RE: Mississippi Draining into Aquifers Instead of Flowing to the Gulf
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Well... I don't think the river is disappearing but it is becoming less stable I think. Maybe we should be asking delta farmers around the area about how much deeper their wells have been increased every decade, and if their pump's are costing more to run. See what their PR says.
If they say something like "We’re draining the ground faster than it refills" then maybe we should be concerned.
Also an aquifer doesn't behave like a drain where you pour a river into, it's more like a saturated sponge in clay. Yes, rivers can feed aquifers. But they don’t suddenly vanish into them unless there’s something called "Karst", which is just limestone caverns, or even massive fractures in the river bed, of which I am not aware of any because I'm not from that area sor know anything about that specific river.
I just did a quick search on it and I am finding that the Mississippi river doesn't run over that kind of geology for hundreds of miles. So maybe, and I'm just guessing, dry season is really good this year.
But this is where I respect your observations the most because the river IS being dried up and my bets are on the same wavelength of you mentioned above. We are breaking the system. We are stealing from the future. We have engineered out natural buffers. We do lie to ourselves with tech fantasies.
So I agree with your sentiments as I find them to be common sense. We should allow more flooding to happen and consider overpumping as theft of natural resources. If we can keep a non negotiable extraction and keep it maintained to living within recharge rates, we should be fine, IMHO.
Where I think the image itself misleads is in scale. It makes it look like the river itself is being drained underground, when what’s really happening is we’ve cut off the floodplain and overpumped the sponge beneath it.
The river still reaches the Gulf, but it’s lost its ability to heal the land on the way there. Giving it that look of despair.
Your solutions point in the right direction. We just have to match tools to the size of the problem. But I'll leave that to the people most qualified for that. I'm just shooting my two cents from my own observations.
The water level in the underlying aquifer has been lowered by ~10M. That's where the Mississippi is going. The pic above well shows the reduction in flow and water reaching the Gulf.
The bed has been eroded away and fluidized, allowing the Mississippi to supply the depleted aquifer below it rather than deliver water into the Gulf. The video well explains the physical processes that have caused this to happen.
It's been a good year for precipitation. The river bed has been destroyed by channelization and flood control structures for decades, and suddenly the river broke through and began pouring into the aquifer below it.
That's exactly what's happened. The volume of water flowing downstream reduced by ~half in three days, at a point upstream from St. Louis where the riverbed was finally punched through.
Thanks!
I admit I haven't seen the video yet. But from what you say is very startling revelation for us all. Thank you for keeping us informed!