Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I saw a very interesting You know, I'm a science nerd, right,
so I saw a super interesting article recently describing a
big project and expedition to look for large quantities of
fresh water in a place I might not have thought of.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And joining us to.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Talk about this project, which is called Expedition five.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh one, is Brandon Dugan.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And Brandon is a professor in the Department of Geophysics
at the Colorado School of Minds and one of the
lead scientists on Expedition five oh one. So, first, Brandon,
good morning, and thanks for making time for us, and
welcome to KOA.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Good morning, ros, thank you for having me. I'm excited
to share some of the science we accomplished this summer.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So tell us where are you looking for fresh water
in this project?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yes, this project specifically was targeting fresh water beneath the ocean,
in the sediments beneath the ocean. So we were working
this summer between about twenty and forty five miles south
of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard in the Atlantic Ocean. Water
depths from about one hundred and twenty to one hundred
and fifty feet of water, and then we were drilling
(01:13):
down into the sediments beneath that and actually capturing fresh
water in those sediments beneath the ocean.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
All right, this is probably a very obvious question. But
is the purpose of this to find enough fresh water
to really do something important with it and add to
the country or the world or whatever fresh water supply,
or is there some other scientific interest here or both?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
So it's both definitely ross. So the first part about
it was this project somewhat originated about fifty or sixty
years ago when the US Geological Survey was looking for
hydrocarbons along the East coast of the United States and
other minerals. They drilled some wells in the Atlantic Ocean.
They didn't find any hydrocarbon, but they found some fresh
(02:01):
water beneath the ocean, and we're sort of curious about it,
but it wasn't their main mission, so they didn't study it.
We did additional work over the last twenty years to
develop this drilling project to really go out and understand
how much freshwater is there, how it got there, which
is sort of the basic science question, why would we
have fresh water beneath the ocean in those sediments anyway?
(02:23):
But then the secondary follow on is if there are
large volumes of fresh runner out there. How can we
use that as our water needs grow in society, And
so first documenting and demonstrating where it came from, and
then down the road we could think about how it
could be used as one piece to the puzzle to
solve the growing water crises we have in our country
but also around the world.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Let's take those things in turn. What's the best theory.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I don't know whether you're at a position where there's
a lot of competing theories or there's one more accepted
theory about how it got there.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yeah, so there's really three primary ways that it could
have gone there. We were trying to test all three
of those. This summer. We collected the data to test
all three of them. So one is that rainfall happening
on land today. I think coastal Massachusetts, Rhode Island is
seeping into the ground and just from the elevation on
land is being pushed farther and farther offshore. And so
(03:16):
we would call that a modern recharge system. It's just
like water that people get out of a groundwater well
today on land it just happens to be under the ocean.
That's not our leading hypothesis here, we just can't find
enough energy to push water twenty thirty forty miles off
shore with the topography we have in Massachusetts. So the
other two sort of hypotheses that we're looking at are.
(03:38):
One is, right now, we see tides. We see ocean
going up, you know, a few feet every day, depending
on tidal cycles, depending where you are. Over longer geologic
time periods, sea level was two hundred feet lower than
it was today, so we had much larger beaches. Rainfall
could then seep into the ground. When sea level came
back up those two hundred feet, it buried all that
(03:59):
fresh water, so it's old rainfall that's been trapped. Another
sort of corollary hypothesis is especially for places like Massachusetts
or high latitudes. If you think about northern Europe where
this has also been propose, we used to have big
glaciers sitting out there, and the bottom those glaciers have
water that's melting, and that glacier then pushes that water
into the sediments and can push it very far off shore,
(04:22):
because the glaciers might be something like a mile thick
or something like that, and so it's really was it
modern rainfall, rainfall in the past or part of a
glacier in the past. From what we looked at this summer,
we think it's primarily driven by old glaciers, but it
might have some component of modern rainfall. But we need
a few more months or years to really dive into
(04:44):
the details of the chemistry of the water and some
of the chemistry of the sediments to understand when it
really got there. But we have the samples to do.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
That between theory two and theory three, with theory two
being old rainfall and theory three being glaciers which are
presumably also old, which one of them is an older
water source? And then do you test that by something
like nuclear decomposition like carbon fourteen, or how do you
test the age of water?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Yes, that's a great, great question. Most likely the last
time we had significant glaciers in North America was eighteen
to twenty thousand years ago, but there were cycles before that,
so it could go back maybe even four hundred thousand
or five hundred thousand years. The rainfall one would be young, old,
but not as young as the old glaciations, and so
(05:35):
we're thinking it's these older glaciations producing the water now
how do we get the ages. It depends on how
it is, but it is through isotopes or radioactive decay
as one process we can do it. We can look
at carbon that's dissolved in the water. So we have
a group of scientists who are expert and looking at carbon.
