Joe Romm reports that an alarming satellite-based analysis from NASA finds that the world is depleting groundwater, the water stored underground in soil and aquifers, at an unprecedented rate. A new Nature Climate Change article, The global groundwater crisis, by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, warns that most of the major aquifers in the world arid and semi-arid zones, that is, in the dry parts of the world that rely most heavily on groundwater, have been experiencing rapid rates of groundwater depletion for many years. The groundwater in some of the largest aquifers in the U.S. High Plains, California Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere are being produced at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished by recharge from precipitation. Nearly all of these underlie the great agricultural regions of the world and that groundwater is primarily responsible for their high productivity. These semiarid regions are projected to experience further decreases in precipitation and/or soil moisture, which will sharply boost the chances of civilization-threatening megadroughts and Dust-Bowlification.
As these increasingly drought-prone global bread-baskets lose their easily accessible groundwater too, we end up with a spiral into additional problems. Moreover, because the natural human response to drought is to pump more groundwater, continued groundwater depletion will very likely accelerate mid-latitude problems that will be exacerbated by significant population growth in the same regions.
Let us be clear, these declines in aquifer production have been known for decades, but pumping had to be continued to meet the local needs of agricultural production so they had to let the pumping levels decline. As predicted years ago, there will come a time... which has arrived.
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