With her home nestled on the Finniss River bank, you can understand why Diane Bell is so passionate about the state’s water systems. From her living room overlooking the water, we talk about one of the world’s largest artesian groundwater basins.
Extending from Cape York across three states to South Australia’s northeast, the Great Artesian Basin contains approximately 64.9 million megalitres of water.
“I worry about the connectivity between the Murray Darling Basin and the Great Artesian Basin and I worry there’s an unlimited take from (it),” explains Bell.
Currently Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia extract 1500 megalitres a day from the basin. We rely on it for approximately four percent of the state’s total water consumption. Yet that is expected to increase to 10 percent over the next five to 10 years as water intensive mining increases in the state. Knowing this, the government admits there is still no solid data on how the basin refills itself, if that happens at all.
“When I started to learn more about the (mining) processes and the way in which they were being monitored, that is what piqued my interest on this,” says Bell.
Adelaide Review.com.au
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