NASA Study: Largest Aquifers Being Rapidly Depleted

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NASA Study: More Than One-Third of Earth’s Largest Aquifers Are Being Rapidly Depleted

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Lorraine Chow | June 17, 2015 2:28 pm | Comments

Think the water situation is bad in California? Freshwater is depleting at alarming and unsustainable rates in major underground aquifers around the globe, according to NASA satellite images. (SEE MAP at URL above)

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites and discovered that one third of the Earth’s largest groundwater basins are rapidly depleting due to human consumption, and will only get worse with the changing climate. The research was published in two complimentary studies in the Water Resources Research journal. [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... gDone=true ]

These aquifers are a crucial source of fresh water for 35 percent of the human population. That’s more than 2 billion people.

What’s most alarming, according to one of the studies, is how there’s insufficient accurate information on how much water remains in the basins, which means “significant segments of Earth’s population are consuming groundwater quickly without knowing when it might run out,” the researchers concluded in a news release. [ http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2297/ ]

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