# Your breath is burning my skin
# Your mouth takes in my water
# And the clouds roll like a river The rain falls sharp as ice
# And the oceans tumble over like mist in the night
# And my heart is a machine A machine keeping time
# And my body is a building scraping at the sky
# And water looks like water running
# Water looks like water running. #
ANIMALS CHITTER
Probably because I use it every day, I take water for granted.
I'm Kelly McEvers and I'm a radio journalist.
And for this story, I have teamed up with film-makers and scientists
to make a podcast-style documentary
about what might be the most important substance on our planet...
..water.
And since embarking on this journey, I am now starting to see
this molecule everywhere.
We call it the water lens.
Look through it and you'll see water inside everything that lives.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
BIRDSONG
You'll see rivers in the sky...
..you'll even see water shaping human evolution.
You'll see water in the blueprint of civilisation...
FAINT CHATTER AND GUNFIRE
..you'll see water connected to changes
and even conflicts across the world.
And for me, after seeing all this, I think one thing becomes clear...
..we really can't take water for granted any more.
WATER DRIPS
WIND BLOWS
So if there are endless ways to combine atoms to make molecules...
..what's so special about water?
Water is, of course, a molecule,
but it is in THE most
intense and intimate
relationship with life that one can imagine.
Geologist Stephen Mojzsis speaks to the heart of this film.
We need to understand this relationship between water and life
because, to be blunt, our survival depends on it.
WIND GUSTS
Stephen is one of the many experts we met on our journey.
And his particular expertise takes us back to the very beginning
of this story about water and life.
Stephen shocked the science world when he discovered
where Earth's water came from.
We long held this idea,
a belief, really,
that water was delivered by comets and asteroids and so on.
But instead, what we found is that water was already here!
And we know this from the investigation
of the very oldest minerals of all.
Stephen says water first showed up on the surface
about 4.3 billion years ago.
So much of the surface was molten rock that we call this time
the Hadean, which means "hell".
This is very much like what we might imagine the Hadean Earth was like,
a bright red sky.
That atmosphere is dominantly carbon dioxide.
Soon after it had finished its cooling,
rocks and minerals released water as steam.
THUNDERCLAP
It goes into the atmosphere, expands and cools
and, as clouds, then result in rain.
So began the first water cycle.
And it rained so much that two thirds of our planet
was submerged underwater.
This water has special powers.
Well, water is like the superhero of molecules.
Water is a really great solvent.
We call it the universal solvent
because it dissolves more substances than any other liquid.
And that meant our ancient oceans
were this primordial soup of chemicals.
That is the crucible of life's origin.
We don't know for sure, but scientists think there was a spark.
And then...
A water molecule is the link
between the non-living
and the living world.
Stephen says the development of life could not have happened
at a more crucial moment.
Because at this time, Earth's atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide,
which acted like a blanket hugging the Earth.
That heated things up and threatened to vaporise all our water.
Earth's fate would have been a super-hot house
with a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere.
No water, no life...
..hellish surface.
But then, Stephen told me,
early life evolved to rescue Earth from this scorching apocalypse.
Because a kind of bacteria
photosynthesised the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere...
..and replaced it with...
The highly-toxic substance called oxygen.
Now...that's ironic
because without oxygen, we can't...
HE BREATHES DEEPLY
And it's this interplay between life and the atmosphere
that continues to keep Earth at the perfect temperature.
Not too hot, not too cold,
just right for liquid water.
Life has actually perpetuated the liquid water
on the surface of our planet for geologic time.
BLADES WHIR
INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER
Stephen has spent his career trying to find evidence
of early life forms and their watery origins.
Searching for fossils that might have survived for 3.8 billion years.
These rocks here to the east and north,
they're called the Amitsoq.
Which is one of the most exciting places in the world
to see the earliest evidence for life on our planet.
BLADES WHIR
Almost all of the fossil rocks from such an ancient time
have been churned up or weathered away.
This is one of the three places on Earth
where the original seabeds still survive.
Stephen has travelled thousands of miles
to see this single rock face.
Got to get the sun angle right.
There's a layer here.
At first, it's hard to tell if Stephen is impressed...
It looks like a kind of tepee.
..and then...
Holy...!
FAINT LAUGHTER
There they are. I think...
..holy, holy, holy cow.
Stephen thinks he might be looking at the oldest life form ever found.
It'll take months of testing in a lab before Stephen can confirm
that these markings were once living beings.
It's the kind of thing that many of us have been looking for
for many, many, many years.
This is the ultimate search for a relative
at the base of the family tree of all life itself.
Ever since, all life has been bound to water.
It is such a fundamental bond.
No life can exist without it.
Even when life moved on to land
and the plants colonised the surface of the Earth,
even in the driest deserts,
they still carry a little bit of the ocean with them.
All plants are 90-95% water in the first place.
And it's part of their structure, it's part of their metabolism,
it's part of absolutely everything that they are.
Vast regions of our world are getting hotter and drier.
For humans to adapt,
it makes sense to study how nature overcomes the absence of water.
So for 25 years, plant scientist Jill Farrant
has championed a rare group of plants
that can dry out and still come back to life.
So this is a resurrection moss.
It rehydrates extremely quickly. It's going to happen fast,
so watch as I pour the water.
Mosses like this were among the first life forms to colonise dry land.
Plants that I work with are commonly called resurrection plants
because they appear to resurrect from the dead state.
They're not dead at all.
They're just so dry that they look dead.
But you just have to add water.
Back in her lab in Cape Town, Jill is trying to discover
how resurrection plants are able to break the sacred bond with water
and still survive.
She wants to use this knowledge to help farmers get through droughts.
My dream is to create a crop that tolerates water loss and does not die
and produce food security in the face of drought.
Or if there hasn't been rain and you get a rain,
there's a guaranteed comeback of your crop.
All yours.
Imagine if a crop could resurrect in 24 hours
the way the resurrection bush does.
OK, let's pour some water on.
In its dry state, the bush transformed its insides
into a glass-like substance.
And now, as it rehydrates, these glassy tissues soften
and come back to life.
The strategy is extremely rare.
There are only 135 species in the world that can do this.
But in a drought-prone world, this strategy is a game-changer.
BIRDSONG
Resurrection plants might be rare,
but the genetic potential for resurrection is actually common.
It's in every plant that makes a seed.
Every single crop that we have makes a dry seed.
It has the genetics to be a resurrection plant,
it just doesn't switch those genes on in the face of a drought.
Let's actually just turn on those genes.
As water sources for crops become more and more erratic,
Jill hopes she can develop her resurrection crop
in time to save the world's most vulnerable farmers.
In the Northern Cape, Jill took our camera team to film a spectacular event
that dramatically shows this ability of life to survive
even in the driest extremes.
Now, what fascinates me is this leaf.
Look at this one. Yeah.
It's going to...
Yeah. Yeah.
Purple juice.
And it's got this capsule which all the seeds will erupt from.
Jill is introducing us to a secret desert bloom location
where we might film the mass flowering of the desert.
There's so much life here. It's dormant and it's waiting,
but, you know, you're going to have to have faith in the system
that the rain's going to bring it around.
Christian Munoz and his son, also named Christian,
are time-lapse experts,
and they have already spent decades chasing these elusive desert blooms.
They use a computer-controlled camera
which means they can combine two shots filmed at different times.
Once with the bloom and once without.
The trouble is, there's at least a six-month gap
between filming the two images.
And they're not just shooting in South Africa,
they are chasing super blooms all over the world.
The Munozes' biggest challenge has been to film the bloom back home in Chile.
The Atacama Desert is the driest desert on Earth.
There are areas with no record of rain at all.
Checking the weather radar, the Munoz family has a reason to be hopeful.
Sometimes a few drops is all it takes.
Finally, after a decade of work,
the Munozes can show us the transformative power
of water in a desert.
FAINT BIRDSONG
INSECTS CHIRRUP
WIND GUSTS
FAINT BIRDSONG
Before they died, these flowers produced millions of seeds.
And with just a few molecules of water sealed inside each seed,
these time capsules of life can survive everything the desert throws at them.
We know of seeds that have sat for 30,000 years
and still germinated when they finally got water.
Seeds. You know, seeds are... I call them miracle technology.
Imagine if you had seeds of a Ferrari.
You know, human technology.
Ferrari, a nice car, beautiful,
the object of desire of many people.
And now you can buy a Ferrari that will arrive with an envelope
through the mail.
And you got this seed you put in a pot with soil.
You water it and a few months later, you have a Ferrari there.
Imagine...imagine that!
And that's precisely what nature is doing quietly, silently...
..with a tree.
It started with a seed that weighed just a few grams
and it's able to build it, the whole thing,
from gas, water and sunshine.
Right? Now, stop and think about this.
What technology we have that match that?
BIRDSONG
I have never met someone who loves trees as much as Antonio Nobre does.
He's not hugging the tree, he's listening to the water
rising up through the trunk.
DULL THUDDING
The leaves are pulling the water column and it cavitates.
It makes, "Tak-tak-tak-tak".
And you can hear it on the stem, on the tree trunk.
DULL THUDDING
Antonio, a scientist at INPE,
Brazil's equivalent of NASA,
has dedicated his career to tracking the water molecule
on its journey through the greatest forest on Earth.
