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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Rising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trend. Water is being depleted at sites around the world
Intensive groundwater pumping, evaporation and melting due to rising global temperatures have shifted a growing amount of freshwater from the continents to the oceans. This threatens water availability for most of the world’s population and adds to sea level rise.
These measurements show there have been alarming declines in freshwater in many parts of the world between 2002 and 2024. The researchers found dry regions aren’t just getting drier – a trend expected with climate change – they are also expanding by more than 800,000 square kilometres per year, an area about the size of the UK and France combined.
The team identified four “mega-drying” regions where separate areas of freshwater loss have now connected to create a swathe of drying. Those include northern Canada and Russia, where loss is driven by melting glaciers, permafrost and reduced snow.
In the other two regions, water loss is dominated by groundwater depletion, mainly from pumping for irrigation. Those are the US Southwest, much of Central America and a region stretching from western Europe and North Africa to northern India and China. They found groundwater depletion, which can be exacerbated by heat and drought prompting people to pump more, makes up 68 per cent of the decline in overall water storage.
This transfer of mass is so large it has become a major contributor to sea level rise. They found since 2015, water loss from the continents has caused more sea level rise than meltwater from the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, raising the oceans by just under a millimetre per year.
These trends together “send perhaps the direst message on the impact of climate change to date”, the researchers write in their report. “The continents are drying, freshwater availability is shrinking, and sea level rise is accelerating.”
We already knew about these drying trends in many individual regions, says Manoochehr Shirzaei at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. But he says the power of this research comes from its global view of the problem. “We are not producing water or destroying water. We are just redistributing water. But redistribution is not going in the right direction,” he says.
“The next step is really to do the detailed diagnosis to actually separate out what’s driving the groundwater depletion,” says Benjamin Cook at Columbia University in New York. “It would take a little more detail to separate the climate change story from the groundwater depletion story.”
Journal reference: Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability, and increasing land contributions to sea level rise, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 31 2025, @01:08PM (4 children)
For 100+ years, land developers in Florida have been "draining the swamps" - which translates to: letting more rain water run-off directly into the Atlantic Ocean / Gulf of Mexico.
For the past 50 years, there have been gradually increasing protections of wetlands, new development design requirements to include "stormwater impoundment areas" aka Alligator pits, and, gradually, this has slowed the rate of increase at which rain water is being "wasted" directly back to the oceans; but, simultaneously, the ground water pumping described in the article is increasing for residential use at a rate higher than it is decreasing for the already huge agricultural uses. When I was growing up in the 1970s "saltwater intrusion" into ground water was a woo-woo scary future thing like "climate change" became in the 1990s - something to be sad about in the future, not happening yet, but coming if trends don't reverse. Welp, saltwater intrusion in Florida groundwater is here now, in spades. Islands that supported pine forests for centuries are undergoing salty transitions as even the mature pine trees' tap roots can no longer reach fresh water. Coastal subdivisions that used to be able to water their lawns with shallow well pumps now have groundwater salt content high enough to kill most traditional turf species, and almost all traditional ornamental landscape shrubs. When my father was a kid in the 1950s, you used to dig a hole in the backyard and hit groundwater within 1-2' depending on the season. Even by the 1970s, groundwater had retreated 10-20' below the surface. A common feature in Florida soils is a 1-2" layer of "hardpan" which consists of high iron content sands which are, as the name implies, much harder to dig through than the sand above and below. This hardpan was formed over thousands of years at the seasonal high point for groundwater, where iron in the water would oxidize and harden into the soil - it's more or less where my father would hit groundwater in the wet seasons of his childhood, and I believe it's a bit softer when it's wet. Many plants that could put roots down through soaked wet hardpan are stymied by modern dried-hard hardpan, and so they become dependent on rainfall - and often: irrigation, pumping up groundwater which only lowers the ground water tables further, and when groundwater tables get below sea level - which they have been in much of Florida for decades now - salty sea water flows in.
I suspect the salt being deposited in Florida coastal soils today is going to be a "feature" for centuries to come, even if the next plague kills all of humanity next winter.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2025, @02:07PM (1 child)
Who knew that the next big extinction event would be us? We are killing ourselves off, and the survivors will not be a pleasant bunch
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday July 31 2025, @02:21PM
We need another Arc of Noah's, er ..., I mean an inverse Arc of Noah's that float over the desert, floods it (upside down) ... and goes backward in time.
(Score: 2, Troll) by driverless on Friday August 01 2025, @04:04AM (1 child)
Geeze, why does every conversation end up having to be about Trump?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 01 2025, @01:04PM
Just because the Orange Turd uses an old catchphrase doesn't mean that every future use of that catchphrase is about him.
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