Passageway between flourishing plants and trees at Cadiz Farms (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic) With their communities facing disaster, many western water managers ask: How can we not? The rainstorms that pounded the California coast this month don’t change the fact that the region’s climate is drying and warming, and that as a consequence, the state is running out of water––not just for lawns and crops and households, but to protect homes and lives from the region’s ever-larger wildfires. “How can we possibly justify using it now?” The Fenner aquifer is “an emergency supply,” the University of New Mexico anthropologist David Groenfeldt says. They say existing laws and regulations don’t address the ethics of water use, and that water management in the age of climate change requires not just new pipes, but also new paradigms. That doesn’t mean the Cadiz project and others like it are justified, argue a coalition of anthropologists, philosophers, lawyers, and hydrologists. The plan has persisted through a decade of political and legal challenges. The company’s plan for the aquifer goes far beyond lemons and hemp: Cadiz intends to channel ancient water through two pipelines that would cross hundreds of miles of desert to deliver water to Southern California water districts. In California in 1983, NASA imagery revealing the size of the Fenner aquifer attracted the British entrepreneur Keith Brackpool, who bought the land, co-founded Cadiz, Inc., and started digging wells. In India, desert aquifers fed the Green Revolution, transforming the country into the world’s second-largest producer of wheat. Like oil deposits, the buried water inspired opportunists: In Libya, the dictator Muammar Qaddafi tapped the Nubian sandstone aquifer to power his Great Man-Made River, one of the world’s largest irrigation projects. In the 1950s, oil prospectors began turning up vast, untouched supplies of water, often hidden under deserts. But for most of human history, few knew it existed. Logan Wicks at Cadiz Farms (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)įossil water, also called paleowater, is the largest nonfrozen freshwater resource on the planet. And unless the aquifer is actively refilled, its depletion could have serious consequences for ecosystems aboveground. In the current desert climate, this groundwater will never replenish itself, at least not on a human time scale. According to new radiocarbon and other isotopic age-dating tools, the water in this aquifer hit the surface as rain during the last Ice Age, when mammoths still lived here. The wetter climate that filled the Fenner aquifer ended about 10,000 years ago.Ĭadiz Inc., is drilling for what some call “fossil water”-water that has been buried deep in the Earth for millennia. Just 20 miles from Cadiz Ranch, the ghost town of Bagdad still holds the record for the driest spell in American history: Between 19, this town went 767 consecutive days without rain. If it seems improbable that so much water lies under the desert, it is. But the company’s ranch taps only a tiny fraction of the aquifer, which extends 700 square miles between two of California’s mountain ranges, the New York Mountains and the Old Woman Mountains. Today, the nine water wells on Cadiz Ranch support a 3,500-acre oasis of lemons, hemp, and other crops. Wicks and his colleagues work on behalf of Cadiz, Inc., which has drilled 300 feet below the desert’s surface to reach the massive Fenner aquifer. In fact, there might be as much as 34 million acre-feet, or enough to flood 34 million acres one foot deep. “There’s a hell of a lot more where that came from,” he says, nodding at the spray. Wicks pushes his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head, rubs the short dark bristles on his upper lip, and smiles. Crouching under the shade of a 10-foot lemon tree, at the edge of a citrus orchard that spans hundreds of acres, Wicks is here for water.Ī fine stream bursts from the plastic pipe, forming a rainbow-crested arc before hitting the hot sand. Here on a sandy road off Route 66, past miles of scrubby creosote and spiny mesquite, Wicks monitors the pumps and pipes of a promising desert extraction project.īut he’s not looking for oil or gas. On an early-December morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the Geoscience Support Services geohydrologist Logan Wicks squats in the sand and fiddles with a broken white pipe.
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