The Big Thirst, page 39
Barcelona uses 220 million gallons of water a day—152,777 gallons a minute. So the Sichem Defender’s 5 million gallons of water lasted 32 minutes.
The Contester Defender carried 9.5 million gallons of water, which lasted 62 minutes. That figure is from the French TV news account below:
“Barcelona’s Unprecedented Drought,” France 24, May 26, 2008. http://www.france24.com/en/node/1939450/%252F2.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper has a good account of the arrival of the first water ship, but showed the quantity of water as different from other accounts:
Graham Keely, “Barcelona Forced to Import Emergency Water,” Guardian, May 14, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/14/spain.water.
In terms of supplying water by supertanker, the largest supertankers carry about 3 million barrels of crude oil—at 42 gallons a barrel, that’s 126 million gallons. Barcelona uses 220 million gallons of water a day. And of course, even if you could muster a continuously flowing fleet of two supertankers a day into Barcelona, you’d also have to find enough water to fill those supertankers.
Supertanker information:
Tanker Information, Pacific Energy Partners, May 2005 (PDF). http://www.pacificenergypier400.com/pdfs/TANKERS/TankerBusEmissions.pdf.
18. Thomas Catán, “Barcelona Relies on Water by Ship to Slake Its Thirst Amid Drought,” Times, May 14, 2008. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3927283.ece.
19. The story of Orme, Tennessee, running out of water is based on these news accounts:
Drew Jubera, “Tennessee Town Rations Water,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 21, 2007.
Dick Cook, “Rain Lacking; Troubles Welling,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, September 29, 2007.
“Tennessee Town Runs Out of Water in Southeast Drought,” Associated Press, November 1, 2007. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,307437,00.html.
Rusty Dornin, “Town Has Water Just Three Hours a Day,” CNN, November 8, 2007. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/08/dry.town/index.html.
“Water Flows in Town Where Drought Dried Up Spring,” Associated Press, Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 11, 2007.
20. Steve Helling, “The Town Without Water,” People, December 3, 2007. http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20170838,00.html.
21. Human Development Report, 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis, UN Development Programme. http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2006/.
1.1 billion people don’t have access to drinking water: p. 2.
700 million people live on $2 a day or less: p. 7.
(The full UN report on water and poverty is available from the page above as a PDF file, but it is 422 pages.)
22. Human Development Report, 2006.
1.8 billion people whose water is within 1 km: p. 35.
23. Ibid.
1.1 billion people use just 5 liters per day: p. 5.
24. Ibid.
1.8 million children die annually from water-related disease: p. 6.
25. Florida population, Table S0901, “Children Characteristics,” U.S. Census, 2006–2008. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?-geo_id=04000US12&-qr_nane=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_S0901&-ds_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_.
As of 2008, Florida had approximately 1.3 million children between the ages of 6 and 11, according to the U.S. Census.
26. Human Development Report, 2006.
1.2 billion more people by 2025, 2.4 billion more people by 2050: p. 138.
27. Ibid.
Population up by factor of 4, water use up by factor of 7 since 1900: p. 137.
28. Most people find it surprising that only about 6 percent of the people who have ever lived are alive now. About 10 billion people were born between 1900 and 2010, which means in the years stretching back before 1900, 90 billion people were born and died.
For a fascinating discussion and analysis of the long history of human birth and death, see Carl Haub, “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” Population Today, Population Reference Bureau, 2002. http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx.
29. If we just consider drinking water for humans, 3 liters per day for 30 years equals 32,850 liters per person.
32,850 liters per person × 100 billion people = 3.3 × 1015 liters.
Three liters per day of drinking water as the basic human requirement comes from Peter Gleick, “Basic Water Requirements for Human Activities: Meeting Basic Needs,” Water International, vol. 21 (1996), pp. 83–92 (PDF). http://www.pacinst.org/reports/basic_water_needs/basic_water_needs.pdf.