WILDLIFE CHITTER
Antonio and his colleagues started by tracking the journey
of the water rising through the trees.
Measuring the molecules
as they are drawn 200 feet high into the canopy.
Colouring the water with a UV dye, scientists can even observe
the flow of water through each individual leaf.
A rainforest tree can pump 260 gallons of water a day.
Heated by the sun, the water escapes as vapour into the sky.
But Antonio noticed that alongside water,
the trees were also releasing something else.
Rising out of the forest, they measured tiny particles of dust.
So small, they would be dwarfed by the spray from a perfume bottle.
Why trees are releasing this dust, you know,
this is like Sherlock Holmes sort of mystery.
What is going on there?!
Antonio and his team discovered the forest was conducting
transactions in the air.
Creating its own cloud system.
Because every cloud and every raindrop
is formed on a speck of dust.
THUNDERCLAP
The technical term is condensation nuclei,
but Antonio gave it a name that I like a lot better.
It's like you're dropping, er...magical dust, like fairy dust.
and then, pfff, it starts raining.
Fairy dust is another seemingly-magical expression
of the bond between life and water.
It's like seeding the air so that it would benefit itself.
So the forest is cranking its own rain.
Antonio's discovery immediately sparked a new mystery.
Everyone assumed in the dry season, Amazon trees stop pumping water,
but that's not what happens.
The Amazon trees do something that is counterintuitive.
They transpire more water during the dry season
than during the wet season.
The trees there are crazy, but they don't care.
They just pump, pump and pump.
They respond as a group.
And it's a big group!
400 billion trees pumping a staggering 20 billion tonnes
of water each day into the sky.
It rises and condenses on fairy dust to make clouds.
And then all these clouds move like a river.
Only this river is in the sky.
It captured the imagination. People said,
"Wow! There are rivers in the sky?! How come?"
Well, it's a concentrated flow of moisture
and they bring moisture from point A to point B, like a river.
Above the forest, the aerial river
is even bigger than the Amazon River itself.
You could think of this as the largest river on Earth.
And it flows far beyond the boundaries of the forest.
Blocked by the Andes mountains, it is forced to turn south,
travelling 2,000 miles, beyond the city of Sao Paulo.
Dumping water as it goes, it transforms areas
that should be deserts into fertile plains.
And floods the prairies of the Pantanal,
creating the largest wetland on Earth.
Which boasts the highest concentrations of wildlife
in South America.
So much water arrives that the usual rules for animals
seem to be turned upside down.
Fish eat fruit from trees.
A tapir, having lost its meadows,
grazes while holding its breath.
Even jaguars move from land and hunt in the water.
The Amazon isn't the only flying river.
From the rainforests of Borneo to the African Congo,
there are many forests with the power to shape global weather.
Combine this with the natural ebb and flow of the seasons
and what you get is nature's great pulse.
This is ten years of data
of what the plants are doing.
The whole biosphere.
Low productivity in red and yellow
and high productivity in green and blue.
This is showing you what the biosphere is all about - life.
It's pulsating like a heart. Heartbeat.
Water is Earth's bloodstream.
And life is the result.
And now, researchers are following the paths
that water and life take together.
And new technology can open up an even greater understanding
of how the movement of animals is connected to the pulse of water.
When we caught up with Martin Wikelski,
he was busy putting a tracking device on a young giraffe.
But it's not just giraffe that he studies.
FAINT CHATTER
Martin is actually coordinating a worldwide
animal-tracking revolution.
Martin's high-tech miniature tags
can relay live feeds via the International Space Station
to scientists anywhere in the world.
All done. RELIEVED SIGHS
Well, on animals, we have these tiny little tags
that have a solar panel and a battery
and electronics inside and an antenna.
And that can be as a backpack, or it can be a little ear tag.
Martin even makes tags small enough for insects.
Like this death's-head hawkmoth.
With these smaller tags, Martin follows the signal from his airplane,
downloading the tracks to his global maps.
Martin is able to gather all this data
from creatures big and small, into the Icarus database.
Or, as some call it, the Internet of Wings.
It gives him a live global overview,
where he can actually see how the patterns of animals
connect with the pulse of water.
So water is actually THE most important thing.
In a lot of cases, we see that water is driving migrations, movements
or entire life histories of animals.
Wildebeest follow the rains as they sweep across the Serengeti.
BRAYING
They know the rain will transform a desert
into one of the richest grasslands on Earth.
As they graze, these 1.4 million stomachs break down the grass
and return the nutrients to the soil
in the form of dung and urine.
And discoveries in the Serengeti reveal
the greater the animal impact, the more the landscape is enriched
and is able to hold even more water.
The movement of animals can affect the landscape
just as much as the movement of water does.
12 million snow geese seem to know the exact moment
the snow will melt in the far north.
On their migration, they disperse nutrients and seeds they have eaten
across thousands of miles.
A lot of the movements we see here are related to water.
So we have the ice, when it melts,
we see the snow geese going up from California.
The productivity of populations of animals, like geese in the Arctic,
is highly dependent upon water.
So it's really a system that drives almost everything.
Everything from great herds to tiny insects
is perfectly synchronised with the pulse of water.
INCESSANT HONKING
THUNDERCLAP
But for us, one story really stood out.
An incredible journey following water
on a record-breaking adventure.
BIRDSONG
Wandering glider dragonflies hatch in the rice paddies of India.
And as the monsoon rains sweep off the southern coast,
the tiny insects rise 5,000 feet into the air,
following the water far out into the Indian Ocean.
The mystery of where the dragonflies go
caught the attention of biologist, Charles Anderson
when millions of wandering gliders suddenly appeared in the Maldives,
400 miles off the coast of India.
I realised that something quite extraordinary was going on
because dragonflies absolutely need fresh water to breed.
And Maldives is a place with no surface fresh water.
So, what on earth are they doing?
Why are they coming here? What on earth is going on?
Without breeding waters, flying all the way from India makes no sense.
Unless...the dragonflies were en route to somewhere else.
Remember those flying rivers over the Amazon?
In a similar way, the monsoon brings rain from India to Africa.
Charles tracked how the dragonflies were hitching a ride on these storms.
Incredibly, the tiny insects spend about a week
flying 2,500 miles across the Indian Ocean.
All the way to Africa.
Most people cannot believe that a five-centimetre insect
could possibly cross an ocean.
And yet, they do.
The rains create temporary pools...
..and the dragonflies arrive to be among the first to colonise them.
In the water, their nymphs prey on mosquito larvae.
Within just seven weeks, they're ready to emerge
and transform into adults.
HUMMING
The wandering gliders wait for the seasons to change.
A circuit of the Indian Ocean takes four generations to complete.
A round trip of 10,000 miles.
This is the largest, most amazing migration of any insect.
In some ways, of any animal.
To cross oceans, to pass between continents,
it is quite extraordinary.
Their relationship with water is extraordinary.
And in Africa, they eat so many mosquitoes, they can end up
being the most effective way to control diseases, like malaria.
So imagine, what if farmers in India
spray too many pesticides and kill the dragonflies?
It could cause a deadly malaria outbreak in Africa.
We are really just at the beginning of a new phase
of understanding Earth's systems.
Because we finally get a glimpse of how life is moving
and interacting around the planet.
And this is super exciting to us.
THUNDERCLAP
The pulse of water connects all the plants,
all the forests and all the animals.
But of course, this pulse also connects you and me.
Over seven billion of us depend on the pulse of water.
Our success as a species has been to harness the pulse.
We use water, above all, to feed ourselves.
But we now know that droughts are increasing in intensity,
becoming longer, breaking records.
The pulse of water might not be as reliable as we thought.
On our travels across America,
we met farmers who are experts at growing food in dry climates.
But for many of them, the most recent droughts have been overwhelming.
There are folks that have run out of water.
And if there's no water here, there's no value.
Yeah. There's no value at all.
We're so thankful this morning for the rain that we've had.
I know here, every drop counts.
And we've been praying that drought is broken in West Texas.
After 2010, we've had a pretty good decline in rain
and I've been stuck pretty dry for the most part
for about the last nine years.
We try to sustain until we get rain,
and if there's no rain, then we have to sell.
So the water table has dropped significantly in this area.
Without water, there's no livestock, there's no people.
It's not only farmers who suffer.
Without water, entire communities are collapsing.
And it seems like nothing can be done, other than to pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, we thank you for the blessing.
We please ask that you keep the rainfall coming
and let it nourish our pastures and nourish our crops. Amen.
Amen. Amen.
THUNDERCLAP
AIRCRAFT OVERHEAD
Scientists have developed a unique technology to follow the droughts
and to measure the amount of water held in the vegetation below.
This is clear out of the end...
You want to continue down, you're going to run these 80 miles down.
Time to go?
Er, yeah.
You have to send all these clouds up.
They call Greg Asner the drought chaser.
We have found ourselves facing these drought events.
And when I say chasing, it's somebody calling me up and saying,
"Greg, we have this drought, can you come and help us
"to make that assessment?"
And it used to be that we'd get that call once a year and now
I'm getting that call, I'm not kidding, at least once a month,
if not once a week.
Greg's technology can see and measure water
in ways impossible with the naked eye.
As he flies over, lidar scanners use a laser
to create a high resolution 3D map of the forest below.
At the same time, Greg's cameras record a spectral image,
which means they can see the chemical make-up of each tree,
including the movement of water in the canopies.
