The Ogallala and The Keystone
The Ogallala Aquifer is an American treasure. Yet most Americans don’t know or care about it, for the Ogallala cannot be seen with the naked eye but only by an educated imagination. If you drive across Nebraska heading for more gaudy treasures like Mount Rushmore or Grand Canyon, you might notice huge green crop circles of corn and soybeans. An educated imagination might tell you that these crops are being irrigated by water that lies beneath the ground’s surface. And they are—water from the Ogallala Aquifer. And then if you knew the Ogallala contains approximately a million billion gallons of water, which is to say about 2.9 billion acre feet of water, you might begin to develop a sense of amazement about the Ogallala Aquifer. An aquifer, as you probably know, is not an underground lake but something like a huge underground sponge—made up of water, sand, silt, clay and gravel. The Ogallala is the largest aquifer in the United States and one of the largest in the world. I