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Under the Sea: Hidden Freshwater Reserves with Brandon Dugan

By 2025, experts predict over half the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas. With a number of our freshwater resources on land receding, is it time to look to the ocean – or, rather, underneath it for fresh water? Jay sits down with Brandon Dugan, the Associate Department Head and Baker Hughes Chair in the Department of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines, to find out.

Brandon Dugan tells us about an aquifer off the coast of New Jersey that could provide access to freshwater – if we dig deep enough. Jay taps into the advanced drilling technology Dugan and other researchers use to access these hidden freshwater reserves and assess them as a viable resource. The find raises questions about water ownership and governance in uncharted territory, along with the need to value offshore water as much as we value offshore oil and gas.

At the tail end of this episode, our producer Erin Stephens is back with our first ‘Ask Jay’ segment. Do you have a question about water for Jay? Let us know who you are, what’s on your mind, and where you’re based – by writing to ideas@whataboutwater.org. Voice memos are also welcome.

Guest Bios

Brandon DuganBrandon Dugan

Brandon Dugan is the Associate Department Head and Baker Hughes Chair in the Department of Geophysics and a Professor in the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program at the Colorado School of Mines. His pioneering research in onshore-offshore freshwater resources has had direct and immediate societal relevance as traditional freshwater resources are declining due to overexploitation and climate change. In 2018 Dugan received the Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize from the American Geophysical Union and the Japan Geosciences Union. The prize recognizes an individual “for outstanding transdisciplinary research accomplishment in ocean drilling.” He has served the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) community in multiple advisory capacities, including as a long-term member of the Environmental Protection and Safety Panel and as a leader or steering committee member of various workshops. Dugan also supports students by promoting exploration through active learning and group projects and by relating classroom activities to active research and career opportunities. Fun fact: he has spent over 12 months of his life on scientific research vessels exploring fluid flow in ocean basins.

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Dive Deeper

  • In 2019, researchers Gustafson et. al used electromagnetics pulses to image the sub-seafloor off the coast of the Northeast U.S. where a massive freshwater aquifer exists, and were able to prove for the first time that the freshwater extended great distances and was not a localized phenomena. A Massive Freshwater Sea Is Buried Beneath the Atlantic Ocean | Live Science
  • The continuous aquifer spans more than 200 miles of coastline, from New Jersey to Massachusetts and possibly beyond. It runs from the shoreline out to as far as 75 miles away from the coast. (CNN)
  • The aquifer contains at least 2,800 cubic kilometers (~ 739 trillion gallons) of liquid; enough water to fill 1.1 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools. (CNN)
  • The water would still need to be desalinated to be used for potable drinking water, as it contains anywhere from 1-part-per-sounds of salt to 15 parts per thousand, but it would be much cheaper than desalinating typical seawater (35 parts per thousand). A Massive Freshwater Sea Is Buried Beneath the Atlantic Ocean | Live Science
  • Over 2 billion people already lack access to safe drinking water at home, and by 2025 over half of the world’s population will reside in water-stressed areas. (Pew Research Center)
  • More research will be needed to clarify the boundaries, and if they extend much further north and south, this water deposit could rival the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest groundwater system in North America and one of the largest aquifers on Earth. A Massive Freshwater Sea Is Buried Beneath the Atlantic Ocean | Live Science

 

Photo Credit

  • Brandon Dugan – Submitted

Full Transcript

Brandon Dugan:
By 2025, you know, half of the world is going to be living in a water-stressed environment. Some places are experiencing water stress right now. They may be seasonal. So if we look at South Africa in the last four years, they’ve had two events where they were potentially going to run out of their freshwater resources. And so, in times of water-stress need, maybe monsoon seasons a little bit low or there’s been a couple of years of bad monsoon seasons.

Brandon Dugan:
These resources might be able to plug that gap.

Jay Famiglietti:
By 2025, over half the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas. The freshwater resources we rely on are at risk of depletion due to climate change and overexploitation. But a discovery off the coast of the eastern United States might give us hope that there are more freshwater resources out there. If we dig deep enough. Brandon Dugan is the Associate Department Head and Baker Hughes Chair in the Department of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines.

