ABOARD LIFTBOAT ROBERT, North Atlantic — Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.<\/p>\n
It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps \u2014 fresh water.<\/p>\n
This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise<\/a>. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.<\/p>\n It’s just one of many depositories of \u201csecret fresh water\u201d known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet\u2019s intensifying thirst<\/a>, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society,\u201d Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines, told Associated Press journalists who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform. The research teams looked in \u201cone of the last places you would probably look for fresh water on Earth.\u201d <\/p>\n They found it, and will be analyzing nearly 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins \u2014 whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.<\/p>\n The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It’s bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it’s even feasible.<\/p>\n Why try? In just five years, the U.N. says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%<\/a>. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.<\/p>\n The fabled Ancient Mariner\u2019s lament<\/a>, \u201cWater, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,\u201d looms as a warning to landlubbers as well as to sailors on salty seas.<\/p>\n In Virginia alone, a quarter of all power produced in the state goes to data centers<\/a>, a share expected to nearly double in five years. By some estimates, each midsize data center consumes as much water as 1,000 households. Each of the Great Lakes states has experienced groundwater shortages.<\/p>\n Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close<\/a> to running out of fresh water for its nearly 5 million people in 2018 during an epic, three-year drought. South Africa is thought to have a coastal undersea freshwater bonanza, too, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same.<\/p>\n Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, are among places where stressed freshwater supplies coexist with prospective aquifers under the ocean.<\/p>\n Enter Expedition 501, a $25 million scientific collaboration of more than a dozen countries backed by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation and the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (U.S. money for it was secured before budget cuts sought by the Trump administration).<\/p>\n Scientists went into the project believing the undersea aquifer they were sampling might be sufficient to meet the needs of a metropolis the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh or nearly fresh water at both higher and lower depths below the seafloor than they anticipated, suggesting a larger supply even than that.<\/p>\n Their work at sea unfolded over three months from Liftboat Robert, an oceangoing vessel that, once on site, lowers three enormous pillars to the seafloor and squats above the waves. Normally it services offshore petroleum sites and wind farms. This drill-baby-drill mission was different.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s known that this phenomena exists both here and elsewhere around the world,\u201d Expedition 501 project manager Jez Everest, a scientist who came from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, said of undersea water. \u201cBut it\u2019s a subject that\u2019s never been directly investigated by any research project in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n By that, he means no one globally had drilled systematically into the seabed on a mission to find freshwater. Expedition 501 was quite literally groundbreaking \u2014 it penetrated Earth below the sea by as many as 1,289 feet or nearly 400 meters.<\/p>\n But it followed a 2015 research project that mapped contours of an aquifer remotely, using electromagnetic technology, and roughly estimated salinity of the water underneath.<\/p>\n That mission, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, reported evidence<\/a> of a \u201cmassive offshore aquifer system\u201d in this area, possibly rivalling the size of America\u2019s largest \u2014 the Ogallala aquifer<\/a>, which supplies water to parts of eight Great Plains states.<\/p>\n Two developments in 1976 had stirred interest in searching for undersea freshwater.<\/p>\n In the middle of Nantucket island, the U.S. Geological Survey drilled a test well to see how far down the groundwater went. It extracted fresh water<\/a> from such great depths that it made scientists wonder if the water came from the sea, not the sky.<\/p>\n