The Water Crisis: Understanding The Problem | Part 1

 The Water Crisis: Understanding the Problem

By: Abhijay Bhosale

Our water is going through a crisis. Droughts, water depletion, melting polar ice caps, plastic pollution, and much more. In the end, these can be directed at 1 thing. Human. Carelessness. Human carelessness means global warming, human carelessness means plastic pollution, and human carelessness means drying up rivers. We’re using up water too fast, and it’s at the top of the agendas of both governments and the normal person. But it’s a crisis, a big one. This needs cooperation, hard work, determination, and will by no means be easy. The water crisis isn't just droughts in California, the floods in Pakistan, or the depletion of the Polar Ice Caps. It's all of these, and more, combined.

The Ocean's Gyres

All oceans have currents. They're streams under and over the water in where the Coriolis Effect (the Earth's spin on its axis) and thermodynamics rule all. Based on the uneven heating of the earth and sun, the currents go in different ways. When things are dropped into the oceans, they eventually get picked up in one of these currents, and they end up in collections of waste known as gyres. This has caused massive build-up of plastics and microplastics in those areas, and until we stop, it'll only become worse.

Oil Spills

Oil spills might seem like a thing of the past, but just this year there was a major oil spill in Peru that most don't know about. The eruption of the volcanic eruption in Tonga caused (investigations are still going on) an oil tanker to spill 6,000 barrels of oil into the ocean. The surrounding fishing industry and wildlife has been massively depleted, this isn't even one of the most serious oil spills, with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill having a peak of 4 MILLION barrels of oil spilled. Most of these problems are usually human error, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a way to stop it. This is usually a result of careless companies. These are mistakes, but mistakes so big, so disastrous, that they need to be addressed. What some people do is commandeer the ship with minimal experience. For companies, hauling oil is a just a step in the whole process. A time-consuming, annoying step. They need transport the crude oil to places around the world, and the easiest way for them is by ship. Since it isn't paid much attention to but is also one of the most uncontrollable parts of the journey, it creates a recipe for failure. Most people on the ship are underpaid and have done this hundreds of times, enough times to not care. Carelessness is what leads to disasters in the end. Most people operating the equipment aren't educated enough to understand the value of what they're doing, along with what they can do

Four Problems With Our Oceans

Water Consumption:

Water is being consumed at a record pace. The US is consuming 322 billion gallons of water per day, soda companies are buying massive water sources to fuel their supply, and all of this is happening as the population keeps on growing and our ice caps keep on melting. Although we can't really blame out older generations for not knowing this, why aren't we doing that much to solve it? We have the solutions, why can't we do it. Well, problems need time. Time is a commodity we simply don't have for something as big as water.

Water Diseases:

Diseases like typhoid, E. coli, cholera, and salmonella could be viewed as a crisis of yesterday. In reality, it's not true at all. These diseases can be found in almost all water, it's just that our water purification facilities keep it out. But around the world, clean water isn't a commodity taken for granted. It's something to strive for. Even then, the seemingly clear water can have microbes out to kill in them. Even in the US, in clear ponds and lakes, a brain-eating amoeba was found. That's pretty self-explanatory. Water diseases aren't just in 3rd world countries, but have long found their place with us.

Water Toxication:

Oil spills are mistakes, fatal ones at that. They destroy everything. Reefs, sealife, wildlife, and even us. No one do it on purpose... right? After all, we spent decades making the perfect laws to make sure it could never happen, even on accident. Well, you were wrong. Almost every single industry is taking the water for granted, and using it as their own personal trash can. The airline industry dumps their airplane cleaners into water, the meat industry uses it as a ready to go sewer for their byproducts, the chemical industry in all it's self-righteous glory now puts their poison into groundwater supplies. But what can they do? They can stop, of course, but what good is that. Just one major company stopping everything for one problem would be catastrophic. So mot choose to ignore what's happening, pretend it's not there.

