And now even wetlands, formerly known as swamps, have come to share the environmentalists' spotlight. Let's begin by briefly discussing the supposedly worsening water shortage, a topic that there was no need to address at the time of the first edition. Nature of the Problem Water does not change into something else, as do fossil fuels that are burned. And water never languishes in a dump, as scrap iron does. Furthermore, the quantity of water in the oceans is huge by any comparison.
Usable water is like other resources, however, in being a product of human labor and ingenuity.
An important example of a newly-discovered source is the aquifers in areas where the underlying rock has large faults. In the past, geologists had assumed that the water in these large watersheds does not flow easily from place to place, and especially, does not flow vertically. But scuba divers have been able to map the movement of the water in these aquifers, and to demonstrate that it does move vertically. In this fashion, huge new supplies of groundwater have been found in the Red Sea Province of eastern Sudan, Florida, and elsewhere. This new method has also revealed that massive watersheds are in greater danger of being polluted by ground water than had previously been known.