In 2010, the drought chasers were called in to analyse a drought
in the Amazon.
We had this mega drought show up
across a lot of the Amazon Basin, especially in Brazil.
The imaging systems on board our plane were lighting up.
Literally, the big screens were showing enormous amounts of loss.
We saw this everywhere - all over the western Amazon.
We saw mortality that easily was over 50% of the tree canopy.
And the reason this is alarming is that at any given moment in time,
you would expect to see about 1% to 2% of the canopy in a state
of dying just naturally.
When you see 50%, 50 times the rate, you don't have words for it.
Scientists like Greg Asner believe if just 25% of the Amazon is lost,
it will reach a tipping point that could fatally damage the rivers
that fly above the forest.
People like Antonio Nobre think we're already there.
And in 2015, there were worrying signs he might be right.
2,000 miles away in Brazil's biggest city, Sao Paulo,
the flying river had stopped its flow
and the people were running out of water.
Antonio Nobre lives there.
The drought struck us, you know, head on
and I started getting really concerned.
The Army started preparing for riots because,
imagine 22 million people in the largest Brazilian metropolis
running out of water, and people got so... It was like,
"What are we going to do. We don't have water, not even for drinking!"
The only explanation is that we are damaging the Amazon.
You damage the forest, you damage the flying rivers,
therefore you damage the water cycle, the pulses stop.
It's like a heartbeat that all of a sudden stops.
While we were filming here, we found one of the most unexpected effects
of the Amazon drought on the Rio Tiete.
Normally, there's enough water to flush pollutants from Sao Paulo
up to the sea, but in the drought, the pollution intensifies,
phosphates and industrial chemicals combine to create this toxic foam.
To kayak here, you have to wear a biohazard suit.
It is the saddest image of a river I have ever seen.
Multiple organ failure, you have that term
in intensive care units, multiple organ failure.
It's going on right now on planet.
And that organ failure has been even more clear,
as the Amazon forest recently started to burn.
That connection between drought and fire is a story we know well,
where I live in California.
Our drought started in 2011 and lasted six years.
It got so bad, the governor asked Greg Asner to come map its effects
on our forests.
This is a dramatic landscape where we're seeing, I would say 30%
are severely drought stricken and maybe 20 are surviving.
Greg estimates the drought in California killed
140 million trees.
Without moisture, the forests are like a tinderbox.
The famous Malibu coastline beneath a rising tower of smoke.
2018 was the worst fire season in California's history,
with over 8,500 fires burning close to 2 million acres
and killing over 100 people.
Oh, my God. I don't know what to do.
Oh, my God. I'm surrounded by fire and I don't know which way to go.
Oh, please, dear God.
Oh, no way.
So, you know, the system is changing,
the water cycle is changing on us.
Yeah, it's time to go.
Those are really big fundamental, planetary-scale changes
that are affecting everybody.
Amidst all this destruction, Greg Asner remains hopeful.
Because whenever he flies,
he finds places that somehow manage
to beat the drought.
He calls these places refugia.
Whenever I've seen these massive losses,
whether it's in the Amazon Basin, or in California,
or in the Pacific islands, like Hawaii,
we always have refugia emerge as places of survival.
This is an example of a refugia,
or a refuge, during the 2016 peak
of the drought in California.
And what you see here are mostly coastal redwood trees.
What defines this as a refuge is the fact that there was enough
water on the landscape persisting in the soil to generate a sustained,
a resilient set of trees in this forest.
And that's why they're showing up in blue.
Protecting refugia protects water supplies of the future.
To me, those are the nuggets, the gold nuggets of nature
that give me hope and not just hope,
but literally the biological resource
for re-expansion of those species.
The key is finding them and protecting them and allowing them
to persist into the future.
Our future is bound to water because of the intimate connection
between life and the molecule that made us.
On Earth, you have a paradise, you have water in the liquid form
for four billion years.
What is allowing for the water to remain on Earth is life.
The take-home message here is that life is the key.
The pulse of water moving across the Earth is the very thing
keeping our planet alive.
But that pulse is changing - because of us.
And you don't have to be a scientist to realise what's at stake.
Even though our human world is vulnerable to these changes,
what fascinates me is how resilient nature can be,
if we give it a chance.
I realise now it's not the water I was taking for granted...
..but where it comes from.
It's nature we need to fight for, as if our lives depend on it.
Because they do.
Next time on The Molecule That Made Us,
Episode Two, Civilisations.
An entire civilisation ends here.
That's what we come from, a water-wading ape.
This is unbelievable.
# Your breath is burning my skin
# Your mouth takes in my water
# And the clouds roll like a river The rain falls sharp as ice
# And the oceans tumble over like mist in the night
# And my heart is a machine A machine keeping time
# And my body is a building
# Scraping at the sky
# And water looks like water running
# Water looks like water running. #
It's amazing, isn't it?
Our blue planet.
The only planet in the solar system
that's surface is covered in liquid water.
But less than 1% of that is freshwater.
Drain the saltwater away,
paint a picture of our freshwater world -
and these are the veins that carry the precious lifeblood
we all depend on.
A liquid with an almost mystical importance to humankind.
And when you look at our human story through this water lens,
as we have been doing for the past year, you start to see the extent
to which the water molecule has shaped our destiny.
And while our water history is an epic success story,
it's also a story of a dangerous dependence.
With an uncertain ending.
Because now we face a difficult question.
Are we about to become victims of our own success?
I'm Kelly McEvers and I'm a radio journalist.
For this story, I've been working with a team of film-makers
and scientists, making a podcast-style documentary,
digging deep into how water has shaped, and is still shaping,
our civilisation today.
But one of our crews started the story about as far away
from civilisation as you can get.
Deep inside Africa's Congo River basin on the trail of a new theory
that might explain a critical moment in human evolution.
And that theory is all about water.
BUZZING
This is a bonobo.
It's a close cousin of the chimpanzee.
You can only find them here in the Congo,
and they have this unlikely relationship to water.
This rare behaviour that gives us a glimpse at how we humans
might have taken our very first steps.
BUZZING
So, if we're going to film this, we have to keep up with the bonobos.
And I have to say this is not easy.
Our crew spent three weeks trying to follow these guys.
And following Professor Richard Wrangham.
He's our guide to this new theory of how we evolved to walk on two legs.
Here we are.
Hi, Mawa, how are you doing?
She's just sitting looking at us.
She's just fascinated.
"What's this guy doing wading in my pond?"
You know, it's almost 50 years of walking in the tropical forests
of Africa and, frankly, the thrill never dies.
Richard told us that the story of our first steps has always
been a hotly debated subject because up until now,
no-one can agree how we came to make this move onto two legs,
or in Richard's words... BOTH: Bipedalism.
Which is very frustrating, because this is, in many ways,
the defining characteristic of the hominin line,
the line that led from the rainforest ape
to where we are today.
The generally accepted thinking is that we left the trees
and slowly started to walk out onto the savanna.
But it's never been exactly clear how that would have worked.
In the initial phases of bipedalism
it would have been hopelessly inefficient.
That is why we're here, to see an energy-efficient way
that our tree-dwelling ancestors walked out onto land
some six million years ago.
BONOBOS GIBBER
BONOBOS SQUAWK
So, here what we're seeing,
is the bent hip, bent-knee locomotion,
like Groucho Marx.
You can see her whole body swivelling as she walks.
Walking like this can be very tiring on land,
but it's easy for getting food in water.
And that's what's so wonderful about the wading hypothesis.
In the water, you're buoyed up
so that the physical stresses are much less.
This is a wonderfully ecological argument for how we became bipedal.
That's what we come from,
a water-walking, wading ape.
A water-walking ape might be the missing piece in the puzzle.
And some people go even further, linking water origins to other
human attributes, like why we sweat or why we lost the hair
that covered our bodies, even the size of our brains.
Clearly, for Richard, water was instrumental in the evolution
of our uniquely human style of walking.
WATER ROARS
And it's this kind of thinking that kept coming up
with all the experts we met.
A rethinking of the role of the water molecule
in our human story.
We might take it for granted,
but all civilisations are dependent on their supply of freshwater.
Always have been, always will be.
Of all the experts, for me, water economist Giulio Boccaletti
really spelled out how this dependence on water
has shaped the world around us.
It's Giulio's first time here.
It is, the first time in Cairo.
It's exciting.
It's just an enormous place with a lot of people,
all of them living off one river.
Giulio has spent his adult life trying to convince governments
that water scarcity is humanity's biggest threat.
He famously calculated that ten years from now, we will need 40%
more freshwater than we will be able to supply,
not just here in Cairo, everywhere.
Egypt, in many ways, is a model for the world, and its management
of this one stream of water is essential to the survival
of this civilisation.
And it's true now as it was true 5,000 years ago.
It is hard to overstate the importance of rivers to the story
of our civilisation.
It's not just the freshwater that's so important.
Ancient rivers like the Nile had a kind of heartbeat,
the pulse of the yearly flood that brought new soil...
..to feed the crops.
Today, the Nile is dammed, but at one time it flooded so far
it reached to the pyramids and beyond.
The waters engulfed areas by up to 40 times the size of the river.
When it receded, it left behind a carpet of fertile soil
that fed the world's first great civilisation.
