This is about water but oil and coal play a big role.
4 Likes
I’m going to put this in the “wait and see” pile. This is a single report, and it says that the extraction of 2150 gigatons of water extracted from below the surface is changing the tilt of the planet.
Meanwhile the plant itself weighs around 6 billion trillion tons.
So it’s 2,150,000,000 tons out of
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons,
Math puts that at 2,150/6,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, That works out to about 0.000000000000358% change, assuming every drop pumped out stays out. But it doesn’t, of course. Only a fraction old the water goes into the fruits and vegetables (and animals) being watered. Let’s say half, with the rest winding up on the ground between rows or evaporating and forming storms which come down a few hundred miles down the road. It doesn’t make it back to the aquifer, I’ll grant, but it also doesn’t leave the planet or even the general area where it’s pumped.
Meanwhile we know that axis has been changing around over hundreds of thousands, even millions of years; we can read it in the locked-in magnetic signatures of rocks all across the planet long before groundwater was being pumped at all.’’
Yes, we’ve all seen a top start to wobble when it gets near the end of its run, and we know that a little weight redistributed will make your car tires run funny, but the disparity between those numbers and what’s being proposed here is so gargantuan, well, it’s hard to see the parallel in that light.
I’m skeptical.I’m open to being convinced, but it’s ain’t it, not yet.
4 Likes
Not sure any of us here are upper level stats people who can prove this out. You are forgetting momentum in your calculations. The data miners in this are saying they can factor things to prove it out. I doubt in this they are liars. The momentum part of this makes sense. But leaving out oil production is odd.
But it is not just the groundwater that is mentioned. It is also the shifting of lots of water mass from ice/snow/etc due to global warming. Glaciers disappearing and massive volumes of ice (all over the planet) are melting and entering the oceans, thus adding a significant mass/volume of liquid that moves fairly readily compared to the previous solid mass it had been (ice/snow/glacier, etc).
NASA estimates Antarctica loses 150 billion tons/yr of ice while Greenland loses 270 billions tons/yr (since 2002). Far more than the amount of water pumped from underground–especially considering the water underground is somewhat/sort-of “evenly distributed” over the planet (so it vaguely could offset one reduction in an area with a reduction in a different area of roughly the same amount). That does not happen with Greenland or the Antarctic areas that lost ice.
3 Likes