Brandon Dugan, associate professor and Baker Hughes Chair in Petrophysics and Borehole Geophysics at Colorado School of Mines, was recently interviewed by The Verge about the possibility of tapping into offshore freshwater aquifers to address the Cape Town water crisis.
From the article:
According to [a 2013 Nature] study, there's an estimated 120,000 cubic miles of subsea fresh water globally - roughly 1,000 to 1,200 times the amount of water used in the US annually.
That would be more than enough to provide backup water supplies to other cities facing water shortages beyond Cape Town, like S??o Paulo, Brazil and Mexico City. To date, however, none of it has been pumped up for public use.
But why?
"It's complicated," says Brandon Dugan, a geophysicist and associate professor with the Colorado School of Mines, who has been studying offshore freshwater aquifers since 2002. "We don't exactly understand the plumbing of the system or the precise volume of fresh water that's down there. So that makes it difficult to devise a pumping strategy to maximize use of the resource."