Ancient Egypt was to the ancient world what the United States
has been for the 20th century.
One of the reasons it was so powerful is that,
just like the United States today, it was able to provide much, much
more food than its population required.
It seemingly didn't have a ceiling
of how much it could actually produce.
And all this food production was the beginning of our addiction
to the molecule, the beginning of a dangerous dependence
that made us vulnerable.
Giulio is adamant, when it comes to a water crisis,
we have been here before.
Giulio confessed to me that he only really came to Egypt
to walk down this old staircase.
I've been waiting to see this for a long time.
This is the nilometer, it's the oldest river gauge in the world,
to measure the height of the river,
and it's been here for 2,500 years.
The nilometer was used by Ancient Egypt's water experts,
the temple priests, the Giulios of the day.
It's sort of strange to think that there was somebody like me
worrying about water some four millennia ago.
But that's what this indicates.
Each year, the flood would rise up inside the staircase.
The priests would carefully monitor its height
using the markings carved into the walls.
A good flood was, at this point, 11 or 12 metres.
And yet they were measuring the finger difference,
or the palm difference, or even the length of your forearm,
the cubit difference.
And so it's an instrument of extraordinary precision,
given what they were trying to do.
What they were trying to do was build a predictive model.
This is from Ancient Egypt's oldest surviving text,
and it is all about water and harvests.
You can see here, you have three cubits or three forearms.
One, two, three, four, five, six. Six palms and then two fingers.
So, here they were recording the height of one year's flood.
By looking into the past, the priests could see into the future.
And that was key because the success of this instrument
as an instrument of prediction, was dependent on having long records.
Those records could predict a bad harvest,
which gave the pharaoh enough warning
to distribute food before the famine hit.
It might be a simple stone staircase,
but the nilometer's predictive technology was instrumental
in Egypt's rise to power.
This civilisation lasted for three millennia, far longer
than our Western civilisation.
And I'm sure that there were times when they were convinced
that they would last forever, and they didn't.
Something went wrong.
A water crisis caught up with the pharaohs and they lost control.
This is the last hieroglyph ever inscribed anywhere
in the Egyptian world, and it's defaced.
The last gasp of a civilisation that crashed and burned.
An entire civilisation ends here.
You know, this is the last sign that the Egyptians left us.
The reasons for the fall of the empire are, of course, complex,
but Giulio told me about some surprising new research
that compares ice core data from the Arctic
with the ancient Egyptian nilometer records.
And there's a direct match between global weather events at the time,
the failure of floodwaters in the Nile,
and the successive collapse of dynasties in Ancient Egypt.
It happened time and again,
culminating with the fall of Cleopatra.
There were at least two very severe droughts at the end
of the Egyptian kingdom, during the last reign of Cleopatra.
The drought persisted for much longer than expected,
and then there will be strife, there will be problems,
and the power of the state will be severely weakened.
And that's what happened over and over again
during the course of Egyptian history.
And, in a way, that's what we face today as well.
We, too, are vulnerable to changes in the climate.
This is what Giulio's day job is all about,
and he wants to warn us that water scarcity
can still lead to famine, social unrest, even war.
The origins of the world's civilisations...
..started alongside the fertile banks of four major rivers.
And like Egypt, none lasted forever.
The rains came and went in cycles associated with great droughts
or catastrophic floods.
But of the four, only one is defined by its relationship to water.
China is the water kingdom.
Controlling the molecule is at the heart
of this entire civilisation.
Even the word for politics uses the symbol for water.
And at the centre of China's mythology is a 4,000-year-old story
of a great flood that swamped the land for two decades.
WATER ROARS
As legend has it, the people were saved from the flood
by a heroic figure known as Yu the Great.
And his ability to tame the Yellow River
made him emperor of China's first dynasty -
the Xia.
Our water journey took us to the ancient Yellow River Valley,
to meet a man who thinks he has proved this legend to be true.
Wu Qinglong is a geoarchaeologist who has been unravelling this water
mystery for the last ten years.
It's this perilous gorge that hides Wu's evidence
of the mythical flood.
The story begins at an archaeological site called Lajia.
DOOR CREAKS
This is China's Pompeii.
4,000-year-old skeletons, mainly children,
perfectly preserved by thick layers of mud and sediment.
This is the first time any Western cameras
have filmed this amazing find.
And it's hard not to be struck by the scene of devastation.
How these people died is part of Professor Wu's mystery.
The state of the bodies suggests a flood has preserved them,
but the excavation also shows signs of another disaster,
that might have trapped them first.
Inside Jishi Gorge, Wu began to piece together
the gruesome chain of events.
His first clue, the signature of a massive earthquake.
An earthquake would explain why many of the skeletons' bones
were broken, but it did not explain how it could have caused the flood
that entombed the people.
The evidence he was looking for was there all along.
It had just been too big to see.
The remains of an ancient landslide so big,
it once filled the entire gorge and dammed the river behind it.
Wu worked out how, over nine months, the river rose up behind the dam.
600 feet of water building up until the pressure got too much...
..it burst.
The Great Flood was real.
of China's history and seeped into the psyche of an entire culture.
And for Professor Wu, it was the culmination of ten years of work.
Turns out, China's water obsession was born of real events.
And their struggle to control rivers continued for millennia.
Many of China's rulers were actually trained as water engineers,
masterminding more and more ambitious projects
to bring the molecule under control.
This 1931 flood, the greatest in living memory,
inundated an area the size of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut
combined, leaving four million people dead
and 40 million homeless.
And it was out of this enduring struggle to control the flood
that China became masters of the molecule.
Today, the Three Gorges Dam is the monument
to that water history.
It is the world's largest hydroelectric project,
generating enough power to supply Beijing with all its electricity
needs, and stopping the floods downstream.
It even has its own boat lift.
But controlling all this water comes at a cost.
The 400 square miles of reservoir displaced 1.2 million people,
and caused huge ecological damage.
The loss of habitat caused a dramatic reduction
in local rainfall, and the weight of water...
..has even caused a 30-fold increase in earthquakes here.
Concerned about the environmental impact,
scientists use satellite imagery to count the dams across the world
and calculate how much water is held behind them.
The water in the Three Gorges, for instance, can be represented
by a column 1,000 feet wide.
Rising over 300 miles high.
And that is just one dam.
China has 87,000 of them.
And it's not only China.
The United States has almost just as many.
84,000 and counting.
Today, two thirds of the world's major rivers
no longer have a connection to the sea, endangering fish populations,
wetlands and estuaries.
Within ten years, 93% of all river water will be choked by a dam.
There is now so much water
stored behind dams in the northern hemisphere,
the weight of the water has tilted the axis of the planet,
affecting the speed of its spin.
The way we control water is changing the planet.
For most of our history, anywhere without freshwater
remained off limits to all but the smallest of settlements.
But there was always another source of water -
underground, tantalisingly close,
which, if tapped, had the power to change the face of the planet
like never before.
In ancient Mexico, that power of groundwater
was connected to the gods,
and today, portals to their underground water world still exist.
Here, where there is not a lake,
river or stream for hundreds of miles,
there are small openings in the jungle, called cenotes.
Sources of water that could support whole cities.
No wonder the Maya attributed a spiritual power
to their mysterious underground water source.
DISTANT GRUNTS AND HOWLS
Camila Jaber has her own special relationship
with the Maya's underwater world.
She's a freediver.
She's actually Mexico's national record holder.
She went down deep...
..on a single breath. Yeah. For a long time.
If you want to access this world,
you have to dive 200 feet down in a single breath,
which is incredible, but that's what freedivers do.
And if that wasn't enough, today,
Camila plans to dive into this eerie, toxic cloud
at the bottom of the cenote.
Frankly speaking,
this is the most worrying thing we can encounter cave diving.
Vincent is accompanying Camila as a safety diver.
This is visually beautiful, but it's pretty toxic
and it has exactly the same effect as carbon monoxide.
So it's not really a good thing to be swimming in for ages.
Someone tell that to Camila.
Looks more like dancing in the water than swimming.
I'm not really worried for her,
as long as she's not staying very long in the hydrogen sulphide.
It is not surprising the Maya worshipped these natural wells.
For other civilisations,
it was rare to get such easy access to groundwater like this.
Here in India, this step well has 3,500 steps
to access the freshwater below,
a long climb to get a drink of water.
In this way, for most of our history,
underground water was always just out of reach.
That changed in the early 1700s.
Once again, water is at the centre of a massive leap
in the progress of human civilisation.
This time, it is all about an invention
made on the small, wet island of Britain...
..a new machine called the Newcomen engine,
and it harnessed one of the special properties of the molecule
and used steam to drive the first mechanised pump.
Originally designed to get rid of unwanted water
from flooded coalmines,
soon these pumps would be sucking much-desired groundwater
all over the world.
Steam engines powered the Industrial Revolution.
Steam transported us further and faster.
And that simple original design for a pump
gave us access to groundwater that had been off limits for so long.
There is no better place
to see how that has affected the landscape than here in Arizona.
We headed 60 miles east of Phoenix into the desert
to see 21st-century pumps at work on an unimaginable scale.
Each one of these circles is watered
by a centre-pivot irrigator, taps into underground reservoirs
that seeped into the Earth
over tens of thousands of years,
until we reached them with our really long straws.
Sanjayan is convinced we have been building a debt here,
that we will soon have to repay.