Jay Famiglietti:
He’s also a recipient of the 2018 Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize and he joins us today from Golden, Colorado. Welcome to “What About Water?” Brandon.

Brandon Dugan:
Thank you, Jay. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, great to have you. And, you know, I probably should have known about this aquifer, you know, being a groundwater person myself and one who really, you know, advocates for really exploring and understanding our… our groundwater resources. But, you know, I think I missed this. So please tell us about this massive aquifer of fresh water under the Atlantic?

Brandon Dugan:
I don’t necessarily think you missed anything. You know, logically speaking, most of us would not go look beneath the ocean to find fresh water. And actually, the original discovery of this freshwater resource that we’ve since learned is is in an aquifer came as an accident. It was actually the U.S. Geological Survey doing an assessment of energy resources along the Atlantic margin in the 1970s.

Brandon Dugan:
And as they were bringing cores and samples up onto the ship, they realized that some of these samples that they were bringing up from beneath the sea floor had fresh water in them off New Jersey or off Long Island, about you know 50 to 80 kilometers offshore. When they drilled down about 50, 60, 70 meters, they found fresh water, one part per thousand salinity, and started thinking about, well, how did this water get in place?

Brandon Dugan:
Why is it here? And so to go back to your original question, how did we you know, how did we miss this? How did it get there? Well, nobody thought it was there. And it was an accidental discovery.

Jay Famiglietti:
But how did it get there?

Brandon Dugan:
In the 1980s, about seven or eight years after the original observations, the USGS put together some groundwater models looking at how high topography in the Appalachian Mountains and lowered sea levels in geological past may have created the driving force to flush these waters out very, very far. And they put together some conceptual models that were numerically based that said: these are the physics that could define how this system works. Jump forward about another decade or so.

Brandon Dugan:
And Mark Person, a colleague of mine at New Mexico Tech, and I started thinking about, well, how could those driving forces have changed over time, especially looking at high latitude? And we started thinking about the last glaciation or the last glacial maximum, where you had these big ice sheets advancing out to Long Island, to Cape Cod, and they create this big driving force with water at their base and they can drive that water far offshore.

Brandon Dugan:
And so now we’ve started to look at the role of both topography on land and sea level changing, but also how ice sheets advance and retreat and how that might actually create a driving force. And so we started to put all these together with initial observations from the 1970s. And better understanding of computational techniques to understand these to predict what we think they look like.

Jay Famiglietti:
So Brandon, let’s fast forward to 2019. Another major discovery about this aquifer happened. What was that?

Brandon Dugan:
So Kerry Key, Rob Evans, Chloe Gustafson, some of my colleagues went out and actually started using electrical surveys in the ocean to try to figure out what layers the freshwater is in offshore and how that connects back to onshore. Before we just had a point measurements, so we had wells and we said, Oh, there’s some freshwater over here.

Brandon Dugan:
And then we had a well, that was 100 kilometers away and we said, There’s some freshwater over here. And we used what we knew, knew about hydrological principles and geological principles to understand how they might be connected and how they might be related. And so we’re continually adding to the technology to understand these systems better. So a big question is, are these things recharging in — on human timescales — are actively recharging?

Brandon Dugan:
Is the water young? Is it a rain event that happened six months ago or three weeks ago? Or is it right would call paleo-groundwater, which is from the last glacial maximum, maybe, maybe 20,000 years ago, maybe even older, maybe 70,000 years ago.

Jay Famiglietti:
So, Brandon, just how big are we talking about here? We’re talking about something that’s the size of Connecticut or the size of New England or something like the high Plains or the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches across from south to north across the Midwest?

Brandon Dugan:
You know, if I had to give you the best estimate, it’s probably on the order of the size of New York State or something like that. But it’s distributed over a pretty long north-to-south corridor. So it extends all the way from Maine down to New Jersey. And you can envision it as sort of a thin slab of freshwater that hugs along the coast and goes up from New Jersey all the way up to Maine.

