613 million tonnes of wheat and barley between 1993 and 1999 was used up to grow 1.2 million tonnes of alfalfa.

And

Between 1993 and 1999, Alfalfa production increased by almost 1.2 million tonnes, from 2.435 million tonnes in 1993 to 3.606 million tonnes in 1999. Such a volume was beyond local needs. Alfalfa was exported to neighboring markets. In 2000, the government banned alfalfa exports. So, production declined. The drop within one year was 344,000 tonnes (3.606 million tonnes in 1999 – 3.262 million tonnes in 2000). The drop in alfalfa crop happened while production of red meat and poultry during 2000 increased to 643,000 tonnes from 577,000 tonnes in 1999, and of milk to 1.039 million tonnes in 2000 from 937,000 tonnes in 1999, an indication that earlier increases in alfalfa production was for export purposes, not local meat growing.

While firm figures are difficult to pin down, Elhadj estimates that “the expected useful life of non-renewable Saudi aquifers may range between 22 years and 38 years” provided that 100% extraction is possible and that there will be no aggregate growth in agriculture. More realistic estimates range down to less than ten years of remaining resources.

The report concludes:

What was the instrument that enabled this situation to develop? The answer is that it developed as a result of government subsidies to desert irrigation. Subsidies distort the efficient workings of markets. They cause resources to be misallocated. The above analysis shows that under current international prices for agricultural crops, had Saudi Arabia not subsidized desert irrigation, the cost of growing unsubsidized agricultural crops would have been much higher than the market prices for similar imports. This could have led capital funds to be deployed away from loss making desert irrigation schemes into more rewarding industries, provided that there were no protective tariffs in favor of local produce. It would also have preserved the country’s non-renewable aquifers.

Why was it that the Saudi Government chose the course of expensive agricultural development for an arid country despite its persistent and large budget deficits during the 1980s and 1990s? Is it: A) food independence. B) Settlement of the Bedouins, or C) enriching the ruling elite? It was probably a combination of all three, but with a special emphasis on (C).

So yes, Almarai and Saudi Arabia have a resource problem. This explains why buying agricultural land in the Arizona desert is “in line with the Saudi Government direction towards conserving local resources” and why, in its 2014 annual report, Almarai declares that it “has made a commitment to importing 100% of its animal feed requirements and heavy investment in our overseas arable farming assets will dramatically reduce reliance on the Kingdom’s water supply.”

The 4,430 acres of western Arizona“currently irrigated” are south of the hamlet of Vicksburg in the Ranegras Valley of La Paz County. The land had previously been under cultivation for corn, cotton and other crops, including smaller amounts of alfalfa for hay, all watered from around 15 high productivity wells. The extent of this irrigated land, just north of Interstate 10 160 kilometres west of Phoenix, is clearly visible on the otherwise desiccated alluvial fans:  

It turns out that, on my US southwest road trip last year, I had driven, in complete ignorance, right by, and this is what the country looks like:

Now, the irrigated land is turned over to alfalfa (hay), all of it destined to feed Saudi Arabian cattle. The desert is a great place to grow alfalfa because it can be done continuously, all year-round – as long as there’s enough water. And “enough” is a lot – alfalfa is about the most thirsty crop after rice. The water requirements of different crops vary considerably, depending on temperature, soil conditions, growing season etc., but to cultivate a hectare of alfalfa in California (over a season of less than a year) requires over 14,000 cubic meters of water (1.5 million US gallons per acre). In comparison, wheat, corn and other grains will typically need a little over 4,000 cubic metres (0.4 million gallons per acre).

Now Almarai are understandably – and I’m sure justifiably – proud of their experience with desert agriculture, their use of drip irrigation and so on, but it would seem that for year-round irrigation of 4,000 acres of alfalfa, we’re talking several tens of millions of cubic meters of water a year. In a land which has been suffering drought conditions for the last few years.

