WATER SHORTAGES

These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.

—Rev. 11:6

7249 World’s Water

The earth has an estimated total volume of 8.7 million cubic miles of water.

Of this vast amount, rivers and streams account for only 300 cubic miles; inland seas and lakes, some 55,000 cubic miles; and underground, some 200,000 cubic miles.

All the rest are ocean and in ice caps.

7250 Water In Atmosphere

The atmosphere holds about 3,100 cubic miles of water—enough to cover the earth with 1 in. of rain if it fell at one time. This atmospheric water falls as rain and is replaced by evaporation every 12 days or so. Most rain falls in the sea or runs into rivers. About one-sixth soaks into the earth to nourish growth.

This cycle of evaporation and precipitation is a closed circuit in which water that dries up in one place falls as rain somewhere else.

7251 The Hydrosphere

The hydrosphere is the aqueous envelope of the earth which includes bodies of water and aqueous vapour in the atmosphere. The depth of the hydrosphere is about 10,000 feet.

7252 Where Are Drinking Water?

Fully 97.3% of the world’s water is ocean and unfit for drinking.

Of the 2.7% of water that is fresh, over three-quarters are at the two poles. And a large portion of the other quarter is trapped as so-called fossil water deep underground.

Thus, only . 36% of all the world’s water is available in drinkable form on the earth’s surface for man. These are found in rivers, lakes, and swamps. And pollution is rapidly reducing even this small proportion.

7253 Diminishing Water Supply

From a free and abundant gift of nature, water has become in the space of some 30 years a commodity with a price ticket on it.

In the 1970’s water resources no longer covered needs in five European countries: Cyprus, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Malta, and the Ukrainian USSR. Seven more countries—Belgium, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Turkey—do not expect to be able to meet the growing demand for water from their own resources by the year 2000,

Europe, overall, has enough water for at least the next 25 years, but often not where it is most needed, or at the times of greatest demand.

7254 Higher Cost Of Water

By current estimates, the world population will require about 25% of the annual flow of all earth’s surface waters by the year 2000. But the cost of water begins rising rapidly when over 10% of the total supply in a given region is exploited.

In fact, if water demands exceed 20% of total runoff, that area will have reached the absolute limiting factor in economic development. Thus, water management plays a crucial part in the economy of a country and even completely dominates its economic planning.

7255 Conference On Water

At the United Nations conference on water at Mar del Plata, Argentina, while the assembled experts agreed that the global supply of usable water is as great as ever, they warned that it may soon be inadequate to slake the world’s growing thirst. The day is not distant, warned Syrian Delegate Saub Kaule, when “a drop of water will cost more than a drop of oil.”

The conference—the world’s first inventory of water resources—discussed improving the management of available water resources, and the choices to be made to prevent a world water crisis.

7256 United Nations Water Researches

UN experts have issued study papers on subjects such as:

—management and use of waters of river Volga;

—policies for maximum use of water in Israel;

—Mexico’s management of its water resources;

—Towing polar icebergs to Saudi Arabia to provide fresh water for its people;

—pollution caused by paper-making in Finland.

7257 U.S. Water Needs

The United States will need 600 billion gallons of water a day by 1984—2/3 more than it is presently using today. No one knows where this water can possibly come from.

7258 California’s Water Shortage

California’s East Bay Municipal Utility District, on Feb. 8, 1977, voted a mandatory 25% reduction in water consumption for its 1 million customers in Alameda and Contra Costa countries, which included Oakland and several San Francisco Bay Area suburbs.

Further to the south on the Monterey Peninsula, some communities were allocated 50 gallons of water per person per day. Note that a washing machine cycle uses 30–40 gallons.

7259 Per Capita Water Usages

It is reported that a person uses twenty-five gallons of water for a shower, thirty-six gallons for a bath, twenty gallons to shave if done with tap running, forty-five gallons to machine-wash nine pounds of laundry, and other uses proportionately. All told the average consumption per capita for all purposes including municipal, industrial, agricultural, etc., amounts to eleven hundred gallons a day. With the number of American citizens approaching 200 million no wonder there is concern about a possible water shortage.

7260 Three Big Cities

A study released by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers warns that in the three big metropolitan areas of Boston, New York and Washington, D. C., “the gap between available supply and water use even in non-drought years is narrowing perceptibly.”

7261 Minister Of Water

Britain now has a “Minister of Water” to regulate the use of water in the nation. During the worst drought in Britain’s history in 1976, it was feared that industry might have to go on a three-day working week to save water.

7262 Hong Kong Imported Water

So scarce was water in the city of Hong Kong in April of 1964 that a large import company shipped water from Canada in 48-ounce tins (about 1/3 of a gallon). This is marketed not under the name of “tinned water,” but under the flowery phrase of “sparkling Alpine Agua.”

7263 Water-less Toilets

Alligerville, New York (Reuter)—The latest business of the Rockefeller dynasty is producing toilets.

But a toilet with a difference—it uses no water and no energy, is odorless and turns waste to compost.

However, hardly anyone but a Rockefeller could afford the $1,300 amenity.

Abby Adrich Rockefeller, niece of Vice-President-designate Nelson Rockefeller and granddaughter of magnate John D. Rockefeller, has bought the American-producing rights for the Swedish invention.

Called a multrum, it saves 10,000 gallons of water per person per year—half the water in a city’s supply.

There are about 1,000 in use in Sweden and a few in Finland, Norway and Germany, she said.

The 30-year-old invention looks like an oversized square coffin and consists of a fiberglass container or tank about 10 feet long, four feet wide and eight feet high. The container is in two separate chutes.

The combined wastes decompose as they settle and slide slowly below deck. It takes up to three years for the first compost to reach the storage chamber. The compost is then removed about once a year afterwards.