Brandon Dugan:
But if we reshaped it would probably be about the size of of New York or something on that order.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s… that’s huge.

Brandon Dugan:
That’s about 100 years of groundwater use for the entire world. If you think about it. Just if we look at groundwater here. So it’s a pretty big resource on the U.S. East Coast margin from New Jersey up to Maine. We estimate that there could be on the order of 1300 cubic kilometers of freshwater stored out there. That’s about ten years worth of all the groundwater that the US would use.

Brandon Dugan:
Or if you want to look more close, that’s about 800 years worth of water that New York City could use. And so while it might not be renewable in the sense of it’s actively recharging today, we still have hundreds of user-years of resource out there and we better start thinking about how to use this because it is salinating today as sea levels go up.

Jay Famiglietti:
So Brandon, is this the only offshore freshwater aquifer of its kind in the world?

Brandon Dugan:
There is an offshore groundwater resource just south of South Africa that was discovered during oil and gas drilling in the late 1990s, early 2000s. As you mentioned, by 2025, you know, half of the world is going to be living in a water-stressed environment. Some places are experiencing water stress right now. They may be seasonal. So if we look at South Africa in the last four years, they’ve had two events where they were potentially going to run out of their fresh water resources.

Brandon Dugan:
And so in times of water stress need maybe monsoon seasons a little bit low or there’s been a couple of years of bad monsoon seasons. These resources might be able to plug that gap in times of need, whether it be seasonal variation, multi-year variation, or longer term climatic changes. But, you know, to do this responsibly and sustainably, we really need to understand the dynamics and understand which systems are actively recharging so they could be used over and over again and which ones are are locked and old water that might provide help in times of need, but they’re not going to be replenishing over the time scales that humans would need.

Jay Famiglietti:
Right. You know, I think it’s very cool that we’ve had this discovery. We do spend a lot of time around the world, not just the United States, but really, you know, global society going out there and exploring for oil and, you know, less so, less so for for water, partly because it hasn’t really had the value or maybe hasn’t had the value until now.

Jay Famiglietti:
So I find this really exciting. And we use a comparison of like an acre foot of oil is worth like $800,000. And an acre foot of water, at the highest, it’s like, you know, $1,000, you know, in the southwest, in the drought. So it could be a while. But, you know, things are changing so fast, right? With water availability that that who knows?

Brandon Dugan:
Yeah.

Jay Famiglietti:
And who knows what the government will want to put into it as well.

Brandon Dugan:
I talk to my students all the time, as I’m sure you talk to students. And I sort of asked them how much a gallon of gas costs every time I first have them in class. And I asked them how much a gallon of water out of the tap cost and they have no idea because it’s essentially free. Right?

Brandon Dugan:
And so this sort of economics problem we use as a motivator. But we’re seeing lots of people who grew up in this environment of seeing water-stress and limited water resources and the droughts and the wildfires that we’re having. So my hope is that in the coming years, we’re going to have more activism towards this, just like I’ve seen in my life with with climate change.

Brandon Dugan:
Oh, yeah. You know, it wasn’t really a term when I was an undergraduate. Now I’m getting 18, 19 and 20 year olds who are passionate about working on this problem. And I think, you know, I hope they follow suit.

Jay Famiglietti:
No, I agree. And I mean, I’ve said multiple times and in different ways, you know, water is the new carbon, water is next, we need to be doing this kind of exploration. We need to be doing this kind of accounting. So you’re starting to do some more work on it, some more exploration. But there’s you know, there’s a wrench here and there’s talk of putting a big offshore wind farm in this exact area, by the way, you know, I come from Rhode Island. I’ve seen the wind farms off of Block Island, and they’re quite impressive. Is there is there a potential of like, you know, poking holes in these submarine aquifers and and, you know, that saltwater would pour in? Or that the fresh water would pour out?

