Fast forward to yesterday (August 26, 2014), the Washington Post posted a story with this headline: "
Why no one should freak out about the giant crack that opened in the Mexico desert." The Post reports:
The chair of the geology department at the University of Sonora, in the northern Mexican state where this “topographic accident” emerged, said that the fissure was likely caused by sucking out groundwater for irrigation to the point the surface collapsed.
“This is no cause for alarm,” Inocente Guadalupe Espinoza Maldonado said. “These are normal manifestations of the destabilization of the ground.” I'm sorry, no. These are not normal manifestations of natural activity, this is the result of human activity run amok. Just because Cthulhu isn't clambering out of the breach to wreak havoc on humankind DOES NOT MEAN we shouldn't be alarmed by the fact we've sucked so much water out of the ground that the surface of the earth is collapsing.
Groundwater reserves can take centuries to recharge, so industrial-scale extraction of water for big agriculture in the middle of the desert cannot continue forever. In the US, water managers are facing an uphill battle to control water use in the Colorado River Basin and from the Ogallala Aquifer which stretches from Texas to South Dakota. Factor in that
hydraulic fracturing is permanently removing water from the hydrological cycle in some of the most drought-stressed regions of the West, and you have a serious problem.
To be clear, the southwestern US and western Mexico are not necessarily about to fall in on themselves all at once, but they are struggling to support large-scale agriculture, enormous demand for water from a revitalized onshore oil and gas industry, and a growing population. Maybe this chasm in the desert doesn't herald the coming of Judgement Day, but perhaps we should be 'freaking out' about our poor judgement.
