Good Magazine: And these systems of underground fractures and water flow are what you call the megawatershed. You’ve written that, in many regions of the world, if people harness these megawatersheds, they’d have access to 10 to 100 times their current groundwater estimates, and that it’s all sustainable and renewable. That sounds amazing, but don’t a lot of scientists take issue with the concept?
Robert Bisson: It’s been interesting over the past 30 years to see the shift in the way the traditional hydrologists, scientists, and engineers have responded to this. They used to argue that there was no water in the bedrock. But the exploration scientists we’ve been working with all knew there was water in the crust. We were part of the process back when I was working in oil in the 1960s, and doing off- and onshore mineral exploration in the 1970s. We kept encountering water that wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d ask where it was coming from and the answer I’d get was that, oh, yes, there’s water in the bedrock, but it’s fossil water—finite, thousands of years old, undrinkable, and connected with the formation of the crust. But the water we found wasn’t fossil, and it just kept on coming—and as answers weren’t available in academia or literature, I started asking serious questions to my Earth-science team.
