How far would you go to help someone get a glass of clean water? Zachary Dunn knows exactly how far he’d go: 9,000 miles. And that’s just one trip, one way. By summer’s end, Dunn and fellow Oregon State University students had traveled almost 36,000 miles — greater than the Earth’s circumference — to help bring drinkable water to Lela, a tiny farming community in Kenya.
“The Congress has found that we have entered a period in which acute water shortages are hampering our industries, our agriculture, our recreation, and our individual health and happiness.”
The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade.
The next time you sip a glass of spring water, consider this: Before it got to your lips, that water was soaking through soil, creeping along basalt crevices or flowing through porous volcanic rock.
Water in the West has long been a trigger for disputes. Witness Colorado River diversions in California and Arizona and struggles in Oregon’s Klamath basin. But cooperation is still the rule, according to research by master’s student Kristel Fesler and a team of OSU students in the Dept. of Geosciences.