What are natural and artificial water reserves

As we said, we call water reserves those bodies of fresh water that represent a useful or potentially useful source for activities carried out by human beings. The different uses of water can be agricultural, industrial, domestic or other environmental activities.

The distribution of water in the world is that 97% of the existing water on the planet corresponds to masses of salt water such as oceans or seas, while only 3% is fresh water, of which approximately two thirds is frozen. in glaciers or polar caps. Other sources of fresh water are rivers, lakes, groundwater, or reservoirs. Almost all water uses use fresh water.

Fresh water represents a renewable resource through rainfall, mainly. However, due to factors such as climate change , accompanied by the decrease in annual rainfall in many areas of the world and the increasing desertification of the climate on earth, they are making the global supply of clean and fresh water increasingly scarce.

In addition to this, the demand for water is greater than its supply in many parts of the world and continues to increase as the world’s population increases. In the 20th century alone, awareness of the importance of preserving the planet’s water has increased , but much remains to be done.

The water reserves can be natural or artificial. Next, we explain each of these types of water reserves:

• Artificial water reserves: they are constituted by those superficial water masses that are created by human activity through the construction of artificial channels that are then filled with water and renewed with the water from precipitation. Within these reserves we find artificial reservoirs , dams, artificial lakes or some artificial swamps. Also included as artificial reserves are those obtained through artificial processes such as desalination of natural waters.
• Natural water reserves: include all those bodies of water that are formed in channels that are created by natural processes. These include lakes, rivers, reservoirs created by natural processes, or groundwater.

In the following sections we will explain each of the fresh water reserves in the world .

This includes rivers, lakes, man-made reservoirs, and freshwater wetlands . These water masses are renewed naturally through rainfall and are lost due to the management of human activities, evaporation, evapotranspiration and infiltration through the subsoil.

Although the greatest entry and natural renewal of these water sources are rainfall, there are other factors such as the storage capacity of lakes , wetlands and artificial reservoirs, the permeability of the subsoil below these bodies of water, and runoff characteristics of the substrate. of the basin, period of rains and local rates of evaporation, which vary with the climate of the area.

These include water flowing through rocks and gravels from the bottom of other water bodies and soil characteristics in the hyporeic zone. This is why, in areas of large valleys, the hyporeic water reserves can exceed the visible water of the course or surface water.

The problem with these reserves, apart from the fact that access to them is more complex than that of the surface reserves, is that in many areas they are contaminated, not only by the contamination of the nearby surface water, but also by the contamination of the soil.

Groundwater reserves, as their name suggests, are underground and, specifically, they are those that include the masses of fresh water found in the pore space of soils and rocks . They also include water from aquifers below the water table. Sometimes, this type of groundwater, such as water from aquifers, is called fossil water and it must be well differentiated from hyporheic waters, as they are not exactly the same.

The desalination of water is an example of the application of artificial processes to obtain artificial water reserves . The water desalination process is expensive compared to other water sources, so this process is a minority, being used only for high-value uses in more arid areas (such as industrial processes). One of the places on Earth where this process is most used to obtain artificial water reserves is the Persian Gulf, a place where water is scarce in natural reserves for these processes.

This water includes the bodies of water that are found in frozen form within glaciers and polar ice caps . At the moment, it does not contribute much water to the planet’s fresh water reserves and has only been used for scientific purposes. If achieved in the future, this artificial process would constitute an artificial reserve of water, since it would be extracted artificially.

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