FOUR
THE BLOOD OF THE EARTH
Were water actually what hydrologists deem it to be—a chemically inert substance—then a long time ago there would already have been no water and no life on this Earth. I regard water as the blood of the Earth. Its internal process, while not identical to that of our blood, is nonetheless very similar. It is this process that gives water its movement.
VIKTOR SCHAUBERGER
WATER AND THE HEALTH OF THE EARTH
Water in the earth works like blood in the human body; it performs similar roles of nourishing, communicating, and recycling. Likewise, the health of water is as much an indication of the health of the whole organism as is blood to the body, as Schauberger and environmentalist Sir David Attenborough have both warned.
Earth’s water domain is going through enormous changes brought about by global warming. Climate change is altering the behavior and distribution of rainfall, causing extreme weather, and melting the glaciers, which have been a valuable storehouse of fresh water and maintainer of river flow for the millennia of humanity’s existence. The oceans are losing their ability to store CO2, and their fauna are suffering stress, migration, and species loss.
THE WATER PLANET
Earth is known as the water planet. The wonderful blue color it presents from space derives from the abundant amount of water in its atmosphere (which optically screens out the red end of the spectrum) and from its surface being 70 percent covered by oceans. The atmosphere is composed of 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen and a tiny amount of trace gases. Greenhouse gases, which act like a blanket preventing the planet from losing too much heat, are a tiny fraction of the total atmosphere, spatially limited mostly to the layer known as the troposphere. Water vapor accounts for 60 percent of the greenhouse effect, CO2 for roughly 36 percent.
As the principal component of this planet’s surface, water is constantly moving, circulating, and interchanging. In its vaporous state it swirls in great streams, moving heat and cold from one latitude to another, balancing the temperature.
Despite its ubiquitous presence, water prefers to play a mysterious role. Like the chorus in a Greek play, it stays in the background, yet it is the foundation of all processes. Its role is a dichotomy, on the one hand passive—for it does not in itself initiate processes, being the vehicle for change; on the other, active and facilitating. The outcome of energetic processes may be beneficial or catastrophic but water, in one of its three states, makes it all happen.
Our incomplete knowledge of water’s role and function makes it hard to predict the processes of instability and change that we are experiencing today. Water magnifies and accelerates a process like that of climate change. The future of humanity on the planet will to some extent rest on our ability to understand that the critical points of the warming cycle are determined by positive feedback loops that depend on water. For example, we have only recently come to understand that the oceans are the largest store of CO2. Teeming with life, they have stored enormous amounts of minerals and salts washed down from the continents over three billion years. They have their own complex circulatory system, which balances temperatures and nutrients. The landmasses receive most of their fresh water as precipitation derived from the oceans. Much of this finds its way into the surface of the earth, forming artesian basins and enormous inaccessible aquifers. But there are even greater amounts of ancient water locked up in rocks and volcanic material from the very formation of our planet, which may also be making new primary water. All of this water circulates, carrying energy.
The habitable mass of the oceans is hundreds of times greater than that of the land and the atmosphere just above it. Although it has been calculated that 90 percent of life is in the oceans, we still know much less about the oceans and their history than about the land. This study, however, is concerned with fresh water. Water, as the vehicle for life, may indeed have its own evolutionary journey.
DISTRIBUTION OF WATER
Ninety-seven percent of the world’s water is in the oceans. The remaining 3 percent is fresh water, of which:
| Ice sheets and glaciers | 75 percent (much of which will be lost by global warming) |
| Very deep groundwater | 14 percent (inaccessible) |
| Less deep groundwater | 10 percent (for example, aquifers) |
| Lakes | 0.3 percent |
| Rivers | 0.3 percent |
| Soil | 0.06 percent |
| Atmosphere | 0.035 percent |
ICE SHEETS AND GLACIERS
For the past three-thousand million years, our planet has switched to and fro between a world that basks in a greenhouse climate (90 percent of its existence) and one that is largely covered by ice. There have been at least four major ice ages. The most recent started about 1.8 million years ago and has still not ended, with vast ice sheets still covering Greenland and Antarctica. The ice started as snowflakes that consolidated into grains of ice with the weight of continually consolidating snow.
Earlier in the current ice age, continent-size ice sheets spread over North America and northwest Europe. Ice caps and glaciers ground down the bedrock, carving out huge valleys. Ice has had more impact on Man than any other environmental influence in the past two million years, principally because of its beneficial climatic effects.
Man evolved during the Pleistocene Ice Age, which had some four major advances interspersed with warm interglacial periods when the climate was sometimes warmer than now. In times of warming, glacial meltwater formed huge lakes that, when the dams that held them back were eroded, caused inundations on a continental scale.
Earth has some 30 million cubic km (nearly 19 million cubic miles) of ice, enough to cover the entire planet to an average depth of 60 meters (200 feet).1 Ten percent of our landmass is snow and ice: 84.16 percent in Antarctica, 13.9 percent in Greenland, 0.77 percent Himalayas, 0.51 percent North America, 0.15 percent South America, and 0.06 percent Europe.2 However, scientists are now predicting that enough of it will melt by the end of this century to flood most coastal cities and plains.
The Greenland ice cap has been experiencing unprecedented and accelerating melting in the past decade; the entire structure is becoming unstable. It is comprised of enough ice to raise sea level by six meters (twenty feet). Its rate of melting is accelerating, but it still occupies 80 percent of the island up to a depth of 3,000 kilometers and a volume of 3 million cubic kilometers. There is a risk that the freshwater melt flowing down either side of Cape Farewell (Greenland’s southern point) could cause the beneficial Gulf Stream’s motion to stop.