They're measuring those samples right now to see if they
(05:56):
can get an age from the carbon fourteen. We can
also look at other iceopes. We're looking at krypton eighty one,
which is a noble gas isotope that we can use
that can help us look farther back than carbon fourteen.
And so we use multiple techniques to try and hone
in on what that age is and we pull those
isotopes out of the water that we pulled out of
the ground.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
This summer, we're talking with Brandon Dugan, professor from Colorado
School of Mines and one of the lead scientists on
Expedition five oh one, which is searching for fresh water
off the coast of New England. So let's talk about
the structure of the water. So obviously, even though you're
working on water here, I'm sure you are well acquainted
(06:39):
with the geology of oil and in the geology of oil.
You can find oil sometimes in fairly large concentrations, like
a giant bowl of oil. And then you can also
find oil in a structure that is a little bit
more like a sponge where you might not might not
even look very if you were looking at it. But
(07:01):
this is why they created hydraulic fracturing to kind of
get the oil out of this sponge. And there's an
immense amount there, even if you might not really know it.
So what are the structures like as far as you
can tell so far that you're holding the water.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Yeah, so this is something that was really fascinating to
me and the rest of our team this summer. Is
when we drill down and we're drilling, it's a six
and the five acents hole that we're making the ground,
so not a big hole into the ground that we're making.
We're pulling sediments back up to the surface. And we
had a mixture of clay. You can view it as
something you might buy it at a store to make
(07:37):
a coffee mug out of or something like that. We
saw that type of material. We also thought saw things
looked like beach sand, and the interesting thing was both
of them were saturated with fresh water, which tells us
that this was a pretty large event that was able
to get water in these sand systems where it's really
easy to move water through, but also into some of
these clays where it's hard to get water in. So
(07:57):
that's one of the pieces of information that's leading me
interpret that it's largely glaciers. I need something with a
lot of energy to floce that fresh water into these
clays where it's hard to move water around. And also
interesting you mentioned these dry clays from the oil and gas.
We saw some of these dry clays or what looked
like dry clays offshore that were saturated with the freshwater,
(08:19):
but we also saw things that looked like modeling plays.
So the water was sort of agnostic of what kind
of material it was in, which is sort of counterintuitive
to thinking about hydrologic systems or oil hydrocarbon systems like
you mentioned.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
All right, I have a really dumb question. Why is
the whole six and five eight inches? Is that some
round number in a metric system.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It's actually quite the opposite. It's just the US standard.
So the drill bit industry is dominated by at least
in US, drilling is drilled by US manufacturers and they
have drill bit sizes like six and five eighths inches
and nine and three quarters inches, just whatever they designed
at the time.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
All right, and last question for you on Brandon, what
are your estimates and what are your levels of confidence
in your estimates about how much water there might be?
And then, especially since you're saying, you know it's in
clays and so on, if it's enough water that it
could really make a difference, you know, like to a
(09:19):
municipal or a you know, the whole East Coast water
supply or something.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
How do you get it out? How do you transport it?
Speaker 3 (09:27):
And all that great great questions that we've been thinking about.
So we'll start with the beginning, our back of the
envelope calculations before we started drilling, where if you if
you sort of added up all of the water in
New England, a frame of reference would be it'd be
enough fresh water to supply all of New York City.
(09:48):
It's fresh water needs for eight hundred years or so. Wow,
And it's not going to go to all the New
York City. But that's just sort of to give you
an idea of how much water it is. Looking at
the largest city in the U ask how much water
they need. Our documentation this summer shows that those estimates
are probably not too far off. We need to do
some connecting and adding up of all of our numbers
(10:10):
and looking at some geology offshore New York and comparing
it to New England, but it looks like we've got
hundreds of years worth of water for a huge city
like New York City, so a large volume that could
be impactful for growing communities, seasonal variation thinking about tourist loads.