And he took us to investigate
the extent of our thirst for underground water.
Although it wasn't as easy as we'd hoped.
You would think filming a farming operation wouldn't be that hard,
but we called over 50 farms and asked to film on their land.
Not one of them said yes,
especially if we were going to mention groundwater.
You couldn't get near this stuff.
It actually says "private property" right here, "no trespassing".
So we resorted to filming from the side of the road.
To film it with a drone, I had to stand on the edge
and I had to look across a fence.
Don't lose this thing.
And you think, my God, you know, we've gone around the world
and we've filmed all sorts of things that are really sensitive,
like giant oil rigs or nuclear facilities, and it wasn't this hard.
I mean, it's a piece of farm equipment.
It's not national security, for God's sake.
It's a piece of farm equipment
and no-one wants to talk to you about it?
That tells you there's something going on.
There's nothing illegal going on here,
but there is an issue.
With each of these pumps pulling water out of the ground
at up to 3,000 gallons per hour,
that is much faster than rainfall replenishes it.
The aquifer can only last so long.
Kind of amazing.
Look at this water, just gushing out.
It's cold, because it's coming from deep, deep under the Earth.
The last time that water was on the surface,
there were mammoths walking around here.
That's crazy.
It's certainly not the most sustainable way of using water.
It might not even be the most efficient way of using water,
but it's the fastest way of using water.
And it's hidden water, it's secret water,
it's water that, frankly,
not a lot of people want to even talk about it.
Not to us, anyway.
And the reason for all the secrecy -
it's a sensitivity about whose water it is and how long it'll last.
Growing alfalfa is worth half a billion dollars per year
in Arizona alone.
That's just been mowed.
So that's the alfalfa, what's left of it, that they've now baled.
As long as you own the land,
you don't pay for the water underground.
And while that lasts,
no-one wants to limit the amount of water they can pump
because it means they'll make less money.
Thousands of farms in America are pumping water in this way,
but this farm introduced me
to one of the most surprising parts of our water story.
Sanjayan took us here to show us
how far some will go to get as close as possible to a water source.
Look at this, it's incredible infrastructure.
I mean, it's spectacularly built,
clearly much more money than any of the other farms we've driven by.
I've never seen that kind of infrastructure
just to get into a farm, with a big, big gate.
And it looks like a high-security facility.
Why don't we see if we get to the very edge of this farm
and we can just stop there and take a look?
Because they're sure not going to let us in there.
Places like this show us
a new way that countries are tapping into each other's water.
And it's actually owned by a Saudi Arabian company.
And you think, why is Saudi Arabia in the middle of Arizona?
So, what's going on?
When you think of the Arabian Peninsula, you think of oil.
But when the Saudis started drilling for oil back in the 1970s,
they also found huge reserves of groundwater,
enough to fill Lake Erie.
It led to an explosion of centre-pivot farms
so big, you could see them from space.
And they got very good
at going deep down and sucking that water up at a very fast rate.
In the 1990s, the Saudis were one of the leading exporters of wheat.
They were actually the world's sixth-largest exporter.
But that didn't last long.
By 2012, in just 20 years,
80% of their aquifer had been pumped dry.
Almost overnight, they were importing as much wheat
as they used to export.
They looked around the world and said,
"Where can we grow crops where there is a steady supply of water,
"where people haven't really caught on to it?"
And guess what? They found it right here in Arizona.
And I think that's just sort of this astonishing story.
What's really astonishing
is the extent to which we are all doing this.
The Saudis aren't the only ones
tapping in to the water of other countries.
In fact, it's going on so much
that we're creating a new flow of water around the planet,
one that is not in the form you might expect.
If you had to name the world's second-largest exporter
of fruit and vegetables after the United States,
the tiny country of Holland
might not be at the top of your list,
but last year alone, their exports were worth $100 billion.
Since medieval times,
the Dutch have been the water experts,
and they're still leading by example today.
They recently committed to sustainable agriculture,
and since the year 2000,
many farmers have reduced their dependence on water by 90%.
Much of their success
lies inside vast arrays of climate-controlled greenhouses.
We ventured inside with water scientist Arjen Hoekstra,
and we were blown away by what we saw.
Wow.
That's impressive.
See all the seedlings, young tomato plants,
hundreds of thousands of those seedlings are growing here.
Outside is nearly freezing and here inside,
it's quite hot, actually, I must say,
but everything is climate-controlled
to create the perfect conditions for growth.
When you talk to someone like Arjen,
you realise he is fascinated by, actually obsessed with,
our use of water and its impact around the world.
He even came up with the concept of the water footprint,
that measures the amount of water needed to supply our daily needs.
Most people, if they think about water use,
they think about the shower and washing their hands, or cooking.
But in fact, 92% of all the water consumption in the world
is related to crop production in agriculture.
92%, just to grow the food that we need to eat.
When you calculate how much water it takes to grow a tomato,
it starts to add up.
The interesting thing about a greenhouse like this
is that it is kind of a laboratory.
We know the temperature, we know the lights.
We know exactly how much water the plant needs.
And if you count every drop, as Arjen has,
you discover something quite revealing.
Of all the water that a plant soaks up from the Earth,
99% evaporates.
Only 1% is used to build the plant.
I'll put it back.
Otherwise, you never know what happens.
Inside this greenhouse, the evaporation is contained,
and the drip irrigation reduces water footprint.
Outside, with traditional farming, there's 20 times that footprint.
Worldwide, the average is 200 litres of water
for one kilogram of tomatoes.
It takes 26 gallons of water to grow a pound of tomatoes,
so a tomato's water footprint
includes this invisible trail
of all the water that was used to make it.
This trail of water, Arjen calls virtual water.
And virtual water is as powerful and important as any flowing river.
You just need someone like Arjen to understand the scale of it.
SHIP HORN BLARES
When I see all those containers, I see water,
a lot of water.
If a single container ship were filled with tomatoes,
and it takes 26 gallons of water to grow a pound of tomatoes,
a whole ship like this has a water footprint
of over two billion gallons of virtual water.
That means a container ship filled with green coffee beans,
for example, has a trail of over 400 billion gallons
of virtual water.
Each boat has a satellite tracker, and mapped from space,
you really get to see the scale
of this new flow of virtual water around the planet.
Their paths form giant virtual rivers.
Going through the Suez Canal,
there is three times more virtual water
than real water is flowing over Niagara Falls.
Water is a global resource,
and if you don't have the water in a country,
you can rely on water elsewhere.
This is how Saudi Arabia taps aquifers in America
and causes a virtual water flow from Arizona to Jeddah.
Saudi Arabia, 66% of their total water use is outside the country.
With Europe, it's 44% and the United States, it's 20%.
In other words, this is a global dependency.
This flow of virtual water
is humanity's latest innovation to harness freshwater.
Our addiction to the molecule appears to have no limit.
But there is a dark side to virtual water
because it pushes the consequences of our thirst for water
out of sight and out of mind,
like our desire for cheap jeans and T-shirts,
which sucks a virtual water flow from countries far away.
Take the Aral Sea as an example.
In Uzbekistan, once the fourth largest lake in the world,
but the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea
were diverted to irrigate cotton fields.
Cotton is for export to other parts of the world,
and the rivers don't end up in the sea any more.
The Aral Sea is disappearing.
In just 30 years, the Aral Sea was drained to a desert
by the suck of virtual water used to grow cotton.
It's a huge environmental disaster,
and that is directly related to that export of cotton.
Sanjayan witnessed this man-made tragedy for himself.
It takes your breath away because it's a gigantic lake,
unimaginably big, with ships on it,
that disappeared in my lifetime. In my lifetime.
It is too big to almost imagine
that it is humans that have done that.
For Sanjayan, the Aral Sea is just one of many signs.
The cracks in the system are everywhere.
And you don't have to leave America to see them,
like the Colorado River.
So many dams hold water in their reservoirs
and so many canals siphon it away, that now...
You end up with this river petering out, you know,
50 miles before it reaches the sea.
I could stop it with my foot, it had become such a trickle.
Maybe more importantly, our groundwater reserves
are at a breaking point.
Sanjayan took us to see the extent of our aquifer depletion.
Here in Arizona,
so much water has been pumped from underground
that the ground has dropped and ripped apart.
Holy cow!
Oh, this is unbelievable.
I mean, this is like a canyon opening up at my feet.
That's... Now, that's a crack.
LAUGHTER
I mean, that's a proper crack in the Earth.
Even further cracks down there. Be careful.
This is...this is all ready to go.
Whoa!
Oh, I'm so sorry.
You know, that's kind of amazing, right?
Because, like, nature's found a way to use this little bit of geology,
there's barn owls nesting here.
That's the white that I'm seeing here.
This is ridiculous.
It definitely feels like that crack in the wall of your foundations.
And it's not just Arizona.
The ground is sinking in California, New Orleans,
Mexico City, Saudi Arabia, Bangkok.
It's a sign. Shanghai...
It's an absolute sign. ..Tokyo... ..that you're running out.
Cracks in the desert, sinking cities,
just a few more of the signs that today,
our demands on freshwater are outstripping supplies.
It's a global problem, one that none of us should feel immune to.
And believe me, I'm not above any of this.
If we don't take care of water in a sustainable fashion,
it'll be the first environmental tipping point
that will bite humans the hardest.
