Word: ogallala
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same land 40 years later, showing the lush checkerboard farms of America's breadbasket. Now, as if through a strange reversal in time, the second image threatens to fade into the first. For in another 40 years, the territory could backslide into dust and despair. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir of water that transformed much of the Great Plains into one of the richest agricultural areas in the world, is being sucked...
...thickness from 1,000 ft. in Nebraska, where two-thirds of its waters lie, to a few inches in parts of Texas. Although it was first tapped in the 1930s, it has been extensively exploited only since the development of high-capacity pumps after World War II. The Ogallala's estimated quadrillion gallons of water, the equivalent of Lake Huron, have irrigated farms in South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, changing a region of subsistence farming into a $15 billion-a-year agricultural center...
...past three decades, farmers have pumped water out of the Ogallala as if it were inexhaustible. Nowadays they disperse it prodigally through huge center-pivot irrigation sprinklers, which moisten circular swaths a quarter-mile in diameter. The annual overdraft (the amount of water not replenished) is nearly equal to the yearly flow of the Colorado River. Like all aquifers, the Ogallala depends on rain water for recharging, and only a trickle of the annual local rainfall ever reaches it. Gradually built up over millions of years, the aquifer is being drained in a fraction of that time. The question...
...years, maybe," he reckons. On the High Plains of eastern Colorado, the water level has dropped as much as 40 ft. since the 1960s. In parts of Oklahoma, it has dipped that much in four years. Texas, the thirstiest of the eight states, has consumed 23% of its Ogallala reserves since World...