30. Animals alone outnumber people at least 1,000:1.
Scientists have identified nearly 2 million different species on Earth, of which 1.4 million are animals. (Plants, of course, contain and use water as well.)
Liz Osborn, Number of Species Identified on Earth, Current Results, 2010. http://www.currentresults.com/Environment-Facts/Plants-Animals/number-species.php.
Perhaps the most vivid example of how modest a piece of the biomass humans on Earth represent is the fact that the weight of ants, alone, roughly equals the weight of human beings.
Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 1.
31. Sid Perkins, “Trackway Site Shows Dinosaur on the Go,” Science News, October 26, 2002.
The fossilized, bathtub-shaped depression near La Junta, Colorado, measured 3 meters by 1.5 meters by about 0.25 meters, and so might have held 1.125 cubic meters of liquid, or 300 gallons.
32. The total water consumption for all creatures that have ever lived cannot realistically be calculated. But just to get a sense of the scale, start with the water consumption of all human beings, from note 29, above:
3.3 × 1015 liters.
If animals outnumber people in terms of mass by 1,000:1, and animals have been on Earth at least 500 million years, which is 10,000 times longer than humans:
(1 × 103) × (1 × 104) = 1 × 107 (which is 10 million times the water consumption of humans).
That gives you a figure of:
(3.3 × 1015 liters) × (1 × 107) = 3.3 × 1022 liters of water.
That figure is, if anything, conservative.
For comparison, at any given moment, the USGS says, there are just 1.1 × 1019 liters of liquid fresh water on Earth.
The Water Cycle, USGS. http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesummary.html.
The chart of water distribution is at the very bottom of the page.
33. Yes, dinosaurs had kidneys.
Dinosaurs: Anatomy & Evolution, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. http://paleobiology.si.edu/dinosaurs/info/everything/gen_anatomy.html.
34. Water use to make steel:
Mark Ellis, Sara Dillich, and Nancy Margolis, Industrial Water Use and Its Energy Implications, U.S. Department of Energy (PDF). http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/steel/pdfs/water_use_rpt.pdf.
Water use to cool nuclear power plants:
Got Water? Nuclear Power Plant Cooling Water Needs, issue brief, Union of Concerned Scientists, December 4, 2007, p. 4. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_technology/got-water-nuclear-power.html.
35. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a New York market research firm that closely tracks the bottled-water and wider beverage market, total bottled-water consumption in the U.S. in 2009 was 8.5 billion gallons. There are 8,760 hours in a year, so that’s almost exactly 1 million gallons of bottled water an hour in the U.S.
“Bottled Water Confronts Persistent Challenges,” Beverage Marketing Corporation, July 2010. http://beveragemarketing.com/?section=pressreleases.
36. The USGS reports for water use in the U.S. for 2005, for 1980, and for every five years back to 1950, can be accessed at http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/50years.html.
37. GDP figures for the U.S. economy, in annual dollars and adjusted for inflation, are easily accessible at MeasuringWorth.com, a Web site created by two economists to make national economic data more readily available and easier to use. http://www.measuringworth.com/.
38. Agricultural Productivity in the United States, USDA Economic Research Service. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/AgProductivity/. See the chart, in Excel format, under the heading “National Tables, 1948–2008,” table 1.
39. Martin Wanielista, Stormwater Reuse: A Summary, 2006, University of Central Florida Stormwater Management Academy (PDF). http://www.stormwater.ucf.edu/research/publications/Stormwater%20Reuse%20A%20Summary.doc.
40. The Holy Quran, Surah 21, Al-Anbiya (The Prophets), 21:30.
41. The Holy Quran, Surah 25, Al-Furqan (The Criterion, The Standard), 25:54.
42. Genesis 1:1–4.
43. The way water appears in the English language is a remarkable indicator of our somewhat unconscious attitude about water. Consider, for instance, Shakespeare’s use of water imagery.