Brandon Dugan:
There’s definitely a general risk there. Any time we perturb a system, there’s a risk that we could perturb it in a negative way. Whether it’s scientific drilling, drilling for a resource. I think actually when it looks at the wind farms, which I’m also really excited about, I think it’s actually mutually beneficial and almost synergistic that they’re in the same locations and it should not be problematic as long as we go in with a good operating plan.

Brandon Dugan:
These water resources, we think they’re sort of 50 meters deep down to 350 meters deep or something like that. The anchors for these wind farms should all be in the upper sort of 30 meters, maybe maybe 35 meters or 25 meters. So they should be above it. That said, everybody should do their due diligence and they’re there surveying and working together to make sure that they don’t accidentally puncture a shallow lens or something like that.

Brandon Dugan:
The reason that I think it’s synergistic between them is, in order to install a wind farm, they have to do a bunch of seafloor imaging, some seafloor imaging to look at the strength of the materials to to mount the pilings for the wind farms. That can help us. That same data could be used to look at the local freshwater system to make sure that where every windmill is put that, we’re going to be in a good location.

Brandon Dugan:
Also, if we’re thinking about moving this water from the shelf onto land where somebody can use it, that takes energy. Well, what are wind farms providing? They’re providing energy. And so it’s a local renewable source of energy that’s sort of nontraditional, at least in current times, producing a nontraditional freshwater resource in the same location. So to me, it seems like it could be mutually beneficial.

Brandon Dugan:
Companies, industries, people that are looking at sustainability, greening the system I think should be really excited about this. And I think the two industries, sort of the water industry — if you want to call it that — and the wind farm industry — if you want to call it that — should work together to minimize their costs and maximize their return on the energy or water that they’re providing to communities.

Jay Famiglietti:
Brandon this season on “What About Water?” we’re talking a lot about innovation and technology. Tell us about this crazy piece of drilling equipment that you’re using. Like this isn’t something that I could I could pick up at… at Home Depot.

Brandon Dugan:
Definitely not something you could pick up at Home Depot. So it’s much more akin to what people view of was like an oil and gas drilling rig. So it looks a lot like that. It’s got a big derrick out there and it’s got a drill bit that goes down and helps us drill through the sediment that’s connected to the pipe back up on the rig floor.

Brandon Dugan:
The drill bit itself is about 33 centimeters in diameter. In the middle of it, it has a hole that’s about six centimeters wide. So as we’re drilling around, it’s capturing a six centimeter diameter core in the middle. That’s about ten meters long. Once we drill down ten meters, they send a tool down a wireline. It grabs onto the top of it.

Brandon Dugan:
It pulls it back up to the top of the rig floor so we can look at it as scientists and then it drills down another ten meters again, creating this hole in the middle that we’re collecting in its intact and pristine section. And we can do that drilling from the seafloor down to many hundreds of meters, 600 meters, 700 meters and 800 meters.

Brandon Dugan:
So we have the technology available to drill through this 50 meter to 350 meter interval where we think a lot of this freshwater exists.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s super cool. And it’s such an advance over, you know, what we do in the oil industry, which is drilling down and then having to pull the whole thing up and then drill down again and pull the whole thing up. So it sounds like it really allows us to do this much needed exploration.

Brandon Dugan:
Yeah, it’s definitely been an advantage that scientific ocean drilling has come up with to optimize the time we’re out there to collect as much core to understand the Earth’s system.

Jay Famiglietti:
So, you know, when I hear oil and gas — and this is probably true for our listeners too — I get a little concerned because, you know, we don’t want the evil oil companies coming in here and, you know, taking our water and exploiting the environment. This is this is not that, though. Can you explain that, how oil and gas that industry is is involved?

Brandon Dugan:
Yeah. So that industry, I think, is involved or can be involved in a couple of different ways that are beneficial and not in the the mine sense of taking over the resource and treating it like a commodity like they do with oil and gas. So there are some energy companies that are trying to minimize their water footprint. And so one way they could be involved would be funding research like the research I’m doing or that my colleagues is doing to better understand this resource.

