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Our Perilous Dependence on Groundwater |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / WATER AND HUMAN DESTINY |
| Author: Marc J. Defant |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/2003 |
| Size: 2,000 Words, 12,728 Characters |
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Seventeen-year-old Jason Tuskes must have realized his hopeless predicament. Before he was found, drowned, in a water-filled cave in Florida, he had removed the almost empty air tanks from his back and used his knife to scratch a message to his parents and brother on the wall of the cave: "I love you mom, dad, and Christian." Investigators concluded that the boy may have become disoriented in the aquifer's many confining passages after his fins kicked up silt, making visibility almost zero.
Aquifers, which provide life-sustaining freshwater to millions of people around the world, can also be deadly when inexperienced divers such as Tuskes explore them. An aquifer is any region of rock that harbors potable water. Florida's water-filled limestone caves lie at one end of a broad spectrum ...
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...t, if used properly and kept from pollution, can continue to supply future generations with one of our most crucial commodities. Only time will tell how much future generations will have to invest in order to drink what we still tend to take for granted: potable water.n
Further reading
A.F. Randazzo and D.S. Jones, eds., The Geology of Florida, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1997.
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