going dry due to industrial agriculture.
Not sure if the following excerpt refers to exact same aquifer but it discusses the dynamics. Maybe Ken Burns referenced the Ogalalla Aquifer?
The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.
Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.
And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/us/high-plains-aquifer-dwindles-hurting-farmers.html
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Egan, author of "The Worst Hard Time" about resilient families enduring the calamity of drought elevated to prolonged man-made disaster by flawed tillage practices and widespread erosion, said at a University of Kansas forum the Ogallala Aquifer's rapid depletion to support irrigated crops on the prairie indicated harsh lessons of the past were being sidestepped.
"It's the equivalent to putting a straw in the Great Lakes," Egan said. "I don't see how we can do it on our watch."
He said reluctance among the nation's food producers to embrace the scientifically acknowledged idea of global warming reinforced the argument tragedy of the Dust Bowl, inflamed by ignorance and greed, had been pushed from collective memory.
"Farmers, a huge percentage of them, don't believe it," said Egan, who believes farming practices of big agriculture must be modified. "They fear the sacrifices they'll have to make."
snip
Egan's book, which won the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction, served as inspiration for Ken Burns' documentary, "The Dust Bowl." His book was chosen as KU's Common Book to be read by students and applied in a range of courses during 2013-2014. It also was selected as the Read Across Lawrence selection by the city's public library.
http://cjonline.com/news/2013-09-27/author-compares-aquifers-depletion-dust-bowl
= new reply since forum marked as read