Of course, all the water would need to be moved
and treated. As you pointed out Ross, there's still big
(10:32):
lift to go on the second end. If someone did
decide to use this water for a municipality, they would
pull it out of the sands, which is easier, just
like we do it drinking water today, and we'd sort
of use the clays of the buffer to protect us
from pulling salt in too quickly. But we need energy
to do that, and so you're going to have to
move the water from underground up to the surface the
(10:57):
bottom of the ocean and then pump it into a municipality,
which will require agreements from the federal government. Where in
US territorial waters state governments run pipelines municipalities to clean
the water, and then also an energy source. Where we
were in New England, we were fortunate that there is
wind farm expansion right there, so there's actually a local
source of energy that could be used to help move
(11:18):
that water out of the ground and to shore. But
we saw a lot of work to do before we
got to a production strategy, but we sort of know
what the steps would be. We need to get the
energy locally sourced would be great, and then we need
to work on a lot of policy and management issues
because it's a new resource that we haven't explored before
and would need to think about those things before we
started using it.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So a few listeners have the same question, how could
that water exist there without being contaminated by the salt
water above it and turning brackish, or even being contaminated
by your drilling.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yes, so we spent a lot of time before we
drilled looking at how we could protect the environment because
we were poking a hole with salt water above us
into this fresh and water zone. We actually circulate drilling fluids,
so we prevent too much from going in. We kind
of control what's going in and out of the hole
through our drilling parameters. This is technology borrowed from the
(12:14):
oil and gas industry, adapted for water services. When we
leave the hole, like I mentioned before, this is just
sand and clay that you would use for modeling. When
we're done, it collapses in and plugs itself. And we
know this happens from other drilling experience, so that's how
we predict we protected it in the near term. Now
you can think about the bigger problem, which is if
(12:34):
there's all this salt water above it and there's fresh
water beneath, why aren't they mixing? And this is part
of the reason we think there might be a modern component,
is that there might be a little bit of fresh
water coming in and preventing that salt water from seeping down.
But we still need quite a bit of time to
look at that. What we have is the documentation that
it is salt water sitting on top of fresh water
(12:55):
and it hasn't been there long enough to mix, even
from just diffusion alone. So we can also is at
as a constraint for how old the system is. How
much would it mix if you just put a saltwater
next to freshwater, how long would it take to mix
if you just let them sit there, and that's probably
thousands of years.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So I have a theory. I'm going to share it
with you and then we'll call it a day. I
think there's an old lady who moved to the Cape
Cod area in the late nineteen forties.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
She has a garden that she's very proud of.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
She's got a hose on the outside of her house
and that hose valve is.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Really really old and just doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
And her hose has been running since nineteen fifty one
and just leaking water. And that's where your water's coming from.
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (13:42):
So that is one part. Thank you. I didn't mention
this earlier. But one thing that we really want to
know is if the water that's being used on the
island Nantucket Martha's Vinyard right now that people are pulling
out of their wells, are they actually pulling some of
that water from offshore in the ground towards land. And
that's something that we're we're going to try to do
a secondary project to understand how well the onshore water
(14:03):
system where people are pumping their water for their tulips
and their garden, is it connected to the offshore, and
how can we take advantage of that to maybe maximize
production without these extra energy needs and things like that.
But I think we'd still need to think about the
policy and management issues if we start encroaching into pulling
water from other people's properties, let's say, or other people's
areas well.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
I'm impressed with you giving such a serious answer to
my ridiculous, truly ridiculous statement. Brandon Dugan's professor in the
Department of Geophysics at Mines the Colorado School of Minds
and one of the lead scientists on Expedition five oh one,
which aims to find immense amounts of fresh water off
(14:45):
the northeastern coast of the United States. Thanks for doing this, Brandon,
really fascinating conversation and fascinating research you're doing.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Thank you for the opportunity. Ross. I appreciate you letting
me join you in your community to share some of
this research today.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
All right, that's great, And if you want to share
this interview in a little while, if you go to
Rosscominsky dot com, you'll see it there and you can
share it with whoever you like.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
I'll definitely do that. I appreciate that thank you for
sharing that
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Right, all right, thank you Brandon, all Right, gosh, that
is great stuff.
