The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Goodell Jeff

Author:Goodell, Jeff [Goodell, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science / Environmental Science (See Also Chemistry / Environmental), Politics, Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, Science, Science / Global Warming & Climate Change, History, Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Coastal Regions & Shorelines
ISBN: 9780316260244
Amazon: 031626024X
Goodreads: 34523152
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-10-24T07:00:00+00:00

On coral atolls like the Marshalls, there are no spring-fed rivers, no mountain lakes, no bucolic streams. Freshwater comes from the sky. The Marshallese collect water in rain buckets on the roofs of their houses, or in collection ponds at the airport. Mother Nature sometimes collects it in narrow underground aquifers—what geologists call freshwater lenses. As long as the rains continue, everything is okay. But if it stops raining for a few months, as it did in 2013, and again in 2015, then there is trouble. Marshallese find themselves in the very Robinson Crusoe–like predicament of dying of thirst while surrounded by water.

Freshwater has always been an issue on coral atolls. But as populations have grown, the problem has become more acute. It’s one thing to collect enough rainwater on an island for three hundred people. It’s something else entirely to do it for a city of thirty thousand.

The Marshallese have dealt with this in a sensible way—by increasing the amount of water they can collect. But there is not enough land to build enormous reservoirs; you also can’t dig too deep before you hit salt water bubbling up from below. Instead, they have built a series of collection ponds near the airport to capture runoff from the tarmac—they look like a row of swimming pools covered with black plastic (to reduce evaporation). The water is polluted by grease and oil and bird droppings, so it has to be treated and filtered before it can be drunk. When the reservoirs are full, they hold 34 million gallons of freshwater, enough for the people of Majuro to survive for several months.

Only about one quarter of the people on Majuro are connected to the municipal water supply from the airport, however. The other twenty-two thousand or so residents—as well as another twenty thousand people who live scattered around on outer atolls—rely on rainfall either collected in plastic drums or pumped out of the freshwater lens in the ground. By necessity, the Marshallese are very good at conserving fresh water. In New York City, the average person uses 118 gallons per day. In Majuro, it’s 14 gallons per day.

Nevertheless, running out of drinking water is a perpetual worry in the Marshalls. The northern atolls get less than fifty inches of rain a year. Atolls to the south get about double that. As the climate warms, rainfall patterns are likely to change. According to some models, the Marshall Islands on average will get more rain in the coming decades, not less—and they’ll also get hotter temperatures and longer droughts.

But whatever happens with rainfall patterns, drinking water is likely to remain a concern. The airport reservoirs are surrounded by dikes, but nevertheless, when a big storm comes in, the waves sometimes break over the walls. “If we get overtopping, where salt water gets into our catchment, we have to dump the freshwater out into the lagoon,” Kino Kabua, the deputy chief secretary in Majuro, told me. “As climate change comes in and sea levels rise, it’s going to increase that danger.

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