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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 Thexalon on Thursday July 31 2025, @02:33PM (11 children)
1. Let Nestle and other major companies buy up the remaining fresh water supply. Including making it illegal to collect rainwater or dig a well without metering from the company.
2. Charge everybody who wants fresh water through the nose to get it. As it becomes more and more scarce, or just because the corporation feels like it, increase the price. Although the largest users are free to negotiate their own special bulk deals.
3. Eventually usage will go down because it will be too expensive to drink, and customers who don't get it will drop dead of dehydration anyways.
Sound like some kind of Mad Max far-fetched fiction? It isn't, the government under pressure from the World Bank tried this in Bolivia [wikipedia.org], and it only failed because the people struggling with thirst decided to fight back with all sorts of things including force.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday July 31 2025, @03:51PM (8 children)
1. Let Nestle and other major companies buy up the remaining fresh water supply. Including making it illegal to collect rainwater or dig a well without metering from the company.
It's happening in the Great Lakes watershed already. Nestle is all over Michigan draining as ground water as much as they can as fast as they can and shipping it overseas emptying aquifers in the process. The Great Lakes are only about 1% renewable so what is happening in practice is that they are being drained by cutting off some of the aquifers which feed them.
The lakes can be drained in that way to benefit those in desert areas while slowly becoming a new desert area themselves. I guess to some that makes more sense than moving people from desert areas like NM and AZ to where the water is. The US used to have more sense than that. Take this rant from the mid-1980s, emphasis added:
However, none of that really addresses the core problem of overpopulation. The miscount has made the situation even more dire [sciencealert.com]. Overpopulation is more than just the number of people jammed in shoulder to shoulder in a given area. It is also the ratio of people in an area to that same area's ability to support life [footprintnetwork.org]. From that angle, most areas are severely overpopulated. Notice that not only is Earth Overshoot Day in July, it moves forward each year as both carrying capacity diminish and population rockets upward.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Informative) by VLM on Thursday July 31 2025, @05:23PM (2 children)
Now wait what?
https://lre-wm.usace.army.mil/ForecastData/GLBasinConditions/LTA-GLWL-Graph.pdf [army.mil]
I live "a long drive, but theoretically a day trip, or a bit longer" from most of those lakes and the most interesting feature in these century old water level graphs are fluctuations around "a foot or three" whereas the entire watershed that drains into them gets about 3 to 6 feet of precip annually. Hypothetically because the area of the lake is a lot smaller than the area of the watershed, you could probably pump 10, 20, maybe 30 feet off lake Superior every single year and it would just fill back up with rainwater.
There are parts of the country with severe water issues like Vegas and its Lake Mead, but the fact that some dumb people demand to live in a waterless desert does not mean the entire country or world is a waterless desert, far from it in most cases.
Really the story is land prices are so out of whack and technology level is high enough that water-using people will not live in floodzones they'll prefer to use the water further away on cheaper lands.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday July 31 2025, @05:33PM (1 child)
Now wait what?
There are other sources, but here is one:
There's a lot of water moving about, but it stays within the watershed. Again, just to be clear, only about 1% of it can be messed with. And just because it can be messed with, doesn't mean it should be messed with.
So that means that any and all water leaving the watershed is being stolen from the people who live there and the people who will live there in the future.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2025, @10:24PM
Hmm, maybe we should dam up Niagra Falls, it's just there for tourists anyway
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday July 31 2025, @05:36PM (1 child)
I live in the Great Lakes region, about 3 miles from one of them, precisely because I know it will take a lot more to interrupt my fresh water supply than a lot of areas. I also thank on a regular basis the Great Lakes Interstate Compact, and the Canadians specifically involved in that, because if big businesses had their way all the water would have been pumped to Arizona a long time ago and we could drive a little over an hour across what had been the lakebed to get from Ohio to Ontario.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 01 2025, @01:03PM
I had a relative who was in a senior position at the Chicago water department. He told of the craziest scheme some politician in all seriousness proposed: build a pipeline from Lake Michigan to Arizona to supply Arizona with more water. This plan forgets about the Mississippi River. They didn't forget about the Continental Divide, but they didn't propose anything to deal with it.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 31 2025, @10:36PM (2 children)
> draining as ground water as much as they can as fast as they can and shipping it overseas emptying aquifers in the process.
As much as I despise Nestle and their practices, the volumes of water they are shipping overseas in a year are trivial in comparison to a good afternoon's thunderstorm. I had a 6" bore well into a free flowing aquifer (the same one that Zephyrhills water comes from) that I would normally leave shut, but when we were there to enjoy it, if our 1/8 acre pond was dry we'd open a 2" valve and let it flow overnight. By morning, that pond would be an average of 3' deep with crystal clear slightly blue hued water. Feeling somewhat guilty about that, I guesstimated what 24 hours of such flow out the 2" pipe constituted in acre-feet, and compared that to the 20 acres of rainfall recharge area we owned. A) I was just shifting the water from the deep aquifer to the surface water, most of which eventually recharges the deeper aquifer. B) 1/4" of rainfall on 20 acres of land = 5 acre-inches of water, enough to fill that pond 40" deep...
Now, Nestle does indeed pump 12" wells with big pumps and fill millions of bottles with water, but the plastic pollution and fuels burned and other environmental impacts of shipping are of much greater concern than a 0.1" skim off the top of Lake Michigan per year.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday August 01 2025, @03:10AM (1 child)
... are trivial in comparison to a good afternoon's thunderstorm.
Again, over 99% of that rain was sourced from within the watershed itself. It's basically a closed system, except for the little under 1% which blows in from outside.
However, it'd be necessary to see actual numbers. Nestle can and does pull hundreds of millions of gallons of water annual from these areas [theguardian.com]. Wells and creeks go dry as a result [bloomberg.com]. While those effects can seem rather localized, they are still within specific watersheds and a sample of what will come to the whole watershed if allowed to go on. That includes water stressed regions like California, not just water rich areas like the Great Lakes basin.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 02 2025, @02:08AM
>Wells and creeks go dry as a result
Yeah, that's obviously bad execution on Nestle's part and they deserve to pay damages...
We have a citrus grove on the other side of the river from our wild-land when a freeze is threatening they crank up the 1000hp diesel pumps and suck hard on that aquifer putting water onto the trees to attempt to mitigate the cold damage. When they do that, our well goes from free flowing to needing a pump.
Our house was built in a bigger city, on that same aquifer, in the early 1960s. It, too has a free flowing well but only barely today. When it was new the water would put decent pressure in the upstairs shower head, today it barely trickles into the downstairs tub, but when a hurricane takes out the electricity for two weeks that trickle is a hell of a lot better than having to run a pump off a generator just to flush the toilet. The city started pumping the aquifer for municipal water in the 1970s and they payed for submersible pumps for all impacted homes, like ours. They didn't pay electricity to operate the pump or replace it when it died due to a lightning strike a few years back, just a one-time temporary pain-relief followed by a lifetime of negative impacts.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2025, @03:55PM
Various governments around the world do control rainwater collection.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 01 2025, @09:31PM
In addition, introduce a new invasive species [youtu.be] globally. It's like Dune, but with a different animal, sort of.