Australia Is Sitting on Top of Something That Should Not Be There

Beneath the red dirt of the Australian outback, sitting under one fifth of the entire continent, there is enough fresh water to fill Sydney Harbour one hundred and thirty thousand times. Some of it has not seen daylight in two million years. It sits in layered sandstone under pressure from three kilometres of rock above it, moving westward at one to five metres per year, hot enough at its deepest point to boil. It was formed when the centre of Australia was an inland sea. It surfaces naturally at mound springs in the desert that Aboriginal communities have relied on for sixty-five thousand years. It enabled the pastoral colonisation of a continent by shooting upward under its own pressure when Europeans drilled into it in the eighteen hundreds. It is now being extracted faster than it is being replaced. The endemic species that evolved in isolation inside individual springs for millions of years are disappearing as the pressure drops. The water that took two million years to travel from the Great Dividing Range to the western outback is evaporating off open drains within days of reaching the surface. Australia is sitting on one of the most extraordinary natural systems on Earth and has been losing it since the moment it was found.

#hiddentruth #ancienthistory #australia