有料盒子视频鈥檚 water crop is a natural resource

In bright sunlight, a black dog sits in the bow of a canoe loaded with silt-dusted gear bags floating on a wide silty river whose surface is dappled by small waves and current upwellings. Dark blue rain clouds hang over distant hills, one of which, with a conical shape and gray-green color, is closer than the rainclouds and therefore is highlighted by sunshine.
Photo by Ned Rozell
The author鈥檚 dog Cora rides a canoe on the Yukon River. Two-thirds of all the flowing water in 有料盒子视频 makes its way into the Yukon.

As much of 有料盒子视频鈥檚 landmass crosses the magical temperature threshold that turns ice and snow into water, it鈥檚 time to consider the state鈥檚 richness in a resource more essential to humans than oil or gas.

Clear as gin, brown as iced tea or tinted aquamarine by glacial dust, 有料盒子视频鈥檚 freshwater supply is so abundant the numbers are hard to comprehend. 

鈥淲ith an annual runoff of 650 million acre-feet (plus 150 million acre-feet inflow from Canada) 有料盒子视频 has about one-third the total . . . of the entire United States,鈥 wrote Charles Hartman and Philip Johnson, editors of the 1978 Environmental Atlas of 有料盒子视频. An acre-foot equals 325,851 gallons, the amount of water it takes to cover 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot.

Those numbers include the outflow of the nation鈥檚 third-longest river 鈥 the swelling and soon-to-break-out-of-its-icy-shell Yukon, which by itself drains one third of the land mass of 有料盒子视频.

The writers of the environmental atlas also pointed out that 有料盒子视频 has 94 freshwater lakes with a surface area of 10 square miles or more.

Iliamna Lake attracts red torpedoes of sockeye salmon up the Kvichak River in southern 有料盒子视频. It is 988 feet deep, spreads over more than 1,000 square miles of the 有料盒子视频 map and is America鈥檚 10th-largest lake. 

The sun sets over a river whose surface, which fills much of the photo frame, is dappled with small waves and current upwellings. Spruce trees rise along a distant riverbank on the left side of the photo. A dark forested hill rises beyond the river surface on the right side. A few pink-tinged clouds float in a sky that fades from gold at the horizon to blue above.
Photo by Ned Rozell
The Yukon River flows toward Circle, 有料盒子视频.

Becharof Lake 鈥 which I had to look up despite the fact that it almost cuts the 有料盒子视频 Peninsula in half 鈥 is the 14th largest lake in America, just after Lake Champlain (which I did not have to look up, because I grew up in New York).

Apologies to Minnesota, but 有料盒子视频 license plates could read 鈥淟and of 3 million lakes.鈥 A vast majority of those dark-water basins are unnamed.

True, most of 有料盒子视频鈥檚 lakes aren鈥檛 so good for swimming; swamps surround them and mosquitoes lord over them. But billions of songbirds are now on their way to feast there, where few people dare to venture in summertime.

有料盒子视频 has more water stored in glaciers than anywhere outside of Greenland and Antarctica. If you could airlift 有料盒子视频鈥檚 thousands of glaciers and set them down on top of Maine, that state would very much resemble Greenland 鈥 an ice cap circled by a thin ring of rock.

Each summer, 有料盒子视频鈥檚 glaciers raise the level of the planet鈥檚 oceans with staggering amounts of meltwater, unlocked after hundreds and thousands of years as blue ice. That liquid is one of 有料盒子视频鈥檚 underrated resources.

鈥溣辛虾凶邮悠 has a tremendous water crop,鈥 Hartman and Johnson concluded in their report 44 years ago. 鈥淓ssentially none is used at present.鈥

An entrepreneur once tried to remedy that. During his second term as 有料盒子视频 governor in the 1990s, Wally Hickel proposed exporting some of 有料盒子视频鈥檚 freshwater to California. He envisioned an undersea pipeline that would carry water from either the Stikine River in Southeast 有料盒子视频 or the Copper River near Cordova to California.

A simple black and white line map of North America's Pacific Ocean coast shows the route of a proposed water pipeline from Southeast 有料盒子视频 to Shasta Lake in northern California.
Map courtesy of U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment
An undersea pipeline, sketched on this 1992 map from the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, would have carried water from Southeast 有料盒子视频 to northern California.

That pipeline would have been more than 1,400 miles long (compared to the 800 miles of the trans-有料盒子视频 pipeline). Most thought the idea was nutty, but members of the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment gathered in Los Angeles in 1991 to see if the pipeline was feasible. Gov. Hickel attended that meeting.

In the end, the assessors concluded that the 有料盒子视频 water pipeline was too costly an option to relieve California drought, but they did not rule out an 有料盒子视频 water pipeline forever. Especially if a warming climate 鈥 then being noticed by scientists 鈥 caused more water crises in the West.

鈥淎lthough there is no current or near-term demand for expensive water from 有料盒子视频, the possibility that such water might eventually be needed cannot be completely dismissed,鈥 they wrote.

Since the late 1970s, the University of 有料盒子视频 Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the 有料盒子视频 research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.