Brandon Dugan:
So they’re completely decoupled from how the resources used or understood. They’re just using this as a way to better understand water resources that other people could use to offset the company’s water footprint. That’s a very indirect way they could be involved. A more direct way they could be involved be to actively be involved in understanding this resource and potentially producing it.

Brandon Dugan:
But rather than using the fresh water that that you need and I need and all the listeners need to live and thrive, they could be using water that’s not saltwater and not freshwater. So something that’s in between, maybe a lower salinity of like ten parts per thousand or 50 parts per thousand for water that they could use in some of their industrial practices instead of the freshwater that they’re using today.

Brandon Dugan:
And so what they could do is actually use less freshwater and use partly salty water for some of their activities, including oil and gas recovery or cleaning of equipment or recharging systems that have been depleted after they produce oil and gas. So what they be doing is not using the fresh water that they’re using in active practice today, but use fresher than seawater that they’re collecting out of these offshore resources.

Brandon Dugan:
And then that fresh water that they’re not using anymore could be used for traditional uses like running our infrastructure in a city.

Jay Famiglietti:
So by using this offshore water, which is a little bit more salty, that means they don’t have to use water on land, the freshwater on land and so we have more available, right? For growing food for for people, for the environment on land.

Brandon Dugan:
Exactly right.

Jay Famiglietti:
So is this funded by National Science Foundation or how are you getting this funded?

Brandon Dugan:
Yeah, so we’ve primarily been funded through the National Science Foundation, through different grants to do forward modeling or going out and collecting some some field data, such as the electromagnetic data or the seismic data that we’ve been use to image it. And then all of the scientific ocean drilling that has been done from the 1970s was funded by the US government.

Brandon Dugan:
Other anecdotal data have come through the International Ocean Discovery Program, which is partially funded by the National Science Foundation on the US side, but also a consortium of European, countries New Zealand, Australia, Korea, Brazil, Japan and India and China all kick in some money too, and they’ve helped us collect some of these samples that we’ve used to understand these freshwater systems.

Brandon Dugan:
But again, I’d like to emphasize all of these drilling projects that we’ve done to date had a different primary interest and not the primary interest being the groundwater. And so we’re trying to bring the groundwater to the forefront now as the primary reason we got to do this, the science so we can understand better how these systems are connected.

Jay Famiglietti:
So that that leads to two questions of of governance. And that’s something that I think about with groundwater on land. So, you know, one obvious question that comes to mind is like, who’s… let’s take the one in New Jersey. Like, who… who owns that?

Brandon Dugan:
Yeah. In the U.S. at least, we have not produced offshore freshwater. There have been some cases in Europe where they’ve intentionally produced offshore freshwater, but we haven’t done it. So we haven’t had an experience where we’ve had to discuss the ownership of the same thing on land occurs, right? I live in Colorado, the Colorado River starts here. That water gets distributed over all those states to the Southwest, eventually making its way to Mexico.

Brandon Dugan:
So, you know, there’s always this big question of who owns the water, who owns the water rights, who gets how much? A colleague who I’ve talked to a lot about this is is a lawyer. Her name is Renee Martin-Nagle. And so she’s been looking at different economic and management models and ownership models and basically been using the oil and gas model as the preferred method to do that.

Brandon Dugan:
So for those who are not familiar with this, the US cuts offshore land into chunks of land and they call them blocks. They have these lease sales people can lease that land to go out there and produce the oil and gas beneath it. Her idea is to use a similar model for offshore water governance. So we have the land that the states owned so far offshore, and then we go into U.S. territorial waters of the extended continental shelf and who would own the rights to access that water.

Brandon Dugan:
And then basically there’d be some rules about how close you can get to those boundaries and how much you can produce. And they would have to be a governing body that looked over and approved everybody’s plans to make sure that this production on one block wasn’t affecting production on another block or how people would work together. But again, we can borrow existing legal pros and legal approaches and adapt them for for water.

Jay Famiglietti:
So much stuff I’ve never thought about before. I have enough difficulty keeping straight all of the policies and everything that’s happening with groundwater and water in general on land, thinking about it offshore, just it just hurts my brain. If you could wave a magic wand, how could this drilling technology help us solve our climate related water issues?

