Experts tap ancient ‘secret’ fresh water under ocean

Scientists have uncovered what is believed to be a vast, hidden freshwater aquifer stretching along the US East Coast, from New Jersey to Maine, located deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. This remarkable find follows an unexpected discovery nearly 50 years ago, when a US government vessel, originally searching for minerals and hydrocarbons, drilled into the seafloor off the northeastern United States and stumbled upon fresh water.

Building on that initial surprise, a pioneering global research expedition, Expedition 501, ventured off Cape Cod this summer. Drilling beneath the saltwater, the team extracted thousands of samples, confirming the existence of this colossal underwater reservoir.

It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist. “We need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society,” Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines, told Associated Press journalists who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform.

The research teams looked in “one of the last places you would probably look for fresh water on Earth.” They found it, and will be analysing nearly 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins - whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.

The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It’s bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it’s even feasible. Why try? In just five years, the UN says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.

The fabled Ancient Mariner’s lament, “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,” looms as a warning to landlubbers as well as to sailors on salty seas. In Virginia alone, a quarter of all power produced in the state goes to data centers, a share expected to nearly double in five years. By some estimates, each midsize data center consumes as much water as 1,000 households. Each of the Great Lakes states has experienced groundwater shortages.

Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close to running out of fresh water for its nearly 5 million people in 2018 during an epic, three-year drought. South Africa is thought to have a coastal undersea freshwater bonanza, too, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same. Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, are among places where stressed freshwater supplies coexist with prospective aquifers under the ocean.

Enter Expedition 501, a $25 million scientific collaboration of more than a dozen countries backed by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation and the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (US money for it was secured before budget cuts sought by the Trump administration).

Scientists went into the project believing the undersea aquifer they were sampling might be sufficient to meet the needs of a metropolis the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh or nearly fresh water at both higher and lower depths below the seafloor than they anticipated, suggesting a larger supply even than that.

Their work at sea unfolded over three months from Liftboat Robert, an oceangoing vessel that, once on site, lowers three enormous pillars to the seafloor and squats above the waves. Normally it services offshore petroleum sites and wind farms. This drill-baby-drill mission was different. “It’s known that this phenomena exists both here and elsewhere around the world,” Expedition 501 project manager Jez Everest, a scientist who came from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, said of undersea water. “But it’s a subject that’s never been directly investigated by any research project in the past.” By that, he means no one globally had drilled systematically into the seabed on a mission to find freshwater. Expedition 501 was quite literally groundbreaking — it penetrated Earth below the sea by as many as 1,289 feet or nearly 400 meters.