About Aquifers
When I was growing up in southern Idaho several decades ago, I don't remember hearing the word, "aquifer." Today it's a household word in every corner of this three-sided state and in many other parts of the country.
An aquifer, I have learned, is a large piece of land that contains water beneath its surface. Apparently the word was invented about 1901 by combining two Latin words, aqua (water) and fer (carry or bear). That's not important except to make a point that we haven't been talking about aquifers forever.
Without a huge underground source of water from our aquifers in Idaho, most of us would be living in a desert so dry and barren that life couldn't be sustained there. (I guess we wouldn't be living at all in that case.) Anyway, thanks to aquifers, all of us in Idaho have access to plenty of drinking water and more than 1.3 billion acres of irrigation water for agriculture and industry. We measure water two different ways. If it's moving, we measure water by its speed in cubic feet per second (cfs). If it's resting on the surface of being held underground in an aquifer it is measured in acre feet (af). One cubic foot of water contains just under 7.5 gallons (7.4805). One acre foot of water contains 325,851 gallons of water.
While people in Idaho have been utilizing ground water for decades, some people who live in extremely dry conditions are totally unaware that beneath their feet is abundance of fresh, clean water. In the dry Judean desert of Israel, for example, water is transported hundreds of miles by commercial carrier while its rain-fed aquifers beneath the surface hold an average of 100 million cubic meters of water. Only about twenty percent of its groundwater water is used.
Do you believe the underground supply of fresh water for Idaho is in jeopardy? How much water do we need? How do we use it? Should the government be doing more to provide fresh water for our crops and families?
Let us hear from you.
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