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The World’s Essential Aquifers Are in Deep Trouble
New research finds that the groundwater systems that hydrate your life are in rapid, sometimes accelerating decline around the globe. Here’s how to stop the retreat.
An alarming new paper published today in the journal Nature looked at available data on 1,700 aquifer systems worldwide and found that groundwater is dropping in 71 percent of them. “Real-world observations—300 million of them in hundreds of thousands of wells around the globe—show two main findings,” says water scientist Scott Jasechko of UC Santa Barbara, co-lead author of the new paper. Even more dramatically, the relentless extraction of groundwater is causing land to sink, a phenomenon known as subsidence: Drain an aquifer and it’ll collapse, like an empty water bottle.
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