The Corridor Runs. The Aquifer Maps Say Watch the Margin

The taps in the Iberian corridor cities are running, and the hydrologists want that stated plainly before the rest: the desalination corridors delivered, and delivered more than the models feared a year ago. What they will not do is call it comfortable. In a jointly published margin assessment this week, water scientists mapped the delivered supply against the region's depleted aquifers and found the buffer thinner than the headlines suggest — enough for this cool season, contingent on a normal winter refill that a +2.8°C climate no longer reliably provides. "This is an attribution, not an alarm and not a prophecy," said lead hydrologist Sofia Marchetti, whose team footnoted every figure with its confidence interval. "The corridor covers current demand. It does not build a reserve. One short refill season and the margin we are describing is spent." The distinction is the whole discipline: the maps show a system that works, resting on an assumption about rain that the century keeps quietly revising. The relief is real. The cushion under it is measured in a single season, and reported as exactly that — no thinner, and no thicker.