Global Groundwater Crisis May Get Worse as the World Warms
Global groundwater crisis may get worse as the world warms – From India to Texas, people are rapidly depleting their valuable stores of groundwater — leading to the possibility that aquifers may be emptied within decades, a NASA researcher has warned.
In a commentary published Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change, Jay Famiglietti, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who has helped lead the use of a NASA satellite system to detect groundwater changes around the world, warned of dramatic consequences to come if changes are not made to the way that societies manage water supplies.
Surface water, gets replenished through precipitation but groundwater can take centuries to recharge. Yet humans are depleting groundwater at rates that far exceed the pace at which this water can be replenished.
“Because the gap between supply and demand is routinely bridged with non-renewable groundwater, even more so during drought, groundwater supplies in some major aquifers “will be depleted in a matter of decades,” Famiglietti wrote.
Famiglietti says that groundwater depletion in northwest India is at the top of his list of concerns, in part because of the population growth.
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