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by tzs
1876 days ago
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That gallon of water to grow one almond or the 5 gallons for one walnut obviously does not actually end up in that almond or walnut. Only a tiny amount of water is in the nut itself, and so exported from the state when the nut is exported. Some of it will end up in the ground and eventually become part of the water table in that region, eventually coming back out via wells to be reused. A lot of it will be transpired into the air by the plant. Some of that will condense out and end up in the ground. The winds in those areas tend to blow toward the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east. I suspect a lot of that water ends up rain on the west side of those mountains, where much of it makes its way back to the farming regions. Some will be broken down in chemical reactions in the plant, with the H and O being combined with other elements to form various compounds. It would take someone with a much more extensive knowledge of plant biology than I have to say what happens to those compounds and if any of the H and O used for them ends up as water again later. I've never seen any analysis that actually looks at where the water goes after the nut is produced. |
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Of course the atoms are conserved. Any plant matter that is consumed by humans or burned will end up back as water while it isn’t tied up in your body or buried.
Certainly some will go to groundwater and some will evaporate and get locally precipitated... but depending on weather patterns some water vapor will leave the state and rain down past the mountains or into the sea.
A large ecological transformation could be undertaken to plant forests and other plants to increase water capacity and make more water cycle locally, but that kind of transformation would be terrificly expensive and environmentally controversial. (but could work in places... there are a lot of rainforests out there where if you burned them down they would be deserts.)