Brandon Dugan:
Yeah, it’s a that’s a…

Jay Famiglietti:
This is your magic wand. This is your magic wand moment, Brandon.

Brandon Dugan:
Well, I think if I could if I could wave my magic wand and do anything that I wanted, I just really sort of this, this global awareness that we are now looking in nontraditional, out of the box, places to find fresh water. And this is truly a need and everybody needs to contribute. We need to think about how we can conserve water in every part of our life.

Brandon Dugan:
We’re fortunate enough to now get this water from offshore New England. Well, maybe that means that I can be more proactive in my home life and think about better ways to manage my water at home, whether it be turning the shower off when I’m washing my hair or changing my front yard to be zero escape. So it’s natural flowers versus something that has to be watered.

Brandon Dugan:
And so people really realize that we’re going to extreme lengths to give us fresh water. We should be aware of that and and responsive of it and change our behaviors in ways that can still keep us happy.

Jay Famiglietti:
Thanks so much for joining us today Brandon. It was great chatting with you.

Brandon Dugan:
It was great chatting with you Jay. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

Jay Famiglietti:
Brandon Dugan is the Associate Department Head and Baker Hughes Chair for the Department of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines.

Erin Stephens:
All right! It’s time for “Ask Jay!” So hello, Jay. Good to see you again.

Jay Famiglietti:
Great to see you, Erin.

Erin Stephens:
Thanks. So we have to let our listeners know that at the time we’re talking, it’s mid-September. The school year has just begun. Things are busy. And I feel like, you know, I’d be remiss if we didn’t say also what’s going on right now in the world of water with the flooding in Pakistan. I was reading an article from The New York Times that was published yesterday, so again, mid-September.

Erin Stephens:
And it was saying that so far around 1500 people have died and more than 33 million have been displaced. You know, the pictures, the videos is catastrophic. The devastation is so vast. And I think our listeners are probably curious and saddened by it as well and wondering, you know, how could this have happened from a water science perspective and climate change, too?

Erin Stephens:
Could you just speak a little to that for us?

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, I think, unfortunately, Pakistan found itself in the crosshairs of climate change. This is completely climate change and human-driven. So what’s happening there is a couple of things. One is increased global warming, so faster glacial melting, which is triggering triggering floods, but also a stronger monsoon season. And so the combination of those two things has led to these really incredible floods.

Jay Famiglietti:
And as you said, tens of millions, like 33 million people displaced. Yeah that’s real climate displacement. I don’t know, over $10 billion — I’ve seen different estimates of that number, U.S. — in terms of damage, 1500 dead. You know, sadly, I don’t know how we prepare for these sorts of events in the future, but we need to figure it out because they’re becoming more frequent.

Erin Stephens:
Yeah. And I was kind of thinking a little bit about the conversation you have with Virginia back in episode one about the Famine Early Warning System. Because I was looking at some photos of the flooding and satellite imagery and it was wild to see that difference the before and after. But just thinking about, you know, technology can show us what’s happening.

Erin Stephens:
But in some ways it can’t really prevent catastrophic disasters such as this at this scale, I suppose.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, you know, let’s think about what it would take to actually do that warning. So, sure, we could keep track of melting glaciers. And we know it was an excessively hot summer. And so perhaps we could have predicted some of the flooding. We don’t do a great job at the short term weather prediction so — and medium term weather prediction — so that would have been a little bit more difficult. But we did know in a macro sense that the monsoon was stronger this year. But, you know, there’s a real social side to it, and that is to get people to move in advance, right? In advance of like you have to communicate that this is happening, that people have to believe you, and then they have to have somewhere to go.

Jay Famiglietti:
And so those are all things that are really, really a challenge and really get to the social side of of climate change. People don’t really want to be… they don’t want to have their livelihoods disrupted. They want a more accurate prediction like we can do with, say, a hurricane. You can see the image coming towards, you know, making landfall, you know, towards your coastal area.