I'm sure of it.
You know, you go around the world
looking at places in which people have found ways
to reverse ecological trends and come up with things,
and I think that... I mean, I still believe in human ingenuity.
And that does seem to be the question.
Can our ingenuity design a new water future,
like we've done over and over throughout history?
As we saw in Holland, we can engineer ways of saving water.
But high-tech solutions can only get so big.
You cannot start growing wheat or rice
in those kind of greenhouses,
because the amount we consume is so huge
that it will become much too expensive.
For Arjen, it is about a new appreciation
of the preciousness of water.
And for Giulio, it's just that simple.
All of these problems are manageable, ultimately,
but they certainly won't be managed.
We pretend everything can be solved through technology.
It looks like we no longer take our water management seriously enough.
We just don't value it like we used to.
And that's the real risk here.
If we believe that we don't actually have to worry,
because somebody will take care of it,
well, that's when the biggest problems arise.
Just like in Ancient Egypt, today's temple priests,
the scientists like Giulio, are warning us of a looming crisis.
And I'm afraid nobody's listening.
If we don't listen, our dependence on water,
this molecule that made us, will be the reason for our undoing.
For me, this is a wake-up call to start thinking beyond the tap...
..and find that deep connection to the molecule
that is inside of us all.
Because if the next chapter in our water story
is going to be one we survive,
our next step needs to be our greatest.
Next time, on The Molecule That Made Us...
I'm so sorry.
Episode three: Crisis.
Liftoff of GRACE Follow-On.
We have just
flat squandered this resource.
# Your breath is burning my skin
# Your mouth takes in my water
# And the clouds roll like a river The rain falls sharp as ice
# And the oceans tumble over like mist in the night
# And my heart is a machine
# A machine keeping time
# And my body is a building
# Scraping at the sky
# And water looks like water running
# Water looks like water running. #
Sometimes the best story is right there in front of you,
but you don't see it.
How did I not see water?
I'm Kelly McEvers and I'm a radio journalist.
Every morning, I take a shower, I drink my coffee,
but it never really occurred to me.
I now believe this humble molecule,
the one that's hitting my face every morning,
could be the most important untold story of our time.
So, with a team of film-makers and scientists,
this is our podcast-style documentary on the story of water.
It's easy to follow this story through a record-breaking drought,
or in the increasingly frequent megafloods.
But sometimes the connections to water are less obvious,
like when dry forests burst into flames...
..or when water shortages wreak havoc on stock markets.
Without water, we struggle to feed ourselves and people get desperate.
LOUD CLAMOUR
GUNFIRE
Changes to the supplies of water on Earth
are shaping a new world order around us.
So, I have a new saying -
"If you want to understand why our world is changing,
"follow the water."
So, what does a water crisis even look like?
Does it look like war?
Does it look like a famine?
Or does a water crisis hide in plain sight?
Just 25 miles long and five miles wide,
Gaza is near the epicentre of Middle Eastern conflicts.
But instead of politics, for a moment,
let's just follow the water.
Yehia Jedallah lives with his father and brothers
in a neighbourhood called Al-Shati.
For 4,000 years, people here have gotten their water from wells.
But because the aquifer is now overdrawn,
the saltwater is intruding from the sea.
Today, 97% of Gaza's wells are unfit for human consumption.
If nothing is done, the United Nations predicts
that Gaza will soon be unliveable.
Watching this, you might think,
"Whoa, that is really bad...for them."
But you're also probably thinking,
"My water problems are never going to get that bad."
But here is the thing.
Experts are saying that, in ten years,
the worldwide demand for water will outstrip supply by 40%.
So, statistically, at least, for many of us...
..Gaza is the future.
Maybe you think this couldn't happen in one of the richest nations
in the world.
Well, take a look at this - the Salton Sea...
..a place that once attracted more visitors
than Yosemite National Park.
ARCHIVE: Here is truly a miracle in the desert.
Today, the Salton Riviera beside the blue Salton Sea
is the place for you to take charge of your future.
This unusual city has a date with destiny.
That date with destiny did not end well.
Water scientist Jay Famiglietti understands what happened here.
I like to think of him as the water detective.
Welcome to my office.
Jay told me that we used to let fresh water reach the Salton Sea...
..but now we have diverted the water for other uses.
The only water that reaches the sea is farm runoff...
..which is so polluted that the entire basin
is a public health risk.
One of the things that I think is really clear
from looking at the satellite picture
is that the need for humanity to grow food
is really putting one of the biggest fingerprints on this global map
of changing water availability.
And so what that says to me is that we're having a huge impact,
and so we really need to think about it.
And for Jay, the Salton Sea is also a glimpse into the future.
If we think about worst possible situation -
take a big city like Phoenix, it runs out of water -
this is what it might look like.
Jay often gets accused of being Dr Doom and Gloom...
Rock, RC. countdown one... Go for launch.
..but get him around his rockets and he perks up a bit.
Clarify range for screening. Go for launch.
I'm literally getting the chills. And it is not from the cold weather.
The total amount of water on Earth does not change.
You can't make it or take it away.
So the question is, where does it go?
To answer that, Jay and his colleagues at NASA
created the GRACE mission.
AFDS is ready for launch.
And now, after 15 years of successful measurement,
GRACE is getting a major upgrade.
F9 is in start-up.
LD, go for launch. Ten...
Nine, eight...
Yeah, it's a huge deal...obviously for me personally, but...
And I don't want to sound too corny, but it is a huge deal for a human.
And liftoff of GRACE Follow-On,
continuing the legacy of the GRACE Mission of tracking the movement
of water across our planet.
You know, it reminds me of sending my son off to college
and we dropped him off at the airport -
"There he goes! He's going to do great things!"
We have... Stage separation confirmed.
Stage separation has been confirmed.
GRACE can help us finally understand how water moves across our planet.
Several of Nasa's satellite missions have already been gathering
decades of data that can be pieced together,
and they picture the ancient pathways that water has taken
since the last Ice Age,
a pulse intimately connected with all life on Earth.
THUNDERCLAP
Scientists in the Amazon recently discovered that in tropical forests,
the trees themselves pump water back into the sky.
Above their canopies, this tree water gathers into aerial rivers
that can flow for thousands of miles.
But recently, even the most ancient patterns have been changing.
And we know this because, for the past 15 years,
Jay's GRACE satellites have circled the Earth,
every 94 and a half minutes, gathering data.
With remarkable precision,
they measure the weight of every snowstorm, flood and drought.
We've been able to construct this pretty incredible map,
and it's a really unprecedented look at how water is moving
over the Earth in a way that we've never been able to do before.
And we see a very, very distinctive pattern.
The wet areas, they're getting wetter,
and the dry areas in between are getting drier.
The availability of water is much more fragile and tenuous
than we think, and so even in the developed world,
we shouldn't take it for granted.
I live in Los Angeles,
and one of the things that worries me the most is drought.
NEWSREADER: Cape Town's main reservoir is a dust bowl.
Cape Town is about to find out whether a city can survive
when the water runs out.
Day Zero has arrived.
Drought hit South Africa in 2015,
and for the next three years, they had almost no rain.
The city of Cape Town was within days of shutting off their taps.
We sent a team to film the approach of Day Zero.
And as they followed the water,
the trail took an unexpected and dark turn...
..out of the city and into the once-wealthy farmland
of the Western Cape,
where farmers were dying with the stress of the drought.
I lost three friends during this drought.
It took their lives...
..because they had no hope for their farms,
they had no hope for nothing.
And that's, I think, why we still try to do what we do.
Burre Burger's charity delivers water and feed for livestock
to farmers who are no longer able to farm the land.
The thing with drought is the farmers now all do farming
for a year or maybe a year and a half,
but not for six, seven, eight years.
On some of the farms, they had no rain for almost seven years now.
So then you struggle...
..and you... You struggle with life.
The UN reports that, worldwide,
areas affected by droughts have more than doubled in the past 40 years.
And droughts affect more people than any other natural hazard.
If there's one thing I'm going to change in South Africa
through this project of mine,
I'm going to bring back unity to our country.
We try to get people together, and it's because of water,
that one molecule. HE LAUGHS
If you're caught in the middle of a drought, it's easy to imagine
that the whole world is running out of water.
Far from it.
In fact, as the GRACE data shows us,
the moisture lost in a drought-stricken area
almost always finds its way to somewhere else.
One of the consequences of a warming world
is that the atmosphere can hold more moisture.
And if the atmosphere can hold more moisture,
that means it's going to drop more moisture.
When water is on the move, so is Mike Olbinski.
We got to haul ass!
ENGINE REVS, HE CLICKS TEETH
As a professional storm chaser,
he is one of the few people who benefits from new weather extremes.
Yeah, look at that!
It's really looking good out there.
Yeah, it's really gorgeous.
Most storm chasers want to see tornadoes,
but Mike tracks these rare giant thunderstorms
known as supercells.
Oh, this is stunning!
At this point, it's pretty, but I want a mothership supercell,
so we'll see if we get that.
And so hopefully it's going to be a beastly supercell
with some good structure after a while.
All right, I think we should go.
It's getting close and I want to get in front of it.
Supercells can be ten miles high, 25 times the volume of Mount Everest
and drop billions of gallons of water in just hours.
