Fears over rapid groundwater draining
Print Edition
Human activity is leading to the rapid draining of about one third of the planet’s largest underground water reserves and it is unclear how much fluid remains in them, two new studies have found.
Consequently, huge sections of the population are using up groundwater without knowing when it will run out, researchers said in findings that will appear in the journal Water Resources Research and were posted online on Tuesday.
“Available physical and chemical measurements are simply insufficient,” University of California Irvine professor and principal investigator Jay Famiglietti said in a statement.
Scientists used data from special NASA satellites to measure groundwater losses.
In the first paper, they looked at 37 of Earth’s biggest aquifers between 2003 and 2013. Eight of these were classified as “overstressed,” meaning they were being sucked dry with almost no natural replenishment to offset the usage.
The second paper concludes that the total remaining volume of the world’s usable groundwater is poorly known and huge discrepancies exist in estimated “time to depletion.”
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