National Geographic: The Ogallala aquifer turned the region into America's breadbasket. Now it, and a way of life, are being drained away.
This story appears in the August 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine.
"Whoa," yells Brownie Wilson, as the steel measuring tape I am feeding down the throat of an irrigation well on the Kansas prairie gets away from me and unspools rapidly into the depths below.
The well, wide enough to fall into, taps into the Ogallala aquifer, the immense underground freshwater basin...