I saw a very interesting You know, I'm a science nerd, right,
so I saw a super interesting article recently describing a
big project and expedition to look for large quantities of
fresh water in a place I might not have thought of.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And joining us to.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Talk about this project, which is called Expedition five.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh one, is Brandon Dugan.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And Brandon is a professor in the Department of Geophysics
at the Colorado School of Minds and one of the
lead scientists on Expedition five oh one. So, first, Brandon,
good morning, and thanks for making time for us, and
welcome to KOA.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Good morning, ros, thank you for having me. I'm excited
to share some of the science we accomplished this summer.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So tell us where are you looking for fresh water
in this project?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yes, this project specifically was targeting fresh water beneath the ocean,
in the sediments beneath the ocean. So we were working
this summer between about twenty and forty five miles south
of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard in the Atlantic Ocean. Water
depths from about one hundred and twenty to one hundred
and fifty feet of water, and then we were drilling
(01:13):
down into the sediments beneath that and actually capturing fresh
water in those sediments beneath the ocean.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
All right, this is probably a very obvious question. But
is the purpose of this to find enough fresh water
to really do something important with it and add to
the country or the world or whatever fresh water supply,
or is there some other scientific interest here or both?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
So it's both definitely ross. So the first part about
it was this project somewhat originated about fifty or sixty
years ago when the US Geological Survey was looking for
hydrocarbons along the East coast of the United States and
other minerals. They drilled some wells in the Atlantic Ocean.
They didn't find any hydrocarbon, but they found some fresh
(02:01):
water beneath the ocean, and we're sort of curious about it,
but it wasn't their main mission, so they didn't study it.
We did additional work over the last twenty years to
develop this drilling project to really go out and understand
how much freshwater is there, how it got there, which
is sort of the basic science question, why would we
have fresh water beneath the ocean in those sediments anyway?
(02:23):
But then the secondary follow on is if there are
large volumes of fresh runner out there. How can we
use that as our water needs grow in society, And
so first documenting and demonstrating where it came from, and
then down the road we could think about how it
could be used as one piece to the puzzle to
solve the growing water crises we have in our country
but also around the world.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Let's take those things in turn. What's the best theory.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I don't know whether you're at a position where there's
a lot of competing theories or there's one more accepted
theory about how it got there.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yeah, so there's really three primary ways that it could
have gone there. We were trying to test all three
of those. This summer. We collected the data to test
all three of them. So one is that rainfall happening
on land today. I think coastal Massachusetts, Rhode Island is
seeping into the ground and just from the elevation on
land is being pushed farther and farther offshore. And so
(03:16):
we would call that a modern recharge system. It's just
like water that people get out of a groundwater well
today on land it just happens to be under the ocean.
That's not our leading hypothesis here, we just can't find
enough energy to push water twenty thirty forty miles off
shore with the topography we have in Massachusetts. So the
other two sort of hypotheses that we're looking at are.
(03:38):
One is, right now, we see tides. We see ocean
going up, you know, a few feet every day, depending
on tidal cycles, depending where you are. Over longer geologic
time periods, sea level was two hundred feet lower than
it was today, so we had much larger beaches. Rainfall
could then seep into the ground. When sea level came
back up those two hundred feet, it buried all that
(03:59):
fresh water, so it's old rainfall that's been trapped. Another
sort of corollary hypothesis is especially for places like Massachusetts
or high latitudes. If you think about northern Europe where
this has also been propose, we used to have big
glaciers sitting out there, and the bottom those glaciers have
water that's melting, and that glacier then pushes that water
into the sediments and can push it very far off shore,
(04:22):
because the glaciers might be something like a mile thick
or something like that, and so it's really was it
modern rainfall, rainfall in the past or part of a
glacier in the past. From what we looked at this summer,
we think it's primarily driven by old glaciers, but it
might have some component of modern rainfall. But we need
a few more months or years to really dive into
(04:44):
the details of the chemistry of the water and some
of the chemistry of the sediments to understand when it
really got there. But we have the samples to do.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
That between theory two and theory three, with theory two
being old rainfall and theory three being glaciers which are
presumably also old, which one of them is an older
water source? And then do you test that by something
like nuclear decomposition like carbon fourteen, or how do you
test the age of water?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Yes, that's a great, great question. Most likely the last
time we had significant glaciers in North America was eighteen
to twenty thousand years ago, but there were cycles before that,
so it could go back maybe even four hundred thousand
or five hundred thousand years. The rainfall one would be young, old,
but not as young as the old glaciations, and so
(05:35):
we're thinking it's these older glaciations producing the water now
how do we get the ages. It depends on how
it is, but it is through isotopes or radioactive decay
as one process we can do it. We can look
at carbon that's dissolved in the water. So we have
a group of scientists who are expert and looking at carbon.
