Earth’s Fountain of Life Is Vanishing Beneath Our Feet
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Groundwater aquifers provide vital freshwater to homes, farms, and industries, but decades of mismanagement and political action are draining this resource around the world.
A new study from an international team of scientists concluded that depleted aquifers are impacting countries around the world and could threaten both local ecosystem stability and water security.
However, the report also comes with a ray of hope—evidence that regulation and other restorative efforts can help restore previously declining aquifers.
Groundwater in the U.S. and throughout the world is an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” resource. As rain, melted ice, and snowpack seep into the soil, it’s stored in large subsurface aquifers that provide fresh water for drinking, agriculture, industry, and even energy production. Groundwater is vital to humanity’s survival on the planet, as it provides 99 percent of all liquid freshwater on Earth, and roughly 2.5 billion people rely on these systems for survival.
Despite its importance, measuring our impact on aquifers—and galvanizing support to protect them—can be an uphill battle because of their locked-away and subterranean nature. But a new study, published in the journal Nature, is raising the global alarm for protecting these resources while also providing examples of policy changes and other methods that have helped restore previously declining groundwater aquifers.
In the study, scientists from University College London, University of California at Santa Barbara, and ETH Zürich curated groundwater measurements gathered from 170,000 wells in 1,700 aquifer systems. According to the researchers, this is the first global view into groundwater levels from ground-based data, providing a level of detail that’s impossible to achieve with just satellite or computer-generated models. While their findings are mostly bad news, there is a dash of good news mixed in as well.
“The study has found that groundwater levels are declining by more than 10 cm per year in 36% of the monitored aquifer systems,” the researchers report in a UCL press statement. “It has also reported rapid declines of more than 50 cm per year in 12% of the aquifer systems with the most severe declines observed in cultivated lands in dry climates.”
This is consistent with last year’s New York Times report, which revealed that out of the U.S.’s 80,000 groundwater wells, 40 percent had reached all-time lows within the past decade. As the report also emphasizes, the hardest hit places were states like Arizona, which is even restricting new development due to water concerns. Other, non-Western states also showed signs of groundwater depletion.
This new study identifies sharp groundwater declines in Iran, Chile, Mexico, and the U.S., and warns that drained aquifers can lead to seawater intrusion and land subsidence (sinking). It can also impact the natural function of wetlands and rivers, and previous studies have even suggest that groundwater pumping is causing the entire planet to tilt.
But in a rare moment (especially when talking about climate change), the study also comes with some good news, reporting that a future of completely depleted aquifers is far from a foregone conclusion. The researchers note that aquifers in Thailand, Spain, and even some in the U.S. that showed signs of decline in the 1980s and 1990s, have recovered due to improved regulation and other water-restoring methods, such as interbasin transfers.
Although buried beneath the Earth’s surface, groundwater is finally getting the attention it deserves, and evidence shows that smart management can help sustain these life-supporting aquifers for generations to come.
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