Mexico City may be just months away from running of out water | CNN
www.cnn.com
The metropolis of nearly 22 million people is facing a severe water crisis as a tangle of problems — including geography and leaks — are compounded by climate change.
  • theodewere@kbin.social
    55·
    9 months ago

    Around 60% of Mexico City’s water comes from its underground aquifer, but this has been so over-extracted that the city is sinking at a frightening rate — around 20 inches a year, according to recent research.

    holy crap

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.caEnglish
      59·
      9 months ago

      It’s going to become more and more common. We’ve altered the climate enough that weather patterns will change drastically, and we’ve been sucking aquifers dry as though they’re endless.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
    322·
    9 months ago

    What is now Mexico City used to be Tenochtitlan. An artist made a rendering of what Tenochtitlan might have looked like before the Spanish arrived. The entire place was a lake, and the city was built in the middle of the lake. It contained canals everywhere, and had causeways connecting the edges of the lake to the city.

    I wonder if Mexico City has been effectively slowly “mining” that lake for centuries. I suppose the lake will be fed by precipitation, because the city is in a bowl so any rain that falls there will be collected, but does the amount of rain come anywhere close to matching what they’re using?

    As an aside, to me it’s tragic that the main temple of the Aztecs was razed and a Catholic church was plopped down on top of it. Just as tragic is that the Spanish indoctrination process was so successful that only 0.3% of the country has a non-Christian religion. As a result, most Mexicans see the church the Spanish had built not as a grotesque symbol of the destruction of the original city, but as a good and holy place.

    • moitoi@feddit.de
      9·
      9 months ago

      Spanish drained the lake in multiple steps to build the modern city. The water they are using is ground water, pumped in an aquifer. Mexico city has a network of canals to drain the storm water.

      The other issue is the aquifer doesn’t recharge enough due to the urbanization and consumption. One solution is to use the rain water by cleaning it and storing.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        9 months ago

        They drained the lake, but if I understand how lakes work, the aquifer is connected to the lake bed. So, initially there was so much water in the aquifer that some of that water was above ground in the form of a lake.

        One solution is to use the rain water by cleaning it and storing.

        Are you saying that right now the rain water doesn’t reach the aquifer? Like, it’s drained outside the city? Or that instead of having it trickle down into the aquifer, they could collect it above ground and make it available more quickly by cleaning and storing it in man-made structures?

        If it’s the second, it sounds like not allowing the rain water to reach the aquifer will mean that it drains more quickly.

    • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 months ago

      This is an incredible view into the past. I had no idea that tenoctitlan was so huge and organized. Thanks!

  • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    5·
    9 months ago

    I was living in Cape Town when we were like 70 days from running out of water. It’s a very bleak prospect. I remember my one doctor saying that as soon as there was no water he was closing his practice and leaving. No water means people don’t wash their hands and illnesses start spread like wildfire.

    We were lucky to get rain just before we ran out of water, but we also had a lot of conservation efforts.

    But as you can imagine, the rich people didn’t give a fuck and would water their gardens in the middle of summer and just pay the fines…