They're measuring those samples right now to see if they
(05:56):
can get an age from the carbon fourteen. We can
also look at other iceopes. We're looking at krypton eighty one,
which is a noble gas isotope that we can use
that can help us look farther back than carbon fourteen.
And so we use multiple techniques to try and hone
in on what that age is and we pull those
isotopes out of the water that we pulled out of
the ground.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
This summer, we're talking with Brandon Dugan, professor from Colorado
School of Mines and one of the lead scientists on
Expedition five oh one, which is searching for fresh water
off the coast of New England. So let's talk about
the structure of the water. So obviously, even though you're
working on water here, I'm sure you are well acquainted
(06:39):
with the geology of oil and in the geology of oil.
You can find oil sometimes in fairly large concentrations, like
a giant bowl of oil. And then you can also
find oil in a structure that is a little bit
more like a sponge where you might not might not
even look very if you were looking at it. But
(07:01):
this is why they created hydraulic fracturing to kind of
get the oil out of this sponge. And there's an
immense amount there, even if you might not really know it.
So what are the structures like as far as you
can tell so far that you're holding the water.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Yeah, so this is something that was really fascinating to
me and the rest of our team this summer. Is
when we drill down and we're drilling, it's a six
and the five acents hole that we're making the ground,
so not a big hole into the ground that we're making.
We're pulling sediments back up to the surface. And we
had a mixture of clay. You can view it as
something you might buy it at a store to make
(07:37):
a coffee mug out of or something like that. We
saw that type of material. We also thought saw things
looked like beach sand, and the interesting thing was both
of them were saturated with fresh water, which tells us
that this was a pretty large event that was able
to get water in these sand systems where it's really
easy to move water through, but also into some of
these clays where it's hard to get water in. So
(07:57):
that's one of the pieces of information that's leading me
interpret that it's largely glaciers. I need something with a
lot of energy to floce that fresh water into these
clays where it's hard to move water around. And also
interesting you mentioned these dry clays from the oil and gas.
We saw some of these dry clays or what looked
like dry clays offshore that were saturated with the freshwater,
(08:19):
but we also saw things that looked like modeling plays.
So the water was sort of agnostic of what kind
of material it was in, which is sort of counterintuitive
to thinking about hydrologic systems or oil hydrocarbon systems like
you mentioned.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
All right, I have a really dumb question. Why is
the whole six and five eight inches? Is that some
round number in a metric system.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It's actually quite the opposite. It's just the US standard.
So the drill bit industry is dominated by at least
in US, drilling is drilled by US manufacturers and they
have drill bit sizes like six and five eighths inches
and nine and three quarters inches, just whatever they designed
at the time.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
All right, and last question for you on Brandon, what
are your estimates and what are your levels of confidence
in your estimates about how much water there might be?
And then, especially since you're saying, you know it's in
clays and so on, if it's enough water that it
could really make a difference, you know, like to a
(09:19):
municipal or a you know, the whole East Coast water
supply or something.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
How do you get it out? How do you transport it?
Speaker 3 (09:27):
And all that great great questions that we've been thinking about.
So we'll start with the beginning, our back of the
envelope calculations before we started drilling, where if you if
you sort of added up all of the water in
New England, a frame of reference would be it'd be
enough fresh water to supply all of New York City.
(09:48):
It's fresh water needs for eight hundred years or so. Wow,
And it's not going to go to all the New
York City. But that's just sort of to give you
an idea of how much water it is. Looking at
the largest city in the U ask how much water
they need. Our documentation this summer shows that those estimates
are probably not too far off. We need to do
some connecting and adding up of all of our numbers
(10:10):
and looking at some geology offshore New York and comparing
it to New England, but it looks like we've got
hundreds of years worth of water for a huge city
like New York City, so a large volume that could
be impactful for growing communities, seasonal variation thinking about tourist loads.