In the Arctic what has surprised scientists is how quickly the sea ice is melting. At the present rate there may be no summer sea ice by 2020. It has a strong albedo effect, reflecting the summer sun to keep the Arctic waters cool.*20 When this is lost, summer warming will accelerate.
The Antarctic ice cap covers 13 million square kilometers, one and a half times the area of the United States, and contains 30 million cubic kilometers (7.2 million cubic miles) of ice. It has an average thickness of approximately 2,000 meters (6,600 feet), in places reaching depths of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) or more. The Antarctic summer (when the ice melts) has lengthened from sixty to ninety days since the 1970s. Since measurements began in the 1950s, the average temperature on the Antarctic peninsula has risen by approximately 2.5°C (4.5°F).3
The most dramatic sign of change in the Antarctic in 2002 was the sudden breaking off of the Ross Ice Shelf, 400-feet thick and roughly the size of Spain. As it had been floating on the sea, its melting has not much affected sea level.
Polar ice makes the temperate latitudes much more habitable. This cooling is amplified by the negative feedback of the white surface reflecting the sun’s energy in summer. An unglaciated planet, without polar ice caps and a developed system of mountain glaciers, does not favor Man’s evolutionary potential. It is becoming clear that without polar ice to balance tropical heat, Earth’s climates will become more extreme. This changed environment will be hostile to our species and will almost certainly contribute to a rapid drop in the current world population.
The glaciers of the Himalayas and associated ranges function as a “third pole.” Because they feed the giant rivers of Asia and support half of humanity, their disappearance will cause much deprivation, particularly for the people of China, India, and central Asia (see chapter 17).
If the glacial meltwater disappears from the lush and productive Kashmir valley (reclaimed from a primordial lake), there will be no summer surface water in the valley. If the groundwater is not replenished by the melt, it will become desiccated and barren.
We live in transitional times. Theoretically, we are still in one of those exceptional periods favored by Nature for evolutionary accelerations, an ice age. Yet, clearly the environment is changing before our eyes, and the world will look very different by the end of this century. But the great water cycles will continue, with increasing potency.
DEEP GROUNDWATER
There is an enormous amount of water distributed through the deep crust of our planet. An aquifer is formed where it collects in a basin, absorbed by layers of permeable rock or sand. The upper limit may be the water table, or the layers may be many hundreds of meters below the surface and millions of years old. American, Australian, and Russian scientists have discovered substantial water resources in Earth’s mantle. One of these is a body equal in volume to the Arctic Ocean beneath eastern Asia at a depth of roughly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).
In total, these underground resources probably represent 90 percent of the fresh water on Earth. Only a small amount of this is accessible, and historically any drawing off has always been replenished by rainfall seepage. In the past century, industrial farming techniques and the growth of cities have created enormous demands for water that could be supplied only by exploiting the accessible aquifers far beyond their ability to be replenished.*21 As much as 80 percent of all fresh water is consumed by irrigation, much of which now comes unsustainably from aquifers.
There is, as yet, little understanding of how to gauge when extraction of resources from an aquifer is sustainable—that is, the refill balances the extraction. In fact, most of the world’s aquifers are fast depleting (see box).
Aquifer Depeletion
Anything that obstructs natural replenishment can assist overexploitation, for example, land development and building, roads and parking lots, inappropriate crops (cotton) or trees (thirsty eucalyptus); swamps and wetlands drained for farming; accelerated water flow from straightened rivers and flood prevention—all prevent water from sinking into the ground.
When an aquifer beneath a city is drained, land subsidence follows (25 feet in Mexico City over the past one hundred years). When commercial plantations and urban fill replace natural ecosystems and small farms, flash floods will increase and urban pollution will contaminate the surface and groundwaters.
Countries importing amounts in excess of their own water supplies: Libya, 711percent; Saudi Arabia, 722 percent; United Arab Emirates, 1,553 percent, which does not include bottled drinking water. Imported quarts of bottled drinking water annually per person: France 154, Spain 145, Mexico 179, Italy 194 (reference: Caldecott, Water: The Causes, Costs, and Future of a Global Crisis).
The quality of the water varies considerably. The vast Artesian Basin of Australia has a high sodium content, making it unsuitable for crop irrigation. As a powerful solvent, water picks up and dissolves many chemicals and gases, such as sulfates, sodium, or the radioactive gas radon. In India serious groundwater contamination by arsenic and fluoride has led to bone deformities and crippling organic damage.
LAKES
Lakes contain the largest amount of accessible fresh water. Many are found in recently glaciated terrain where natural dams were formed by retreating ice sheets or glaciers (for example, the Great Lakes of North America). The very deep ones are found in regions of tectonic movement or in rift valleys (Lake Baikal in Siberia, the African Rift Valley lakes, Loch Ness in Scotland); they are the oldest and are often still growing in depth and volume. Some form in volcanic craters (Crater Lake, Oregon), or under an ice sheet (the enormous Lake Vostok under Antarctica). Then there are salt lakes, which have no outlet (Caspian and Dead Seas).
Deep lakes tend to be layered so that the cold lower water is not disturbed. Nutrient-rich lakes have complex fauna and flora, sometimes with algal blooms and poor ecosystems due to lack of dissolved oxygen.
Many lakes are now severely polluted if they are fed by rivers from agricultural land or are near cities. Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest, largest (in volume), and deepest lake contains about 1,700 species of plants and animals unique to the lake. It holds 27 percent of the world’s surface fresh water, of pristine quality. This is now under threat from a planned uranium processing plant in the vicinity. Environmental protesters have been harassed by the Russian government.4
The river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once . . . there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.
HERMANN HESSE, SIDDHARTHA