💦 Water, One of Most Powerful Forces on Earth
And we're running out of it...
This deep dive started while researching my novel, Floodline. Brief reminder - Floodline is a financial conspiracy thriller around the notion that whoever controls the world’s water controls everything. Learning about water led me down a rabbit hole on water rights law, the geopolitics of scarcity, how quietly water is already being bought up, fought over, and even weaponized. So here we are.
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We take water for granted. It falls from the sky. It comes out of our taps. We swim in it, cook with it, drink it without thinking. But water is one of the most extraordinary, mysterious, and greatest gifts of our planet. And when you really start to look at it closely, water is a force of nature with its own personality.
🌊 The Ocean Is Warming. And It’s Angry.
Do you remember Hurricane Sandy? I do. And if you were in the NYC region in late October 2012, I bet you do, too. The storm tore into the northeastern United States with a force that felt almost personal. Nearly 200 people died. Dozens of coastal communities were consumed, and flooding reached deep into lower Manhattan. The financial damage for the US topped $65 billion.
Sandy was a wake-up call. But what made it so catastrophic wasn’t just the wind. It was the ocean underneath it. Warmer ocean water is rocket fuel for hurricanes. The warmer the surface water, the more energy a storm can pull from it, the faster it intensifies, and the more moisture it carries when it finally makes landfall. As ocean temperatures continue to rise, we should expect more storms like Sandy — and worse. Bigger. Faster. Angrier.
The ocean has absorbed the overwhelming majority of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. That heat has to go somewhere. And increasingly, it goes into storms. Water is trying to tell us something.
🌀 Water Has a Dual Nature
Across many cultures, water is understood to have two sides:
The Giver 🌱
Gentle rain coaxing seeds. Rivers feeding civilizations. The morning dew. Life, made possible.
and
The Destroyer 🌪️
The hurricane erasing coastlines. The flood swallowing homes. The drought cracking earth to dust.
In physics, we describe water as having polarity, positive and negative charges within a single molecule that give it its unique properties. But in a deeper sense, water has always been understood as something that holds opposites together.
Water moves. Water changes. It’s often a mirror for the inner life. Water has long been linked to emotion, intuition, and the inner world. Think about how we use “water language” when we speak —-
I was flooded with grief
She felt a wave of joy
We were emotionally drained
Or how a soft spring rain feels tender while a hurricane feels like rage.
🏺 Sacred Water - The Ancient Southwest
Nowhere is water’s sacred status more vivid than in the desert cultures of the American Southwest. I lived in Santa Fe, NM for years and know this firsthand.
Ancestral Pueblo peoples built entire civilizations around water. Kivas (underground ceremonial chambers) were used for water rituals and prayer. Petroglyphs across canyon walls in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah often show rain clouds, lightning, and Kokopelli , the hump-backed flute player associated with water, fertility, and the bringing of rain.
The Hopi Rain Ceremonies
The Hopi people of northern Arizona perform elaborate kachina dances as a call to the spirits for moisture in the desert. Water is a relationship, something respected and given thanks.
Tlaloc & Mesoamerica
In Mesoamerica, Tlaloc (the Aztec god of rain and water) was one of the most important deities in their entire world of gods, worshipped for centuries across central Mexico. Water meant life. Drought meant death. No gray areas here.
Egypt: The Nile Was Everything
Egyptian civilization was the Nile. The annual flood deposited rich silt across the floodplain, and without it, Egypt was an unlivable desert. Their gods, calendar, agriculture, and national identity were all organized around that river.
Across cultures and over time water has been held sacred. Take a moment to think about how we think about water today, and how many of us take it for granted or “I’m sick of all this rain…”
🌍 Where Did Earth’s Water Come From?
I couldn’t stop thinking about this one! Where did this water come from in the first place?
When our solar system was forming about 4.5 billion years ago, our baby Sun was spewing intense radiation everywhere. The heat would’ve been too much for ice water to survive in the area where Earth was forming…. So what happened?
