What is a Ogallala Aquifer?
Do you know we're your water comes from? If you live in the Midwest it probably come from the Ogallala Aquifer. An aquifer is a giant natural pocket of water underground. Aquifers are like huge underground lakes but have tunnels and different passageways.Water encyclopedia tells us ‘’the Ogallala Aquifer is so big it can fill Lake Huron and then some!’’
The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the biggest aquifer and “scientific america” tells us the Ogallala Aquifer is under neither Nebraska,Kansas,Oklahoma, South Dakota, and parts of Texas. “Water encyclopedia”says Ogallala Aquifer has been there for hundreds of thousands of years. It's 174,000 square meters miles and in some places 1000 feet deep. The Ogallala Aquifer has one quadrillion gallons of water. The water that gets in the the Ogallala Aquifer is that water that didn't get a evaporated in the water cycle. The water seeps through the ground and get to aquifer.
The Ogallala Aquifer pumps out an average 332 million gallons a day. For 25 years the aquifer drops a foot a year and in some places it drops 2 feet a year. If the Ogallala Aquifer goes dry, a lot of people would not get water. The economy would drop because people that use the aquifer for watering crops would not grow anything. The Kansas City star says “The disappearing water supply poses a twofold danger. It could end a way of life in a region where the land and its bounty have been purchased by the toil and sweat of generations of farmers. It also threatens a harvest worth $21 billion a year to Kansas alone and portends a fast-approaching, and largely unstoppable, water crisis across the parched American West”. The Ogallala Aquifer has a big part of the Great Plains. If it runs out the will. Be a huge crisis the be will a lot of people moving lot of farmland that would be useless and the economy will drop because in that area is a big producer in wheat,corn,and milo. So when the water goes everything will change. For more information check out www.waterencyclopedia.com.
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v19/n1s/images/scientificamericanearth0309-32-I1.jpg
