Scientists discover undersea freshwater: 100 times more water than used in the last 100 years

I'm surprised at the surprise generated by this news. We've known for a LONG time there were fresh water springs under the ocean floor. Perhaps the amount of freshwater is more than previously thought?

Some of them release fresh water to the surface and these are called "ocean springs. There are several in the Gulf of Mexico and one less than 20 miles off the coast where I live....coincidentally the town I live in is "Ocean Springs".

I've heard of this fresh water before but if there are large sources I have to wonder about accessing that water. It would come to the surface easily as I think it's lighter than salt water....but how do you deplete large stores of water under the ocean floor without risking collapse of the ocean floor? That could be catastrophic for marine life and for coastlines.

Good question, Kay. Look at the mess they made right down the road from you trying to get oil out from underneath. I think any solutions we look for to any of our problems right now are going to have inherent problems. We should be thinking of ways to reduce human populations (no - I don't mean kill people, so stop razzing me before you start) as fast as possible so these high risk tactics to support masses that the planet wasn't meant to hold would be a damned good idea. If it's going to snow hard this year - we would be better off harvesting a layer of snow (not enough to cause dry earth in the summer), everywhere the snow level goes over what is normally good for an area. Probably purer than we're going to get anywhere else. If we planted the trees under glaciers that no longer produce snow because the moisture from the forests is absent, we could harvest some from those. With the planet coming out of the inter-glacial era, we should get enough wet pretty soon that we don't need to tap those underground sources. We just have to clean up the poisons we've dumped all over in the water we have now and make it potable again. Over the next couple years the only places that should be left in drought are those where the forests have been destroyed.

I think the main question should be is, is it's easier and cheaper to use under-sea fresh water than it is to use desalination technology that we already have?

That's amazing discovery! Can we afford to use them?

A fresnel lens is over-kill for this. Using very simple technology similar to the Water Cone would likey be more efficient:


But the real question is, what to do with the salts that are removed from the water, no matter the method?

Nah, instead encourage people to go back to a salt-based economy,
like the Romans!

If for no other reason than to watch the IM sales pages, and the
bitcoin folks talking about "mining salt".

Just as the world is fighting over less than one percent of known fresh water, the universe says.. "Hey, I got this!"

Seriously, there's always going to be an abundance of supplies if we look hard enough. I highly recommend everyone read or watch Peter Diamandis, the future truly is better than we think.

Once we as humans are aware and capable of outer space travel, we can travel to other planets and outer space to extract the abundance of resources out there.

Check out this article about the gigantic body of water floating in space:
Huge Reservoir of Water Discovered in Space 30 Billion Trillion Miles Away

Just like Agent Smith in The Matrix said: "You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area..."