Huachuca Experiment

[Targan]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Anyway, there are so many wells pumping so much water out of the ground here that the few rivers that used to run year round here all dried up decades ago. There's only a couple left now and they barely qualify as streams. The water table has dropped dramatically over the past century. "Recharge" programs pump water back into the ground but never enough to replace what's pumped out. Perhaps, in a T2K scenario where 2/3 of the greater Tucson area population have died or been driven off, the aquifers will have time to recover somewhat.

That makes a lot of sense. Here in my city we've had similar problems with too much water being drawn from the main big aquifers. Sadly a lot of unique stygofauna became extinct when the water table in the caves around Perth was too greatly reduced. Our state government has built two big desalination plants which has somewhat reduced the problem but desalination is a bloody expensive way to provide potable water and it's completely impractical in a T2K situation.

Originally Posted by Webstral

Several years ago, I posted some findings on how other folks in the Third World grow crops in semi-arid climates. I won't repeat it here, other than to say that in some cases the contour of the land is exploited to multiple the precipitation that soaks into the ground where the crops are being grown...

Absolutely. Several pre-Columbian South American civilizations were able to support impressively large populations on what we today would consider very marginal farmland through the use of man-made terraces, careful water re-routing, soil conservation and improvement, etc. You still see terracing there and in parts of Africa and SE Asia.