the.com/desalination
turning the ocean into a giant, extremely inefficient faucet.
means the process of stripping salt from seawater to make it drinkable or usable for farming.
from from latin de- (removal) plus salinus (salty) — humans have boiled seawater since antiquity, but industrial-scale reverse osmosis only took off in the 1960s.
energy hogneeds roughly 3-10 kwh per cubic meter produced.
leftover problembrine byproduct gets dumped back into oceans, raising salinity.
global scaleover 20,000 plants worldwide, mostly in gulf states.
israel examplesupplies over 80 percent of its domestic water this way.