Arizona publishes a fair amount of data on groundwater and well conditions. Here, for example, are two maps showing the changes in groundwater levels in key wells in the Vicksburg area over the last twenty years and the last year:

Levels in the Ranegras Valley have declined by over 60 feet in the last twenty years. Even recently, when there has been some modest improvement in some areas, the levels continue to decline around Vicksburg. Then put this in the context of the overall depletion of groundwater reserves in the groundwater basins of southern Arizona over the last century, as graphically analysed by the USGS in their (depressing) 2013 report: 

 

Note that the vertical scale is in cubic kilometres – over 100 cubic kilometres of depletion between 1920 and 1980. Staggering, eh?

And then there’s the ground subsidence caused by that water extraction. The Arizona Department of Water Resources publishes analyses of this problem, and it it is very clear that subsidence of up to 15 cms has occurred over the last five years in the cultivated area of Ranegras Valley:

 I took the liberty of overlaying the satellite image of the fields on to this map, just to compare:

 

Extend the contours in your mind into the “no data” area and lo, there’s the irrigation. 

But surely, you might ask, groundwater is carefully managed in a state like Arizona? Well somewhat yes, but largely no. Arizona may have paved the regulatory path from as early as the 1970s (which is unusual – California is only now getting around to it), but the law is focussed on urban use and domestic farming: the state's major population areas like Phoenix and Tucson have limits on how much water can be taken from the ground, but rural counties largely are without restrictions. Drill a well in Ranegras Valley, and all you have to do is tell the state that you are putting the water to beneficial use – you can start pumping without any constraints over how much: you are unregulated. After several years of drought, Scottsdale, Tucson and Phoenix have bought land in La Paz County in hopes of harvesting groundwater and sending it back to their communities through a canal system.

There are excellent reports on all this by NPR and Reveal News – it’s well worth listening. Almarai are not alone:

We had gone out to the desert to look at Almarai. We had found them in this cactus-filled valley in the very remote part of Arizona, and as we're driving down the road, all of a sudden we see a sign for a company from United Arab Emirates, Al Dahra, and we realize that another company has come out here and essentially replicated the exact same thing. They are growing hay. They are using the groundwater. And they are shipping it overseas — in this case, we were told, to China.

And yes, there are local concerns, but:

No one we talked to has issue with these corporations coming in and wanting to make money. And the fact that it's going to Saudi Arabia or China, the locals simply didn't care. But what they did care about is that their water tables are falling. So their domestic wells that they use for their homes are increasingly dropping, and at some point, they're going to lose access to water.

Perhaps those concerns will gather momentum – US News and World Report very recently carried an article titled “Rural Arizona county seeks help protecting water as Middle East farm companies arrive” but therein we hear from Tom Buschatzke, Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources:

People are concerned about the water embedded in crops, obviously. However, our viewpoint is that there is an economic value in growing of crops. Those folks have as much right as any other individual in the state of Arizona to grow their produce, grow their crops, sell them, export them.

So who, exactly, does care? Robert Glennon, a water policy expert at the University of Arizona, certainly does – about water supplies for the entire state. In a recent piece on Slate, he refers to options that are being bandied about – desalination, cloud-seeding etc. – and concludes that the answer is much easier. “We need to stop growing alfalfa in the deserts in the summertime.”

As Elie Elhadj wrote in “Camels Don’t Fly, Deserts Don’t Bloom”, what Saudi Arabia did in exporting wheat and alfalfa was “synonymous with shipping away the country’s finite water resources.” The Saudis seem to have now, belatedly, understood this – but have we?

 

[Note: ever since grappling with the multidimensional and thorny issues of arid lands management in trying to write chapter 8 of the Desert book, I have been fascinated by the achievements and absurdities, globally, but also specifically in the western US. I have had in mind for some time now a modest series of posts on these issues, looking at some historical ironies, highlighting a couple of the compelling books I have read, and reflecting on absurdities and progress. I have, however, been suffering not so much from writer’s block as reader’s incontinence – it’s a vast and tangled set of topics. Having now got started with this story (which I only recently discovered), I am determined that further episodes will appear.

[Note that I have posted an update on this, and an attempt to put it in a more global context] 

[Truck image at the head of this post: http://westernfarmpress.com/alfalfa/photos-desert-alfalfa-production-arizona-california#slide-3-field_images-138142]