Water makes an appearance in everyone of William Shakespeare’s 37 plays. In some, like Macbeth, water consistently fails to cleanse—in this case, it is unable to wash the blood from either the hands or the consciences of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In act 2, scene 2, Lady Macbeth exhorts, “Go get some water, / And wash this filthy witness from your hand.” And a little later in the same scene, she says to Macbeth again, “A little water clears us of this deed.”
Macbeth is not so sanguine. In the same scene, he replies to his wife: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas in incarnadine, / Making the green one red.”
Mostly, water in Shakespeare is a comic foil, or a symbol of inadequacy, deception, or impermanence.
In Much Ado About Nothing, the character Leonato says:
I pray thee, cease thy counsel,
Which falls into mine ears as profitless
As water in a sieve (5.1).
In King Lear, Shakespeare writes, “[W]hen brewers mar their malt with water.” (3.2). In Henry VI, Part 1, “[G]lory is like a circle in the water, / Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself / Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought” (1.2).
At least two expressions involving water that survive to this day come from Shakespeare. In Henry VI, Part 2, Shakespeare writes, “Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.” That’s the Shakespearean version of “still waters run deep.” And as the rest of that moment in the play shows, despite two more water puns, Shakespeare is using water to make a point not about hydrology but about human character:
Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep;
And in his simple show he harbours treason.
The fox barks not when he would steal the lamb.
No, no, my sovereign; Gloucester is a man
Unsounded yet and full of deep deceit (3.1).
And in Henry VIII, a Shakespeare character observes, “Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues / We write in water” (4.2).
The line is inscribed in a sculpture that runs along the banks of the Thames River, near the London reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. Most famously, it echoes the melancholy line John Keats asked to have inscribed on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
In terms of taking a direct slap at water, though, nothing Shakespeare wrote quite matches a line from Othello. At the climax of the play, as Othello is trying to justify having just smothered his wife, Desdemona, he says of her, “She’s, like a liar, gone to burning hell”; “She’d turn to folly, and she was a whore.” And then, the final insult: “She was false as water” (5.2).
She was false as water. Meaning, in Shakespeare’s era, she was changeable, volatile, unreliable. Desdemona could not be trusted. (Othello, of course, thought mistakenly that his wife had been unfaithful.)
Shakespeare wasn’t typically thinking about water, of course—and Othello wasn’t maligning water, he was denouncing his wife. Water was just the linguistic tool. In some ways, that makes the pattern all the more interesting, all the more revealing. Shakespeare’s reflexive attitude about water was wariness.
2. THE SECRET LIFE OF WATER
1. The oldest rocks found to date were formed when Earth was just 300 million years old.
Here is an account from the New York Times:
Kenneth Chang, “Rocks May Be Oldest on Earth, Scientists Say,” New York Times, September 25, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/science/26rock.html.
The discovery is reported in the journal Science:
Richard A. Kerr, “Geologists Find Vestige of Early Earth—May Be World’s Oldest Rock,” Science, September 26, 2008, vol. 321, no. 5897, p. 1755. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/321/5897/1755a.
The technical paper in Science appears in the same issue.
Jonathan O’Neill, et al., “Neodymium-142 Evidence for Hadean Mafic Crust,” Science, September 26, 2008, vol. 321, no. 5897, pp. 1828–1831. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/321/5897/1828.
2. How many molecules of water are there on the surface of the Earth?
There are 1.4 billion cubic km of water on Earth, according to the USGS reference The Water Cycle. http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesummary.html.
To get from cubic km of water to molecules of water, we’re going to use basic chemistry—moles of water, and Avogadro’s number, the number of molecules in a mole of a substance, 6.02 × 1023 molecules per mole.
(1.4 × 109 cubic km of water) × (2.64 × 1011 gallons per cubic km) =
3.7 × 1020 gallons of water on Earth.
(3.7 × 1020 gallons of water) × (8.33 pounds per gallon) =
3.1 × 1021 pounds of water on Earth.
(3.1 × 1021 pounds of water) × (4.54 × 102 grams per pound) =
1.4 × 1024 grams of water on Earth.
