AustraliaQuest is an interactive expedition developed by Classroom Connect. For five weeks a team of scientists and explorers will examine the ancient culture of the Aborigines and attempt to determine how it affects their modern existence.

The liquid of life

Quest team member Stephanie Gregory pedals across a parched landscape

When I saw the mummified kangaroos on the side of the road yesterday, I got to thinking about death. My death, to be specific.

My water bottles were empty. I was pedaling hard up and down the never-ending hills and wondering how far ahead the rest of the team was. I could see no shade, no shelter, and no water. Mild panic set in as I realized that I had completely stopped sweating. I couldn't remember if that was an early symptom of heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Either way, I was slowly turning into Sherri jerky.

Since then, I have been paying a lot more attention to the water situation here in central Australia. When I look around, I see an inhospitable desert ecosystem that could kill me in hours. Aboriginals, on the other hand, see an ecosystem full of enough kapi (water) to keep their whistles wet and their cells well watered for years!

To see for myself how Aborigines get water, I traveled to the bush camp outside of Coober Pedy. Eileen Brown, a spirited 70-something Anangu elder, took David and me to Ten Mile Creek, to dig for kapi! Somehow, we were supposed to get water out of a dry creek bed.

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Eileen said that was the only spot in the creek to find water. I jumped in the hole and started digging into the clay-like soil with a sharp stick.

Fifteen hard minutes later I hadn't seen as much as a drop of water. Eileen said: "You need a crowbar."

I couldn't believe my ears! All that digging for nothing! Turns out, the water table (how high the water sits in the ground) was too low for me to ever reach water with my silly little stick. The rainfall has been very low lately. But there may be bigger problems too.

Australia harbors the largest underground body of water on the planet. It's the Great Artesian Basin, with a surface area of about 660,000 square miles and a volume of roughly 2,260 trillion gallons of fresh water -- that's enough to fill more than four billion Olympic-sized swimming pools!

In 1878, European settlers dug a shallow hole (called a bore) and tapped into the basin -- up flowed clean, potable water! Soon, they were sinking bores like crazy and using the artesian water for everything from drinking to watering cattle. Today, 1,200 bores suck about 312 million gallons out of the basin every single day. How long can that last?

Aboriginal Peoples like Eileen Brown have survived for thousands of years in the Outback by being able to find water in this dry environment

For two million years, rainwater has been dripping down through the soil and getting trapped in the sandstone basin below. Then, the pressure of the rocks and soil sitting on top of it puts enough pressure on the water that it will flow up through any available cracks and holes. This is called hydrostatic pressure.

As more and more water is drawn out by humans for cattle, mining, or for taking longer showers, the hydrostatic pressure that drives the water up through bores decreases. (In addition, the basin is in danger of pollution by radioactive substances -- namely uranium -- but that's another story.) The water level decreases, and this could cause a water problem for millions of years.

It seems to me that Eileen's people, who've managed to get water out of places like Ten Mile Creek for 40,000 years, have something to teach us about water conservation. If Australians continue to use water at current rates, we may all be in trouble -- whether you depend on water for mining, ranching, drinking, or just getting through a hot afternoon on your bike.

Digging the Outback,

Sherri

AustraliaQuest
Classroom Connect