Reviving Lakebeds Show The Value of Water Conservation – CleanTechnica

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Clean technology isn’t just about relatively new technologies like solar panels and lithium ion batteries. Sometimes, reducing the negative impacts we have on the landscape is as simple as doing less of something or growing crops in a different way. When we do things the wrong way and take too much water from the earth, the impacts can be devastating. But, when we try to strike a better balance with natural water sources, we can eventually put things back the way they should be.

For those unfamiliar, there’s two large bodies of water that have suffered from humans taking too much. The Aral Sea in central Asia was almost completely dried up when the rivers feeding it were redirected for water-hungry cotton farming in the former USSR. But, the problem of idiotic resource allocation wasn’t limited to the Second World. In the United States, we’ve since gone from the Great Salt Lake being at historic heights to record low water levels threatening a complete disappearance of the lake.

A dried up lake, especially ones as large as the Aral Sea and the Great Salt Lake, has obvious negative impacts on animal and plant life, but the effects on humans are even worse. When the sediment at the bottom dries out and gets blown in the wind, it carries along natural and artificial poisons and carcinogens, sickening and killing people for thousands of miles. Large bodies of water are also a big part of weather patterns, leaving entire regions drier when lake effect snow and humidity levels both reduce.

Ironically, the very farms that take water away from the rivers that feed the lakes end up losing in the end. Without the humidity and snow large inland lakes cause, the rivers themselves end up drying up, so nobody wins.

But, there’s some hope, even when most had written the Aral Sea off as a lost cause.

Most of the progress has been made in the North Aral Sea, a part that was cut off from the rest of the sea as it dried up. The northern stretch was saved from evaporation by putting a dam in a narrow section, allowing one of the rivers to concentrate its runoff in that small section. Now that the North Aral is starting to approach its original footprint, extra water can now be allowed over the dam, helping to replenish the rest of the sea.

This was done without cutting back on agriculture by improving the efficiency of crumbling Soviet infrastructure. By lining irrigation canals and repairing leaks in pipes, along with some covering along the more narrow canal segments, the amount of water needed to serve the farms has gone way down while still getting the same crop output, allowing more water to flow to the Aral.

At present, the rate of recovery/refill is sitting at about 1% per year. As more irrigation efficiency and sustainable farming practices proliferate, the rate will increase to 1.5-2% per year. It’s not going to happen overnight, but some of the younger readers might see the sea restored in their lifetimes.

In the United States, the problem was identified and efforts to stop it happened a lot earlier. This has saved the Great Salt Lake from drying up, but a lot more work is needed to get the lake back up toward where it was in the 1980s.

A hearty 2023 snowpack helped stabilize things since 2022, and now academics have determined how much more water the lake needs from the rivers that feed it. Between that and the amount of problems human health would face if it dries up, there’s now a solid plan of action and motivation to get there.

Specifics of how long such a recovery will take are not yet available, but now there’s at least a plan!

Featured image: The Great Salt Lake at Antelope Island, near its record low in August 2022. Photo by Jennifer Sensiba.