(1.4 × 1024 grams of water) ÷ (18 grams per mole of water) =
8 × 1022 moles of water on Earth.
(8 × 1022 moles of water) × (6.02 × 1023 molecules per mole) =
4.8 × 1046 molecules of water on Earth.
If our interstellar cloud were forming 1 million molecules of H2O per second (1 × 106), that comes to 4.6 × 1040 seconds to create all the water on Earth, which is 1.5 × 1033 years—far older than the universe itself. So the water molecules are popping into existence very quickly.
3. How does one even begin to conceive of a space 420 times the size of our solar system in human terms?
One way is to use the journey of a spaceship launched by humans.
Voyager 2, which was the first spacecraft to visit Neptune and is on track to leave the solar system, flies through space at 42,000 miles an hour, fast enough to circle Earth in 35 minutes. It took Voyager 2 twelve years to cover about half the total width of the solar system; to travel across the width of Orion’s “water factory,” Voyager 2 would have to fly for 10,080 years, which is to say, it would have to fly for more than all of recorded human history.
Voyager: The Interstellar Mission, Neptune, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/neptune.html.
4. Report of the Task Group on Reference Man. International Commission on Radiological Protection (Oxford: Pergamon Press, October 1974), p. 364.
5. The curb weight of a 2009 Honda Odyssey minivan is 4,400 pounds. If you take 0.025 percent of that weight, you get 1.1 pounds. As it happens, a half-liter of water weighs exactly 1.1 pounds.
6. The Earth-to-apple comparison works like this.
The average depth of the oceans is 4 km, and the diameter of Earth is 12,756 km. The ratio of ocean cover to Earth’s diameter is 0.00031.
A medium apple is about 3 inches in diameter; the average thickness of an apple skin is 60 microns. Three inches is 76,200 microns, so the ratio of skin thickness to diameter of an apple is 0.00079—the apple skin is 2.5 times as thick relative to the apple as the oceans are compared to the Earth.
The thickness of apple skins is from:
I. Homutova and J. Blazek, “Differences in Fruit Skin Thickness Between Selected Apple Cultivars,” Horticultural Science (Prague), vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 108–113 (PDF). http://www.cazv.cz/userfiles/File/ZA%2033_108–113.pdf.
7. As it happens, the U.S. each day uses just about a cubic kilometer of water for all purposes—drinking, cooking, farming, power plants. The precise number is 1.55 km3. The volumes of water on the surface of the planet are in the millions and billions of cubic kilometers—10.5 million km3 in fresh ground water, 24 million km3 of water frozen in polar ice, 1.3 billion km3 in the oceans.
The volumes, and other data about the movement of water around Earth, are available near the bottom of the USGS Water Cycle Web site. http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesummary.html.
Even a single cubic kilometer of water is not an intuitively understandable unit.
1 km3 = 1 trillion liters, enough to give every person on Earth 300 half-liter bottles of Evian.
Just the amount of humidity in the atmosphere at any given moment, small compared with volumes like the water in the polar ice caps or the oceans, is 12,900 km3. That’s enough water to fill a cube bigger than a mountain: 14 miles on each side, and 14 miles high.
Daily U.S. water consumption, 410 billion gallons of water for all purposes, comes from Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2005, USGS (PDF). http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1344/pdf/c1344.pdf.
8. The American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, had an exhibit about water, Water: H2O = Life, from November 2007 to May 2008, that presented a range of water data, including the evaporation rate for an acre of trees. http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/water/.
NASA reports that a one-acre corn field can evaporate 4,000 gallons of water a day.
The Water Cycle: A Multi-Phased Journey, Earth Observatory, NASA. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/water_2.php.
9. The nine days a molecule spends floating in the atmosphere before returning to Earth as precipitation—“residence time” in the atmosphere is the phrase scientists use—is part of the data presented here:
The Water Cycle—a Climate Change Perspective, Windows to the Universe, National Earth Science Teachers Association. http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/water_cycle_climate_change.html.
