Tag Archives: groundwater

The cost of building ChatGPT

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After seeing the description for Laura U. Marks’s recent work ‘Streaming Carbon Footprint’ (in my October 13, 2023 posting about upcoming ArtSci Salon events in Toronto), where she focuses on the environmental impact of streaming media and digital art, I was reminded of some September 2023 news.

A September 9, 2023 news item (an Associated Press article by Matt O’Brien and Hannah Fingerhut) on phys.org and also published September 12, 2023 on the Iowa Public Radio website, describe an unexpected cost for building ChatGPT and other AI agents, Note: Links have been removed,

The cost of building an artificial intelligence product like ChatGPT can be hard to measure.

But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water [emphases mine], pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.

As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption.

But they’re often secretive about the specifics. Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.”

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In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons , or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research. [emphases mine]

“It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI,” including “its heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI,” said Shaolei Ren, [emphasis mine] a researcher at the University of California, Riverside who has been trying to calculate the environmental impact of generative AI products such as ChatGPT.

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If you have the time, do read the O’Brien and Fingerhut article in it entirety. (Later in this post, I have a citation for and a link to a paper by Ren.)

Jason Clayworth’s September 18, 2023 article for AXIOS describes the issue from the Iowan perspective, Note: Links have been removed,

Future data center projects in West Des Moines will only be considered if Microsoft can implement technology that can “significantly reduce peak water usage,” the Associated Press reports.

Why it matters: Microsoft’s five WDM data centers — the “epicenter for advancing AI” — represent more than $5 billion in investments in the last 15 years.

Yes, but: They consumed as much as 11.5 million gallons of water a month for cooling, or about 6% of WDM’s total usage during peak summer usage during the last two years, according to information from West Des Moines Water Works.

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This information becomes more intriguing (and disturbing) after reading a February 10, 2023 article for the World Economic Forum titled ‘This is why we can’t dismiss water scarcity in the US‘ by James Rees and/or an August 11, 2020 article ‘Why is America running out of water?‘ by Jon Heggie published by the National Geographic, which is a piece of paid content. Note: Despite the fact that it’s sponsored by Finish Dish Detergent, the research in Heggie’s article looks solid.

From Heggie’s article, Note: Links have been removed,

In March 2019, storm clouds rolled across Oklahoma; rain swept down the gutters of New York; hail pummeled northern Florida; floodwaters forced evacuations in Missouri; and a blizzard brought travel to a stop in South Dakota. Across much of America, it can be easy to assume that we have more than enough water. But that same a month, as storms battered the country, a government-backed report issued a stark warning: America is running out of water.

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As the U.S. water supply decreases, demand is set to increase. On average, each American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water every day, with the nation’s estimated total daily usage topping 345 billion gallons—enough to sink the state of Rhode Island under a foot of water. By 2100 the U.S. population will have increased by nearly 200 million, with a total population of some 514 million people. Given that we use water for everything, the simple math is that more people mean more water stress across the country.

And we are already tapping into our reserves. Aquifers, porous rocks and sediment that store vast volumes of water underground, are being drained. Nearly 165 million Americans rely on groundwater for drinking water, farmers use it for irrigation―37 percent of our total water usage is for agriculture—and industry needs it for manufacturing. Groundwater is being pumped faster than it can be naturally replenished. The Central Valley Aquifer in California underlies one of the nation’s most agriculturally productive regions, but it is in drastic decline and has lost about ten cubic miles of water in just four years.

Decreasing supply and increasing demand are creating a perfect water storm, the effects of which are already being felt. The Colorado River carved its way 1,450 miles from the Rockies to the Gulf of California for millions of years, but now no longer reaches the sea. In 2018, parts of the Rio Grande recorded their lowest water levels ever; Arizona essentially lives under permanent drought conditions; and in South Florida’s freshwater aquifers are increasingly susceptible to salt water intrusion due to over-extraction.

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The focus is on individual use of water and Heggie ends his article by suggesting we use less,

… And every American can save more water at home in multiple ways, from taking shorter showers to not rinsing dishes under a running faucet before loading them into a dishwasher, a practice that wastes around 20 gallons of water for each load. …

As an advertising pitch goes, this is fairly subtle as there’s no branding in the article itself and it is almost wholly informational.

