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By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
Hi Ford,
Thankfully because water is constantly evaporating from the oceans and then raining on the land we will never actually run out of water. However, we do use a lot of the water that currently falls as rainfall, so it is possible for us to want to use more water than actually rains.
This is what has been happening in the Murray-Darling Basin for the last 10 years. Because water was allocated to people to use (to grow crops) when there was a lot of rainfall (in the 1970’s), people then thought they could use most of the rain that fell. When we were in a drought (in the 1990’s and 2000’s), there just wasn’t enough rain to go around.
In a way then, we did run out of water. Thankfully, we had a lot of rainfall last year, but still, we need to plan for future droughts.
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Hi fors, moonja and jenna,
You are right, water is becoming really scarce in certain parts of the world and people are getting worried about it running out. The truth is – like Posty says there is SO much water on earth, but the challenge is trying to make it USEABLE.
There is a lot of salt water for example that cant be drunk. And freshwater is not always available. In some places on earth there is too much water (flooding) but too little in other places (drought). So, if we could pump the water around to the places that need it then we would have a really good solution. But although this solution sounds simple, its not. Water is REALLY expensive to pump around and it would use a whole lot of energy.
That’s why scientists are working really hard to try to find other solutions – like building factories that convert salty water to fresh water for drinking etc.
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