Jay Famiglietti:
You can see it. Right? And so you’ll get out of the way. This is more subtle. Like glaciers melting? Like how do I know that it’s going to speed up? So it’s it’s it’s really a challenge.

Erin Stephens:
Right. Right. And a privilege to be able to leave as well in time.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s right. Good point.

Erin Stephens:
You know, we actually have a first “Ask Jay” listener question for you. That’s about this issue exactly. Not Pakistan specifically, but just avoiding climate disaster in a way. So I’m going to read this question. This is from a listener named Nicholas, and he is in Portugal. So he says, “Hello, this message is for Jay. My name is Nicholas and I recently watched your part on the DW doc on YouTube.

Erin Stephens:
I currently live in Portugal and hoping to buy land soon to build an off-grid home. And I’m trying to find out where would be the best place to do so in Portugal or Europe. I was curious if you have any advice. I’m hoping to build a home and don’t want to have to worry about fires or no water.

Erin Stephens:
I’m sure everywhere will start having more problems just trying to find less risky areas than others. I appreciate any help or advice. Thank you.”

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, Nicholas, that’s a that’s a great question. And I’ll tell you, when I moved up here to Saskatoon from Southern California, I thought I was going to be avoiding things like water scarcity and drought and fires. But that turned out not to be the case. And so when we look at our satellite data, you know, I mean, the world of global climate change, every place is impacted in in some way.

Jay Famiglietti:
And across Europe right now, you know, the entire region is in… is in pretty rough shape. More generally, I think if you move north, you have more of an opportunity for it to be cooler. I think that in general, precipitation has been increasing as you move to northern Europe with the exception of the last few years.

Jay Famiglietti:
So my take home message is really, you know, think about your family. And — uh, you know, I do myself all the time — and think about, you know, your daily life and the people around you. There was an interesting story recently about that people tend to move for climate and tend to move for family reasons and not for climate change.

Jay Famiglietti:
So anyway, think about what’s really important to you. And if climate is really important to you, then, you know, moving north is probably a good way to go.

Erin Stephens:
I mean, you probably get this question a lot, don’t you Jay?

Jay Famiglietti:
I do. I get this question all the time. And, you know, if we’re talking about the United States or Canada moving north and northern half of the United States and Canada tend to have more water than… than the southern part of the United States. The challenge becomes, as we move forward, you know, deeper and deeper into the throes of climate change.

Jay Famiglietti:
How is that rainfall being delivered? What’s the variability? What’s the changing frequency of intense storms? So that’s another thing for you to look at, Nicholas, is if you pick a region, I don’t know, you know, northern France or you know, going up even even more north to, I don’t know, Norway or Sweden or something. Look at the the change in the in the variability.

Jay Famiglietti:
Is there an increasing frequency of flooding? And what are those regions doing to mitigate that?

Erin Stephens:
Awesome. Well, thank you, Jay, and thank you to Nicholas for writing in with that question. So if you’re like Nicholas and you have a question for Jay or a question about anything we’ve covered on the show so far or something you’d like to hear, please send us an email at ideas@whataboutwater.org and members of our team will sift through those. If you’d like to try doing it in an audio message, you can do that as well. Just attach that to your email and keep an ear out. And again, that email is ideas@whataboutwater.org. Thank you so much, Jay. It was good to see you.

Jay Famiglietti:
Thanks so much. Great to see you, too, Erin.

Erin Stephens:
Bye

Jay Famiglietti:
Bye.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, that’s it for this episode of “What About Water?” We record and produce this podcast on Treaty Six territory: the homeland of First Nations and Métis people. “What About Water?” is a collaboration between The Walrus Lab and the Global Institute for Security at the University of Saskatchewan.

Jay Famiglietti:
This podcast is a production of Cascade Communications. Our audio engineer is Wayne Giesbrecht. Our producer is Erin Stephens. Our fact checker is Taisha Garby The crew at GIWS is Mark Ferguson, Shawn Ahmed, Fred Reibin, Andrea Rowe, and Jesse Witow. I’m Jay Famiglietti. Thanks for listening.