Water Pollution:

Everyone calls the ocean a soup. Salt, meat, and water. Old pun, right? Well I'd like to add on to that. Why's the ocean a soup? It has salt, meat, water, and plastic spoons. Over 1 trillion pieces of plastic are in the ocean, waiting to be consumed by fish, birds, and ultimately, much more. Everyone knows about the effect of plastic on animals, but what about on humans? Humans pollute the ocean, fish eat the pollution, humans eat fish. In the end, humans eat pollution. We're living in a world of our own consequences, but there's still ways to make it right. Hopefully it happens before we won't need a plastic bag to carry our fish; before the plastic bag already be inside of the fish.

Global Warming

Climate change is based on 2 main factors:

• Air Pollution

• Overpopulation

Now we don't really have a solution for overpopulation, that's something deserving of its own article. But air pollution... hmm. Air pollution is linked more closely to water pollution than you think. Like in the China-Pakistan graph, hotter air means more evaporation, which means more rain. Although rain is kind of out there, it's still water so it counts. Our main focus is to limit greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, things like that. Carbon dioxide is emitted from almost every power plant in the world, nitrous oxide comes from wastewater with nitrogen-based materials (see, it's linked to water), and methane come from... cow farts. Not as climactic, but it still has almost double the emissions of nitrous oxide. These molecules are lighter that air, so they go into the atmosphere where they trap sunlight, essentially creating a Venus-like atmosphere. To solve Carbon dioxide, we already have renewables, but to perfect the output of these, we need to focus a lot more on its technology. For methane, although not all of it is cow farts, limiting the meat industry to more humane and less cruel ways can do astronomical things for the public and the cows. And to solve nitrous oxide... we need to follow this presentation. Reading it is the first step, but acting is always second.

The 3 Ls: The Most Common Ways To Pollute The Ocean

Littering:

Littering can be indirect or direct. Since indirect closely flows with Leakage, let's look at direct. Picture a beachball, an inflatable one made out of plastic. A family's playing volleyball in the ocean when suddenly, the ball goes too far out of reach. The family's mildly annoyed, but it's easily laughed off in a few minutes. But the beachball's still there. Within a few hours, it's gone from the mainland, still drifting. It's lonely. Until it hits a current. As the beachball's sucked in, he meets him new friends. One's called Card Board, another Plas Tic. He keeps finding new friends until he sees it; a whole community. Thousands, millions, billions of people just like him, gather in a place called "The Gyre." It's paradise for the ball, but not for the animals. Not for us. Not for humanity.

Leakage:

Leakage comes indirectly from landfills. In this growing world, we need dedicated areas to store out waste. So, we made landfills. Giants places where hundreds of trucks come each day and dump off their load it there. With so much weight, the ground goes deeper. Remember that icky liquid in your garbage? Good thing it's gone. Except it's not. It seeps trough the ground, the ground reaches an underwater river. The liquid gets swept away into the ocean, right into a coral reef. A fish is lazily floating there, when the pungent liquid hits him. It's been washing over him for quite some time now, but this one is particularly gross. It runs away, runs right into a fishing net. It gets hoisted into the boat, and put inside of a store. The same fish will be sold to unsuspecting buyers, people who innocently and indirectly contribute to this process each day. And that fish, ends up on your dinner plate.

Legal Not Really (L.N.R.):

Legal-not-really is what the big companies use. Instead of making a story about this one, I'll list a few direct solutions. One way to abide by laws and keep your interests is by just taking a "low production year." Most companies that can afford to bribe politicians and keep their doings a secret are usually stable ones. So for one year, solve most of your problems. Develop solutions, make new ideas, maybe even improve your technology. Do something where you can cut down costs (what industries call "not bribing") and then continue like normal. You can even just continue with business as usual while spending a portion of money to R&D or outside scientists to help them stay clean. Legal-not-really is a big game a chess; a whole section where nothing is black or white but grey. Taking steps to improvement will naturally pave the way to what's right.

Conclusion

Understanding and finding solutions needed come first from understanding the problem. In the next edition, we'll talk about the solution. This is a topic that need more research than most. For that, it's split into 2 parts. Stay tuned for next week's edition and this edition's part 2.