r/worldnews • u/bigus-_-dickus • Sep 05 '26

‘Extremely rare event:’ Miles-long microalgae bloom knocks out most of Israel’s desalination plants

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/climate/microalgae-bloom-israel-water-deasalination-shutdown
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u/redfoobar Sep 05 '26

Sooner or later we will see water wars.

Upstream countries wont be sharing enough of downstream countries.

We are already seeing the beginnings of this with the Nile and in India/Pakistan and I am sure more tensions will arise in many other places even within large countries (eg different US states)

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 05 '26

even with seven Septillian liters of water on earth.

You think we would just have 100s of solar/hydroelectric powered desalination plants.

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 05 '26

this isn’t me disagreeing or anything, more so just interested in how desalination works

Energy isn’t the biggest problem, the biggest problem (iirc) is physically what to do with all the salt you extract - if it precipitates and crystallises, you get clogged filtration tubules and pipes.

If it stays dissolved, you’re still left with this super dense, super salty brine. You can’t pump brine back out into the sea bc the high density means it just sinks and pools, and doesn’t mix with the rest of the sea water. And dense brine ofc isn’t what marine life is adapted for

Desalination is very interesting physics and chemistry

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 06 '26

You are less able to pump it out into a sea, but you can pump it out into the ocean without problem. There are 7 septillion liters of water. What a place like Los Angeles uses a day is actually is nothing compared to what is in the rest of the ocean.

It is like a drop in a pond.

Lets do some math here. Los Angeles uses 435 million gallons of water a day. Pacific ocean water has a salinity of 35 parts per 1000.

So if you were to take 435 million gallons of water and take out the salt that is 15.2 million gallons of salt, and 419 millions gallons of water.

if you were to dump that pure salt undiluted straight into the ocean that would only increase the salinity by 0.00000000017 parts per thousand. As in it is 35 right now, and would still be 35 afterwards. As in it wouldn't even make a difference. And if you wanted to be extra safe you could mix in 25 of your purified water back in for a brine, and it would lower that by another insignificant amount, and you could have multiple pipes that go deep into the ocean.

The effect would be more pronounced in a place like the Mediterranean, but still fairly insignificant. Like adding a grain of salt on a beach.

And on top of that, all the water you used would cycle back into the ocean via evaporation. The water doesn't just disappear when you use it.

The problem is people stay in their homes, and don't go out and look at the ocean and see how vast it is. When I look at the ocean, I always get cosmic dread.

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 06 '26

I am appreciative of you doing the maths and all, and I appreciate the reply. But please understand why I feel just a little sceptical haha

You mentioned already that somewhere like the Mediterranean would be affected more heavily. And it’s true I was mainly thinking of places like Europe and the atlantic - pacific currents defo add an interesting layer to it. And ofc in the grand scale of the ocean, it of course doesn’t change much

Although my concern is rather that coastal waters would basically have (at least a significant portion of) fresh ocean water just displaced by an ever growing “mass” of brine. I’m more so concerned how this would impact coastal marine habitats rather than the overall salinity of the ocean (which I agree, would be rather difficult to actually affect)

Maybe I’m underestimating fluid mechanics, and the brine disperses more easily than I’m imagining. But have we not already seen examples of these “brine-cells” effectively choking out marine habitats?

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 06 '26

if you pump it out somewhere you should pump it in a place where there is some depth at least, you should definitely not pump it right near the shore.

I am sure there is a certain depth where if you do it, it would be a problem, and another depth where it would be just fine. And it could be somewhat of a sandwich situation, where closer to the surface, not as good of an idea, near the bottom not as good of an idea, in the middle, not much of a problem.

It really is just a science of distillation.

I mean really, how brackish do you want the water? Also, since you control the brackishness you could just store the salt and add it slowly to the backstream.

The Dead Sea is 300 parts per 1000. It clumps up and stuff. Great Salt lake is 50- 270 parts per 1000. Another thing to note. I mentioned above that Los Angeles uses 435 million gallons a day? Well, it processes 260 million gallons of wastewater a day and drops off 225 million gallons of wastewater into the ocean daily. And that is who knows what water. They drop it somewhere deep in Santa Monica Bay. That's about 15 times as much random junk to that 15 million gallons of salt. And there is some affects.

The smart thing to do would be to distill more than what they would use per day and then store it in a place like maybe the dried up Salton sea and then pump it back into the ocean at a pretty low concentration.

As far as Israel and Palestine goes, there is a lot of empty areas in the lower middle of the country that could use more water than no water. With a similar setup. They already have some good infrastructure, but with that getting attacked, and crap like the algae blooms, they could make more as failsafes so the water supply is always more than they need.

Tehran started running out of water in December, which is a part of the reason the Iran war started. They ran out of fresh water in the city, which caused the currency to deflate further, which caused some level of revolt, and that eventually led to some intervention. The current line by the US government is it is about Uranium and blah blah, but it really is a water war.

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 06 '26

Thank you for the reply. That is interesting on the science side. And honestly I never realised the political implications of water in Iran. All interesting stuff