No one was around then… But the leading theory involves Late Heavy Bombardment which would have happened 4 billion years ago when our area of the solar system was pelted with comets and asteroids from the outer solar system. I know, it’s really that big!
A lot of these objects being thrown our way were full of ice and volatile compounds, including …..water 💦. Billions of impacts, over millions of years, delivered the water that now fills our oceans, glaciers, rivers, and rain clouds. Wow.
Water came to us from space. From ice-filled rocks crashing into our forming planet. It was a gift from the universe.
🔬 You Can’t Make Water (Not Easily, Anyway)
Here’s the rub. We cannot make water in any practical sense.
Yes, I always thought just stick two H’s onto an O…. but no, not simple at all.
In nature, hydrogen doesn’t float around solo, it exists as H₂ (two hydrogen atoms bonded together) while oxygen exists as O₂. To make water, you need to break the bonds of both which requires an enormous amount of activation energy. Energy is also required to then force the atoms to recombine in a very specific configuration. The angles matter. The attractions between atoms have to be exactly right.
You can’t just mix hydrogen and oxygen gas together in a room and expect water to appear. At least not in a good way….
When hydrogen and oxygen do combine, the reaction releases an enormous amount of energy all at once. It’s why hydrogen is explosive. I wasn’t here May 6, 1937, when the Hindenburg lit up and burned to the ground as a result of this uncontrolled chemistry.
The problem is getting these atoms to react in a slow, controlled, specific way that produces clean usable water rather than a fireball. We need exact temperature, exact pressure, and the right catalyst. Get any of those wrong, and you have either nothing happening or the Hindenburg.
Nature figured this out over billions of years. We have not although bright minds are trying.
Water, once it’s gone from a region, doesn’t come back easily. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. We have what we have.
💧 Sadly, Humans Can’t Survive Without It
A human body can survive for weeks without food, but without water, you have roughly three days. Much less during extreme heat.
Every cell in our body requires water for circulation, temperature regulation, brain function, immune response, digestion.
🧠 Brain Function
Even mild dehydration can impair concentration, memory, and mood. Our brain is about 75% water.
🩸 Circulation
Blood (mostly water) carries oxygen and nutrients to every cell in the body.
🌡️ Temperature Control
Sweating is how our body cools itself. Without enough water, it shuts down, and we’ll bake from the inside.
🦠 Immune Defense
Lymph fluid which runs all throughout our bod, is almost entirely water. Dehydration weakens these defenses.
Water is not a supplement and it is not a KitKat (guilty pleasure). It’s our basis for human life.
We are mostly made of water, organized into a temporary, walking, thinking shape. One day, Earth will reclaim us.
🏜️ The Water Wars Are Already Beginning
The Colorado River supplies water to roughly 40 million Americans across seven states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. It irrigates millions of acres of farmland, fills Las Vegas, supplies Phoenix, helped build LA of today.
It’s complicated. And it’s running dry.
Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir fed by the Colorado River sites behind Hoover Dam, where its dropped to historically low levels. You can see a “bathtub ring” of white mineral deposits that shows how far the water level has fallen.
The Colorado no longer consistently reaches the Gulf of Mexico as its been drained, diverted, and consumed faster than the watershed can replenish it. Our warming planet is only accelerating the depletion.
Negotiations between the seven Colorado River Basin states have grown increasingly tense. The water rights treaties that govern the river were written in the 1920s (it was really wet in those days) and they overestimated how much water the river actually carried. The math never worked.
This is happening right now, in real time, across the American West.
I once read a line in Bloomberg Magazine that has stayed with me:
“Whoever controls the earth’s water will control the world.”
Think about that. There is no replacement for water. There is no lab substitute. You cannot invent a new molecule to fill that role.
Water is the one truly irreplaceable resource on the planet, and we treat it like it’s infinite. The Ancient Pueblo people knew. Water simply will not last. The Colorado River is not an outlier. It is a preview.
Water’s reckoning is on its way.
💧 Thanks for reading. If this resonated, share it with someone who has ever stood in the rain and felt something.