Word: ogallala
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...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...
Although the cause of the trouble is obvious, the cure is not. Indeed, there may be no fundamental solution to the ebbing of the Ogallala. "We can prolong the supply," concludes John Weeks, a U.S. Geological Survey engineer who heads a five-year U.S.G.S. study of the situation, "but we are mining a limited resource, like gold, and we can't solve the ultimate depletion problem...
Last week a committee representing the Governors of states that tap the Ogallala published a list of 20 recommendations for action. Most of the suggestions, based on a $6 million federal study of the problem, involved stopgap efforts rather than cures. Except one. The committee wants further study of a proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers for huge canal systems that would import water from South Dakota, Missouri and Arkansas. The routes - all of which would be uphill - range in length from 376 miles to 1,135 miles. The cost- from $3.6 billion to $22.6 billion - currently places...