Attempts to stave off water shortages as noted in Heggie’s and other articles include groundwater pumping both for individual use and industrial use. This practice has had an unexpected impact according to a June 16, 2023 article by Warren Cornwall for Science (magazine),

While spinning on its axis, Earth wobbles like an off-kilter top. Sloshing molten iron in Earth’s core, melting ice, ocean currents, and even hurricanes can all cause the poles to wander. Now, scientists have found that a significant amount of the polar drift results from human activity: pumping groundwater for drinking and irrigation.

“The very way the planet wobbles is impacted by our activities,” says Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an expert on Earth’s rotation who was not involved in the study. “It is, in a way, mind boggling.”

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Clark R. Wilson, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues thought the removal of tens of gigatons of groundwater each year might affect the drift. But they knew it could not be the only factor. “There’s a lot of pieces that go into the final budget for causing polar drift,” Wilson says.

The scientists built a model of the polar wander, accounting for factors such as reservoirs filling because of new dams and ice sheets melting, to see how well they explained the polar movements observed between 1993 and 2010. During that time, satellite measurements were precise enough to detect a shift in the poles as small as a few millimeters.

Dams and ice changes were not enough to match the observed polar motion. But when the researchers also put in 2150 gigatons of groundwater that hydrologic models estimate were pumped between 1993 and 2010, the predicted polar motion aligned much more closely with observations. Wilson and his colleagues conclude that the redistribution of that water weight to the world’s oceans has caused Earth’s poles to shift nearly 80 centimeters during that time. In fact, groundwater removal appears to have played a bigger role in that period than the release of meltwater from ice in either Greenland or Antarctica, the scientists reported Thursday [June 15, 2023] in Geophysical Research Letters.

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The new paper helps confirm that groundwater depletion added approximately 6 millimeters to global sea level rise between 1993 and 2010. “I was very happy” that this new method matched other estimates, Seo [Ki-Weon Seo geophysicist at Seoul National University and the study’s lead author] says. Because detailed astronomical measurements of the polar axis location go back to the end of the 19th century, polar drift could enable Seo to trace the human impact on the planet’s water over the past century.

Two papers: environmental impact from AI and groundwater pumping wobbles poles

I have two links and citations for Ren’s paper on AI and its environmental impact,

Towards Environmentally Equitable AI via Geographical Load Balancing by Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Adam Wierman, Shaolei Ren. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2307.05494 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2307.05494v1 [cs.AI] for this version) DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.05494 Submitted June 20, 2023

Towards Environmentally Equitable AI via Geographical Load Balancing by Li, Pengfei; Yang, Jianyi; Wierman, Adam; Ren, Shaolei. UC Riverside. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/79c880vf Publication date: 2023-06-27

Both links offer open access to the paper. Should you be interested in more, you can find Shaolei Ren’s website here.

Now for the wobbling poles,

Drift of Earth’s Pole Confirms Groundwater Depletion as a Significant Contributor to Global Sea Level Rise 1993–2010 by Ki-Weon Seo, Dongryeol Ryu, Jooyoung Eom, Taewhan Jeon, Jae-Seung Kim, Kookhyoun Youm, Jianli Chen, Clark R. Wilson. Geophysical Research Letters Volume 50, Issue 12, 28 June 2023 e2023GL103509 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL103509 First published online: 15 June 2023

This paper too is open access.

Environmental impacts and graphene

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Researchers at the University of California at Riverside (UCR) have published the results of what they claim is the first study featuring the environmental impact from graphene use. From the April 29, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

In a first-of-its-kind study of how a material some think could transform the electronics industry moves in water, researchers at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering found graphene oxide nanoparticles are very mobile in lakes or streams and therefore may well cause negative environmental impacts if released.

Graphene oxide nanoparticles are an oxidized form of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms prized for its strength, conductivity and flexibility. Applications for graphene include everything from cell phones and tablet computers to biomedical devices and solar panels.

The use of graphene and other carbon-based nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes, are growing rapidly. At the same time, recent studies have suggested graphene oxide may be toxic to humans. [emphasis mine]

As production of these nanomaterials increase, it is important for regulators, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, to understand their potential environmental impacts, said Jacob D. Lanphere, a UC Riverside graduate student who co-authored a just-published paper about graphene oxide nanoparticles transport in ground and surface water environments.

