After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)

The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.

[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)

As someone of Turkish origin with Kurdish, Bulgarian, and Greek roots (somehow my genes don't fight each other!), I'm deeply saddened by the current state of the region. Growing up in western Turkey, I didn't give much thought to the eastern part of the country, let alone Iran. Funnily, my first real interactions with Iranian culture didn't happen until I moved to Germany. Aside from their cuisine being the only one besides Turkish where I actually enjoy the rice (pilav/pilaf), I've found Iranians to be such warm, kind people who have suffered far too much due to politics. Maybe that's why we connected so deeply... We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.

I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.

> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that of 1950.

It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.

Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?

I'm not sure if people realize this, but Iran suffered more than any other nation during WW2, including Poland, Japan, the Philippines, China, and that's saying something. As a neutral country, I believe they have had something like 25% fatality rate during the war.

This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.

Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.

Maybe it’s selection bias but:

The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.

> In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture.

It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hatred-of-israel-caused-irans-wa...

This editorial elaborates on some of the political corruption, as well as Iran's dismantling of cooperation with foreign water engineers.

I am not saying there is no crisis coming, but I recall reading that Tehran will be out of water in two weeks, two months ago. What's up with that?

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

- Bill Mollison

I’m surprised that Iran can contemplate affording this. There must be such immense losses of all the land, homes, and capital assets in Tehran. And then operational costs of moving people around, building new homes, etc.

$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?

Sounds like it would be cheaper to build desalination plants on the coast, and pipe the water in. Iran certainly has the technology and brainpower to do that.

Unaccountable fools in power destroy entire civilizations...

Amusing/telling/sad how these self proclaimed anti-imperialist Islamists cargo culted western technohubris just the same

Rain water collection structures that distill H2O in terms of pH.

Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.

It is good that there are lessons like this in other lands. Their millions will thirst so that we can see what not to do.

Rural Californians put up signs that say we’re “wasting most of the water in the river” by which they mean our policy of allowing the river to flow into the ocean.

We should look to places with less intelligent geoengineering to see what would happen if we were so foolish. Their combination of resourcefulness and low-IQ will show us what happens when we prioritize extraction alone.

The RealLifeLore YouTube channel published a video about this not long ago: https://youtu.be/n8kSGH4I8Ps

Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?

The 2nd and 3rd order effects of any wars e.g with Afghanistan might be causing some late nights in Langley

China is doing this too in the west.

Some say is the endemic corruption.

Hope it impacts Iran's drone production that Russia uses to terrorize the Ukrainian civilian population in support of Russia's war for colonization.

Back when I read Dune as a teenager I didn't know what a qanat was and I didn't bother looking it up. I might have to read it again with this new understanding. I seem to remember them featuring quite a bit in Children of Dune.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871043

Hmm, I'd expect better from Yale to be honest, this reads like BBCesq style snow melts in winter click bait.

Tldr: City that outgrew its water supply recommends moving to a place with more water.

Although you wouldn't really get that from reading the article, which seems more about blaming people for Tehrans rapid growth and weather conditions.

TYS = told ya so

The Iranian mullahs locked up everyone who warned them about the upcoming water crisis.

Iran has more people than water.

Simple as that.

So... given that the Iranian regime is not paying any heed to the experts, does this mean that the end of their regime will be because of their own arrogance and incompetence?

Next up: Las Vegas

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So the sanctions will eventually work and topple the regime?

Water is going to be needed to cool all these data centres going up around the world. They will gobble up electricity and water.