They produce softball-sized hail, high winds, severe lightning
and even tornadoes.
THUNDERCLAP
In the American Midwest, storms like these are a third more common
than when Mike was born.
Big storms are dropping 10% more rain than they did 25 years ago.
I felt a drop. That's hail! Oh, is that hail? Ow!
Hey, probably got to go! Yeah!
That hail just hit me in the head.
And it's not just moisture.
Storms feed on heat, so warmer conditions also mean more raw power.
MIKE YELPS
THUNDERCLAP
Now the nerves come out. Now the adrenaline's pumping.
THUNDERCLAP
THEY LAUGH
This is what we freakin' live for right here!
This is great... I hope my exposure is right.
Mike finally finds the supercell storm he's been looking for.
Oh, man, it's so great!
Just keep... Just move slow, baby! Just move slow.
This is one of the best supercells I've ever seen.
It's literally all, like, run by water.
They need this for the crops.
And if you didn't have it, then no-one would live here.
That was good, man. Thanks.
THEY CHEER
THEY LAUGH That was good!
It has been a good day for the storm chasers,
but these grand movements of water also tell a tragic story -
one we've been tracking all over America.
NEWSREADER: Supercells have been spotted on the radar.
NEWSREADER: Tornado Alley has already been hammered.
NEWSREADER: That is a wall of water right now.
NEWSREADER: Floodwaters rising as high as ten feet.
One storm in particular caught our attention.
In September 2018,
Hurricane Florence acted strangely as it hit the Carolinas.
REPORTER: Florence will produce catastrophic flooding
over parts of North and South Carolina for some time.
Instead of blowing through, like most hurricanes,
Florence stalled in the coast.
Like a supersize vacuum,
it took moisture from the ocean and poured it onto land as rain.
Florence broke 28 flood and rainfall records for the Carolinas.
That's the top half of our garage.
I don't know where the rest of it is.
We headed to the Carolinas with photographer Gideon Mendel.
Gideon has been documenting the increase in flooding
around the world.
If you could just pause for a second,
so I can, like, get the reflection of the church, that'd be cool.
I guess I have a kind of fascination with this landscape.
There's something about a flooded environment
which I actually find very visually alluring.
He ain't going to come in the boat...
OVERLAPPING SHOUTING
At the heart of the whole project is a series
that I called Submerged Portraits.
KNOCK ON DOOR
And it's a series of pictures of people affected by flooding
engaging with the camera directly.
Would you... Would you be open to us talking to you
and photographing you, maybe? Yeah!
Oh, I'm so sorry, George.
Can you come just a little forward, yeah? That's good...
It is quite amazing how long people will sit there and stand there
in the water and engage with me -
15, 20 minutes, half an hour sometimes.
The portraiture and the direct gaze at the camera,
for me, is so important.
THUNDERCLAP
For Gideon, the increase in flooding is a global story.
In the past 12 years, he has photographed 20 floods
in 13 countries.
The water connects all the people I photograph.
Despite huge differences in culture, class, location,
when the water's in your home,
they have a shared vulnerability to flooding, to climate change,
to global warming.
Extreme rain and flooding is now four times more likely
than it was 40 years ago.
Hurricanes are 60% more powerful than 50 years ago,
and their top wind speeds have increased 25%.
Really photogenic!
So, there's more flooding and there's more drought.
And honestly, it's amazing that farmers are still able
to feed the world.
But what I didn't realise is the extent to which
farmers are tapping into a secret stash of water,
a hidden source that is not affected by droughts or flood,
water that lives underground.
Deep under our feet, there are aquifers that, together,
hold more water than all the lakes and rivers on Earth.
They don't often look like this.
Most ground water is held in layers of rock or sand.
Many aquifers contain what's called fossil water,
and what that means is it took thousands of years to get here.
It is not easy to follow the water that is hidden underground.
But you might have seen these circles from a plane.
With a metal straw and a diesel engine,
we can reach aquifers 3,000 feet down.
Humanity started this kind of industrial pumping of water
just 100 years ago, and it's been so successful,
nearly half the water used for farm irrigation comes from underground.
This water grows almost one fifth of the world's food supply.
We have been draining aquifers with little idea
of how much water is in them, until now.
When Jay and his colleagues launched GRACE,
which stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment,
they designed the system to do the impossible...
..to see into the earth's crust using gravity.
We can see storage changes in the world's great aquifer systems
from space.
I like to say GRACE works like a scale in the sky.
GRACE is actually two satellites.
As they approach an area that has just had a storm, for example,
the extra weight of that water pulls the satellites.
So, as they approach this region that has more mass,
and therefore a greater gravitational tug,
the first one gets pulled down and accelerates a little bit,
the second one comes in, gets pulled down, accelerates a little bit,
and so the distance between the two changes.
That's the measurement that the GRACE mission makes.
It's the position of the satellite.
In this way, GRACE can tell us the difficult truth
about our aquifers.
Sadly, ground water is barely managed around the world,
and so ground water is quietly disappearing.
In California, the ground water took thousands of years to accumulate,
and we're using this fossil water much faster than it can be replaced.
This is the definition of unsustainable.
The disappearance of ground water is really threatening
the water security of the western US.
And, really, no-one's talking about it.
Jay's been doing what he can to get the message out.
BILL MAHER: He's a professor at the University of California at Irvine
and Senior Water Scientist for Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Jay Famiglietti!
CHEERING Jay! Professor! How are you, sir?
All right!
So, finally, a witness who will tell us expert testimony about this.
You know, here's the thing.
The drought situation is much worse than I think is generally perceived.
And this may be why we're not getting the public response
that we want... Yeah, show that chart. Look at this.
It's green, and now it's red.
Now, Doc, I'm not a scientist...
Red is bad! Red is bad.
That's what I know - red is bad. LAUGHTER
It's pretty safe to say that Jay is frustrated more people
are not taking his breakthrough insight more seriously,
but the truth is...it's hard to stop pumping the water.
Farmers need water.
All of us need food.
If anything, we just keep pumping faster.
So, what we're doing here is we just got done setting casing yesterday...
It wasn't until we met Steve Arthur
that we got a sense of the scale of these wells.
He drills 30 new wells each year.
Can you see the water table fall over time?
Well, I remember when I was a kid, we would drill in the Madera area.
We would go 240 to 300 feet.
300 feet was considered a deep well. Yeah.
Now, we're replacing those wells with 500 and 600-foot wells. Oh, OK.
Steve says it's become a kind of race to the bottom,
If one farmer drills deep to get the water,
the next farmer drills even deeper.
And all this drilling is not cheap.
If I'm a customer, and I don't have a well,
I want you to dig a new well. It's 2,000 feet deep.
How much is that going to cost me?
It's going to cost you a little over half a million.
Whoa!
Half to three quarters, depending how it's constructed.
OK.
That is an insane amount of money,
which tells you that water is big business.
It also tells you why so many of America's aquifers are running dry.
The Ogallala Aquifer, one of the biggest on Earth,
lies beneath eight Midwestern states, from Texas to Nebraska.
This is Ogallala Aquifer water.
Comes through the water system over here with the big storage tank.
Like most of the families in St Francis, the Callicrates
have farmed here for generations.
My grandkids, Wilson and Charlie, will be the fifth generation
on this land.
But Mike does not see High Plains farming as a success story.
We have just flat squandered this resource over the last 40 years
that I've been associated with, with farming and ranching
and cattle production in this area.
If we would stop pumping today, it would take 6,000 years
to recover the amount of water that we've taken out
in just the last 40 or 50 years.
The aquifer under St Francis is already a third empty.
Mike blames the industrial model of agriculture,
the one he was taught in college.
I've had a front row seat in this disaster,
and I hate industrial agriculture.
Most of the water from the Ogallala Aquifer is used to grow grain
for feedlots, full of cows.
This is the biggest feedlot in the world, off to your left.
It's 130,000 head of cattle in one place.
From a business perspective entirely, you're thinking
about the Ogallala Aquifer as a gold miner would see a gold mine,
as an asset, as a resource to be extracted and utilised.
And when it's gone, it's gone.
What worries Mike is what happens when the water runs out
and the mining operation moves on?
In St Francis, Mike thinks industrial agriculture has broken
the hope these communities have for a sustainable future,
and it has already hurt the community that lives here.
You know, when we look at this main street of St Francis, Kansas,
what you're really looking at is the approach
of industrial agricultures.
It doesn't care about people.
It cares about return on investment.
It cares about a bank account.
And everything else doesn't matter.
It's no wonder we're losing rural communities and losing farmers.
Down on the southern edge of the Ogallala, the aquifer is already
running dry and putting farmers out of business.
Without the farmers, the local economy collapses.
And if the trend continues,
the town of Happy, Texas is the sign of things to come.
Four churches, but not a single store open for business.
Jay knows this underground water problem is not only in America.
GRACE sees into aquifers all over the world.
There's 37 major aquifers around the world,
and over half of them are past sustainability tipping points.
Which means we use more than is being replenished
on an annual basis
and we're technically mining them.
Given that nearly half of the water used for farm irrigation
depends on these aquifers,
you can understand Jay's alarm.
So as that ground water disappears,
our ability to produce food
for the world's growing population will be threatened.
In fact, there's growing evidence this is already happening,
and it is having serious consequences.
This story begins in Syria, 2006,
when the country was hit by the worst drought in 500 years.