All odor or water vapour is carried away by a ventilation pipe.

7264 Selling Polar Ice Rocks

Speaking of eternal frost, Greenland is selling Polar Ice Cap Rocks, which are ice cubes made from pre-pollution ice formed 100,000 years ago from snow (not sea water). Frozen super-solid, they take longer to melt and make a cheerful popping sound when they do. The Greenland Trade Department is launching the product with Smirnoff-on-the-Polar-Rocks parties around the country.

It hopes that the polar ice will soon be on sale in stores in the United States. And you’d better buy it while it lasts, because Greenland could run out of ice in a couple of million years.

—Don Maclean

7265 Saudi Arabia And Icebergs

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is so short of water that it plans to finance an ambitious project to tow icebergs from the Antarctic to the Red Sea.

The icebergs would be melted to provide water needed to turn the country’s deserts into fertile croplands. This project, which will cost billions of dollars, is expected to supplement the desalination of sea water, which is today Saudi Arabia’s principal source of fresh water.

7266 A New Towing Company

Paris has a new company which specializes in towing icebergs from the Antarctic for countries needing water. The firm, called Icebergs Transport International, is a joint venture between French and Saudi Arabian interests.

The French engineering firm proposes to deliver its first iceberg from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia sometime in 1982 for a fee of $90 million.

7267 Iceberg Usage Possibilities

Engineers think it feasible to cope with one iceberg up to 7 miles long by 1½ miles wide. A tug as big as a supertanker could tow such an iceberg at a rate of about 20 miles a day.

An iceberg of this manageable size would contain more than 250,000 million cubic feet of water—as much as flows over the Niagara Falls in two months.

Such quantities would be sufficient to turn parts of the world’s most forbidding deserts into rich farmland.

The Sahara, the Yuma desert of California, the Atacama of Chile, the dry wastes of Arabia and Western Australia all have the advantage of lying close to the sea. They are therefore open to irrigation without the prohibitive cost of long-distance pipelines.

7268 Icebergs In The South

Once the big iceberg reached its destination, there would be no need for expensive docking installations. The iceberg would simply be left near the shore to melt into the sea. Because fresh water is less dense than sea-water, the melted ice would lie uncontaminated on the surface, while the displaced salt water would sink.

The fresh surface water could easily be pumped ashore and into the irrigation pipeline system.

Greenland’s icy mountain would have come at last to India’s coral strand.

7269 Radiation-Free Water

Deep in the western desert of North Africa, on an abandoned wartime British airfield at Bire Tarfawi, far south near the Sudanese border, an Egyptian geological team has made an interesting discovery. Among the wrecked buildings, vehicles, and thousands of gasoline drums were 10 Italian water drums, four of them intact. The geologists think that these drums contain the only radiation-free water in the world. “The water in these drums has been encapsulated for thirty years and should thus be free of the atomic radiation which has progressively polluted the earth since the first nuclear explosions in 1945.”

—Prairie Overcomer

7270 German Soldiers’ Mistake

The battle of El Alamein had raged fiercely through the hours of the day when the heat was most intense on the sands of North Africa. When it seemed that the British had nearly reached the limits of their endurance, with an almost nonexistent water supply, they were suddenly surprised to see large numbers of the elite desert German army throw up their hands in surrender. They came stumbling in, with parched protruding tongues and thick swollen lips, begging for water, even just a sip.

What had happened was that, as they overran the previous British position, there was a newly-constructed water main there, and the German soldiers had shot holes in it and drank deeply. However, the main was not in use for fresh water, and was being tested out by pumping sea-water through it. What the Germans unwittingly drank was water from the Mediterranean Sea. The more they drank, the greater was their thirst in the battle. Thus was decided the issue of this crucial engagement.

—Albert Mygatt

7271 The Camel

The camel is enabled, by the peculiar construction of its stomach, to carry a supply of water sufficient for seven or eight days together. This power adapts it to the region in which it is found, and to the service of man in traversing the desert. It has, also, great acuteness of scent, and, when ready to fail through the weariness of a long march, will detect the distant stream or fountain. Then new vigor animates it, and, sniffing the air, it strides on till it can imbibe the refreshing waters.

7272 Surviving On Melted Snow

Ralph Flores and Helen Klaben survived for six weeks on melted snow—water for breakfast, lunch and dinner, after their plane crashed in the Canadian Rockies.

7273 Water In A Man

Water is absolutely essential to every form of life. Every living cell of both plants and animals depends on water.

We have about five quarts of blood in the blood vessels of our body. Water makes up about three quarts of the blood fluid.

Of every ten pounds of our weight, about seven pounds are water.

Without water to drink, we would die in a short time.

7274 Thoughts At Niagara

“What made the deepest impression upon you?” inquired a friend one day, of Abraham Lincoln, “When you stood in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, the greatest of natural wonders?”

“The thing that struck me most forcibly when I saw the falls,” Lincoln responded with characteristic deliberation, “was where in the world did all that water come from?”

7275 Two Wonders Of Salt And Water

Salt is a wonder. Salt is composed of two poisonous substances. How is it possible that salt, which is necessary to life, is composed of sodium and chlorine, either of which if taken individually, would kill you?

Water is a wonder. Its chemical formula is H20. That means it has two parts of hydrogen for each part oxygen. Oxygen is flammable; hydrogen readily burns. Unite hydrogen and oxygen into water and you put out fires with it!

7276 Epigram On Water Shortage

•     Samuel Coleridge in the 1700s penned these lines in the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere, not a drop to drink.”

See also: Pollution, Water ; Seas and Oceans ; Springs and Fountains ; Rev. 8:10; 16:34.