Of course, all the water would need to be moved
and treated. As you pointed out Ross, there's still big
(10:32):
lift to go on the second end. If someone did
decide to use this water for a municipality, they would
pull it out of the sands, which is easier, just
like we do it drinking water today, and we'd sort
of use the clays of the buffer to protect us
from pulling salt in too quickly. But we need energy
to do that, and so you're going to have to
move the water from underground up to the surface the
(10:57):
bottom of the ocean and then pump it into a municipality,
which will require agreements from the federal government. Where in
US territorial waters state governments run pipelines municipalities to clean
the water, and then also an energy source. Where we
were in New England, we were fortunate that there is
wind farm expansion right there, so there's actually a local
source of energy that could be used to help move
(11:18):
that water out of the ground and to shore. But
we saw a lot of work to do before we
got to a production strategy, but we sort of know
what the steps would be. We need to get the
energy locally sourced would be great, and then we need
to work on a lot of policy and management issues
because it's a new resource that we haven't explored before
and would need to think about those things before we
started using it.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So a few listeners have the same question, how could
that water exist there without being contaminated by the salt
water above it and turning brackish, or even being contaminated
by your drilling.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yes, so we spent a lot of time before we
drilled looking at how we could protect the environment because
we were poking a hole with salt water above us
into this fresh and water zone. We actually circulate drilling fluids,
so we prevent too much from going in. We kind
of control what's going in and out of the hole
through our drilling parameters. This is technology borrowed from the
(12:14):
oil and gas industry, adapted for water services. When we
leave the hole, like I mentioned before, this is just
sand and clay that you would use for modeling. When
we're done, it collapses in and plugs itself. And we
know this happens from other drilling experience, so that's how
we predict we protected it in the near term. Now
you can think about the bigger problem, which is if
(12:34):
there's all this salt water above it and there's fresh
water beneath, why aren't they mixing? And this is part
of the reason we think there might be a modern component,
is that there might be a little bit of fresh
water coming in and preventing that salt water from seeping down.
But we still need quite a bit of time to
look at that. What we have is the documentation that
it is salt water sitting on top of fresh water
(12:55):
and it hasn't been there long enough to mix, even
from just diffusion alone. So we can also is at
as a constraint for how old the system is. How
much would it mix if you just put a saltwater
next to freshwater, how long would it take to mix
if you just let them sit there, and that's probably
thousands of years.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So I have a theory. I'm going to share it
with you and then we'll call it a day. I
think there's an old lady who moved to the Cape
Cod area in the late nineteen forties.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
She has a garden that she's very proud of.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
She's got a hose on the outside of her house
and that hose valve is.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Really really old and just doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
And her hose has been running since nineteen fifty one
and just leaking water. And that's where your water's coming from.
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (13:42):
So that is one part. Thank you. I didn't mention
this earlier. But one thing that we really want to
know is if the water that's being used on the
island Nantucket Martha's Vinyard right now that people are pulling
out of their wells, are they actually pulling some of
that water from offshore in the ground towards land. And
that's something that we're we're going to try to do
a secondary project to understand how well the onshore water
(14:03):
system where people are pumping their water for their tulips
and their garden, is it connected to the offshore, and
how can we take advantage of that to maybe maximize
production without these extra energy needs and things like that.
But I think we'd still need to think about the
policy and management issues if we start encroaching into pulling
water from other people's properties, let's say, or other people's
areas well.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
I'm impressed with you giving such a serious answer to
my ridiculous, truly ridiculous statement. Brandon Dugan's professor in the
Department of Geophysics at Mines the Colorado School of Minds
and one of the lead scientists on Expedition five oh one,
which aims to find immense amounts of fresh water off
(14:45):
the northeastern coast of the United States. Thanks for doing this, Brandon,
really fascinating conversation and fascinating research you're doing.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Thank you for the opportunity. Ross. I appreciate you letting
me join you in your community to share some of
this research today.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
All right, that's great, And if you want to share
this interview in a little while, if you go to
Rosscominsky dot com, you'll see it there and you can
share it with whoever you like.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
I'll definitely do that. I appreciate that thank you for
sharing that
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Right, all right, thank you Brandon, all Right, gosh, that
is great stuff.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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