I wish they had cited the studies suggesting graphene oxide (GO) may be toxic. After a quick search I found: Internalization and cytotoxicity of graphene oxide and carboxyl graphene nanoplatelets in the human hepatocellular carcinoma cell line Hep G2 by Tobias Lammel, Paul Boisseaux, Maria-Luisa Fernández-Cruz, and José M Navas (free access paper in Particle and Fibre Toxicology 2013, 10:27 http://www.particleandfibretoxicology.com/content/10/1/27). From what I can tell, this was a highly specialized investigation conducted in a laboratory. While the results seem concerning it’s difficult to draw conclusions from this study or others that may have been conducted.

Dexter Johnson in a May 1, 2014 post on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) provides more relevant citations and some answers (Note: Links have been removed),

While the UC Riverside  did not look at the toxicity of GO in their study, researchers at the Hersam group from Northwestern University did report in a paper published in the journal Nano Letters (“Minimizing Oxidation and Stable Nanoscale Dispersion Improves the Biocompatibility of Graphene in the Lung”) that GO was the most toxic form of graphene-based materials that were tested in mice lungs. In other research published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials (“Investigation of acute effects of graphene oxide on wastewater microbial community: A case study”), investigators determined that the toxicity of GO was dose dependent and was toxic in the range of 50 to 300 mg/L. So, below 50 mg/L there appear to be no toxic effects to GO. To give you some context, arsenic is considered toxic at 0.01 mg/L.

Dexter also contrasts graphene oxide with graphene (from his May 1, 2014 post; Note: A link has been removed),

While GO is quite different from graphene in terms of its properties (GO is an insulator while graphene is a conductor), there are many applications that are similar for both GO and graphene. This is the result of GO’s functional groups allowing for different derivatives to be made on the surface of GO, which in turn allows for additional chemical modification. Some have suggested that GO would make a great material to be deposited on additional substrates for thin conductive films where the surface could be tuned for use in optical data storage, sensors, or even biomedical applications.

Getting back to the UCR research, an April 28, 2014 UCR news release (also on EurekAlert but dated April 29, 2014) describes it  in more detail,

Walker’s [Sharon L. Walker, an associate professor and the John Babbage Chair in Environmental Engineering at UC Riverside] lab is one of only a few in the country studying the environmental impact of graphene oxide. The research that led to the Environmental Engineering Science paper focused on understanding graphene oxide nanoparticles’ stability, or how well they hold together, and movement in groundwater versus surface water.

The researchers found significant differences.

In groundwater, which typically has a higher degree of hardness and a lower concentration of natural organic matter, the graphene oxide nanoparticles tended to become less stable and eventually settle out or be removed in subsurface environments.

In surface waters, where there is more organic material and less hardness, the nanoparticles remained stable and moved farther, especially in the subsurface layers of the water bodies.

The researchers also found that graphene oxide nanoparticles, despite being nearly flat, as opposed to spherical, like many other engineered nanoparticles, follow the same theories of stability and transport.

I don’t know what conclusions to draw from the information that the graphene nanoparticles remain stable and moved further in the water. Is a potential buildup of graphene nanoparticles considered a problem because it could end up in our water supply and we would be poisoned by these particles? Dexter provides an answer (from his May 1, 2014 post),

Ultimately, the question of danger of any material or chemical comes down to the simple equation: Hazard x Exposure=Risk. To determine what the real risk is of GO reaching concentrations equal to those that have been found to be toxic (50-300 mg/L) is the key question.

The results of this latest study don’t really answer that question, but only offer a tool by which to measure the level of exposure to groundwater if there was a sudden spill of GO at a manufacturing facility.

While I was focused on ingestion by humans, it seems this research was more focused on the natural environment and possible future poisoning by graphene oxide.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Stability and Transport of Graphene Oxide Nanoparticles in Groundwater and Surface Water by Jacob D. Lanphere, Brandon Rogers, Corey Luth, Carl H. Bolster, and Sharon L. Walker. Environmental Engineering Science. -Not available-, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/ees.2013.0392.

Online Ahead of Print: March 17, 2014

If available online, this is behind a paywall.