Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100° Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers, and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.

Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation, and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.

Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.

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Fresh water we can use for drinking or agriculture is only about 3 percent of the global water supply, and nearly 70 percent of that is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. So far, that was enough to keep us going, but severe draughts have left places like Jordan, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Spain, and California with limited access to potable water.

One possible solution is to tap into the remaining 97 percent of the water we have on Earth. The problem is that this water is saline, and we need to get the salt out of it to make it drinkable. Desalination is also an energy-expensive process. But MIT researchers led by Jonathan Bessette might have found an answer to that. They built an efficient, self-regulating water desalination system that runs on solar power alone with no need for batteries or a connection to the grid.

Probing the groundwaters

Oceans are the most obvious source of water for desalination. But they are a good option only for a small portion of people who live in coastal areas. Most of the global population—more or less 60 percent—lives farther than 100 kilometers from the coast, which makes using desalinated ocean water infeasible. So, Bessette and his team focused on groundwater instead.

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