Recharging water
The Australian government has launched a us $220 million rescue plan for the Great Artesian Basin, where water is increasingly getting depleted due to over- exploitation and wastage. The 1,71 1,000-square-km basin a vast, subterranean "dish" of sandstone laden with water and created more than 195 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs - is the world's biggest reservoir of groundwater.
Spread through a fifth of the continent, beneath Queensland, South Australia, New South Wales and the Northern Territory, it holds an estimated 8.7 billion mega litres of water, some of which has been there for two million years. Even an Olympic sized swimming pool holds only about two mega litres (two million litres). The water supports the annual agricultural production for around 200,000 people.
The chairperson of the Great Artesian Basin Consultative Committee, John Seccombe, said that grazers draw more than 500,000 megalitres annually, with livestock using only 100,000 megalitres annually, The rest of the water is disappearing through evaporation via thousands of kilometres of open drains or seeping away into the ground.
The committee produced a draft management plan that will see 34,000 kilometres of open drains converted to piped water systems. The National Farmers' Federation executive director, Wendy Craik, estimates that the volume of water lost due to wastage could be cut by 95 per cent.
Normally, costly windmills and pumps are used to drill water. But, the beauty of the Artesian Basin is that when a drill is made to extract water, the basin has enough pressure to force water to the surface, Vaile said. But over-extraction had caused artesian pressures to drop.
The first bore was drilled in 1878. By 1915, 2,000 megalitres were being drawn each day from around 1,500 bores. Subsequently, the water level and the pressure dropped. By 1995, about 1,200 megalitres were being drawn everyday. The committee estimates that 300,000 megalitres of the wasted water will have to be saved to protect the basin.
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