Farmers began to overdraw water from their aquifer.
And with GRACE, Jay could see it as it was happening.
We saw the Syria hot spot and we saw that ground water depletion way
ahead of time, and we did try to communicate
that to the Pentagon, State Department...
..and it's, you know, it's tough.
It's tough to get attention.
You know, who are you? You're some professor that walks in
with a research paper and a colourful map.
And it's hard to really convey what's happening.
But, you know, we made our efforts repeatedly.
I was actually reporting in the Middle East at the time.
And when protests, and later war broke out,
we knew it was connected to the drought,
but what we didn't know was how it was connected
to a much larger global water story.
Neither protesters are battling for regime change.
The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan is home to about 80,000 refugees
from Syria's civil war.
Troy Sternberg is a geographer from Oxford University,
and another detective who follows the story of water.
He wrote a paper showing how global droughts caused a chain of events
that influenced not only Syria's war, but politics around the world.
His interviews with refugees like Mahmoud Al-Kadr add a human
dimension to the data.
Mahmoud, could you please explain what brings you to the refugee camp?
What factors drive you here?
TRANSLATED: The lack of rain have reduced the amount
of crops growing naturally.
So people had to go out and start getting water from underground.
But they also stopped the diesel.
So there is no diesel to be able to pump water.
So there was no, no water to drink.
There is no food with the drought.
We start eating the grass.
85% of Syria's livestock died
and hundreds of thousands of farming families like Mahmoud's
had to abandon their farms.
They ended up settling outside Syria's big cities.
Troy's research shows that there were much larger global forces
at work, more than just a drought in Syria.
When Troy followed the water, he documented a series of droughts...
..that connected Russia, China, the Arab Spring
and politics across Europe.
This globalised world is very interconnected,
things that happen in one part of the world can have a great
knock-on effect in another part of the world.
Sometimes we talk about this as the butterfly effect,
but I think it's more direct and it's really climate, drought,
anything that happens that we can't control or can't count on.
One way might be to look at it as a series of dominoes.
It was a set of dominoes that collapsed over a ten year period,
and it started when Australia faced a drought
described as a 1,000 year event.
Australia is dying of thirst,
and where there used to be water,
there is only dry cracked earth.
During the winter, countries in the northern hemisphere
depend on the southern hemisphere for wheat,
and the drought threatened Australia's ability
to supply this winter wheat to the rest of the world.
Then the next domino fell.
In 2010, mainland China suffered its own drought.
The drought ravaging China is being called the worst in a century.
Wheat is a global commodity traded on the international market,
so liable to market forces.
So if China needs more wheat, my thinking was,
"Does this have another impact somewhere else in the world?"
Troy followed the trail to the Middle East,
where farmers were suffering from their own drought.
And with the wheat issues in Australia and China,
it affected food prices in Syria and Egypt.
So, as Egypt needs more wheat and China needs more wheat,
there's less wheat available.
Then in 2010, another domino fell.
Russia, the largest exporter of wheat to the Middle East,
was gripped by a devastating heatwave.
TRANSLATION: Due to abnormally high temperatures and drought,
I believe it's reasonable to introduce a temporary ban on grain
and wheat products export.
With wheat exports from Russia reduced by 80%,
world prices skyrocketed.
It's Christmas for the speculators,
as prices drive upwards - wheat by a whopping 130%.
There's a limited supply, great demand.
Speculators on the commodities market saw an opportunity.
They bought and held on to the wheat, while prices rose.
Richer countries can stockpile the grain.
They have a great physical and infrastructure power.
Ships around the world that can transport wheat.
Other countries don't have this possibility.
By the time some Arab governments realised what was going on,
it was too late.
Prices for bread went way up.
In Egypt, the wheat prices skyrocketed 300% and more.
In recent weeks, there have been long queues in front of bakeries.
Rising prices have even caused riots in the Nile delta.
Hunger began to fuel people's anger toward their governments.
We see food riots in Cairo.
After Friday prayers, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators
gathered in Tahrir Square.
The people of Egypt have toppled their leader.
Egypt will never be the same.
And that's where the Arab Spring really brings everything together.
Which brings us back to Syria.
Inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings
and suffering from their own drought,
Syrian protesters also took to the streets.
The Syrian government made it very clear today
that it will tolerate no dissent.
Events escalated...
..and Mahmoud's family was caught in the crossfire.
TRANSLATION: I lost my son and I lost my wife in this war.
My wife was on the way to the market in Damascus.
On rooftops there were some snipers and she got a shot in the head.
So I'm afraid for the rest of the family.
And we came here, and here they were helping us,
and they were supporting us.
Water or drought is, of course, only one factor
that influenced these events.
But when a million refugees fled to Europe,
the falling dominoes came down much closer to home.
These people calling for the regime to change are on the back foot.
They've been forced from their homes
and pushed towards the border with Turkey.
As migrants pour into Europe, in the UK, we see this filmed on TV
throughout the summer of 2015.
It plays very well into the Brexit leave debate.
The leave campaign celebrates,
as the UK votes to cut its ties with the European Union.
The fear of mass migration directly impacted the Brexit vote in Britain,
and, according to Troy, even had an impact here in America.
If you go further, this news plays out in the US,
Donald Trump gets elected on this very nativist "America first" theme.
We will build a wall.
Troy's concern is that the water crisis can spark an even more
dramatic chain of events in other parts of the world.
What will we see next?
What happens if we have a climate disaster
in India or China or Mexico or Pakistan?
Then we're talking about very serious dynamics
and very serious outcomes.
In our globalised, interconnected world,
no country can afford to ignore water and climate.
For the past four years, the World Economic Forum has ranked
the impact of the water crisis
alongside weapons of mass destruction,
disease outbreaks
and failure to address climate change.
Looking for solutions, we came back to the US
and we went to New York City.
And we reconnected with Giulio Boccaletti,
who wrote a seminal report for the World Economic Forum.
In it, he calculated that, ten years from now,
the world will need 40% more fresh water than it can supply.
But Giulio thinks if more people knew about New York's water story,
they could avoid that grim fate.
New York has a very particular experience, but one that I think
holds the key to the solution to the water crisis for the whole world.
I suspect most New Yorkers, you know, assume that water just comes
out of the tap, and yet behind that tap there is one of the most
sophisticated integrations of nature and water
that has ever been seen on the planet.
Giulio took us to meet the CEO of WaterAid America...
..Sarina Prabesi.
While Sarina has worked on water issues all over the world,
here in New York, she and her husband also own a coffee shop.
She cares a lot about New York's water.
Water is the lifeblood of our business,
like, there is no good coffee without good water.
So you work for WaterAid,
and what do you think people imagine when they think
about the water crisis?
People have thought about the water crisis or something elsewhere.
But now I think there is more understanding
that the water crisis is all around us.
So New York had a proverbial fork in the road, right,
and had to take one option rather than the other?
In the '80s, the water was getting very polluted
and in the '90s, I think there was a real strategic decision to make
of how the future of New York City water would be handled.
One way could have been a bit more business as usual,
invest in infrastructure.
And this was... We're talking about a treatment works, right,
I mean, a treatment plant?
Treatment, filtration, technology, high cost.
I think $6 billion.
Definitely a more energy intensive approach.
And what about the alternative?
And the other option was to really look at
where the water is coming from.
Because where the water was coming from was the Catskill Mountains.
So instead of a new treatment plant, New Yorkers chose to invest
in a nature reserve that doubles as a giant waterfall.
The water is being filtered by trees in its natural environment, serves
like a sponge holding the water.
A forest replaces heavy industrial infrastructure,
with the added benefits that the place runs itself, maintenance free
and supplies 90% of New York's water.
For New York City, it was a radical choice for the time,
but it was going back to something that has been working for millennia.
The water cycle belongs to nature.
In a way, it's the most simple of answers - back into nature.
Find the answer back at the very beginning from the ecosystems
that we came from, and yet, it can support one of the most modern
societies on the planet.
Making the most of our connection to nature is undoubtedly
the best way forward.
But what works for a wealthy city in a moist climate
won't necessarily work everywhere.
I don't think we're really going to find any silver bullets.
I think as we look around the world, region by region,
each one is going to need a different portfolio of approaches
to manage their way through water scarcity.
Maybe it's not surprising, but we found in the places on Earth
where there is less water, people value it more.
And of all the places we went to, it was in the Middle East
where we saw not only the challenges ahead, but also glimpses of hope.
Since its inception, Israel has valued water,
much like America values oil.
They even went to war over it.
So here, controlling water is a matter of survival.
Israel recycles 90% of its water,
compared to just 1% of the US.
And they achieved this not just through wealth and power,
but through winning hearts and minds.
SPEAKS IN HEBREW
It's this appreciation of water that Mike Callicrate
would like to see here, in the US.
I would like to see us not pop a drop
more than what the recharge rate is.
And we know what those numbers are.
Water is a public resource and it should be used
responsibly and preserved.
We can do this.
So in the end, each of our water experts agreed we CAN do this.
That unlike some threats we face, the water crisis is solvable.
But we are vulnerable.
And in this finely tuned, globalised world...
..if we don't respect water, the climate, collapse will follow.
When we understand the connections, where our water comes from...
..then we value it for what it is...
..the fuel of life itself...
..the molecule that made us.