Advanced Cosmic Ray Instrumentation for Agricultural Water Scarcity Resilience

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Are cosmic rays a 21st century divining rod?By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in absolute water scarcity and two-thirds of the world's population live in water-stressed conditions. Agricultural water consumption accounts for 70% of the world's water usage so measurements of soil water content have the potential to direct water usage to where its most needed and alleviate the effects of water scarcity. Water is also essential for food production with demand required to grow by 60% by 2050.Cosmic rays are nature's x-rays, a type of naturally occuring and highly penetrating radiation that is already allowing scientists to famously image the interior of pyramids as well as volcanoes and cargo containers for smuggled nuclear materials. Our project explores a novel application of cosmic rays - to measure the water content within soil.When cosmic rays strike the ground they can interact with the material close to the surface, creating other particles, called neutrons. It so happens that the number of neutrons that are produced is related to the amount of water in the ground. Therefore by measuring the neutrons we learn something about the groundwater content.Our project sets out to develop a novel type of low-cost instrumentation, capable of measuring these cosmic-ray induced neutrons, thus providing us with a 21st century diving rod that will help in the global fight against water scarcity.