by The overflowing of the groundwater, the deterioration of droughts and faster evaporation due to higher temperatures caused a drastic decline in the available freshwater volume, according to a new study.
“Continental Drying” has diverted the overall water of the planet in the oceans that it exceeded the Schmelzeisen as the greatest contribution to the global increase in sea level, according to research.
Losses of land -based water could have profound effects on access to safe drinking water and the ability to increase food in some of the richest agricultural regions in the world.
“We use a lot of water to grow food,” said Jay Famiglietti, professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and one of the study authors. “If things don’t change, we will see an impact on our nutritional security and only our general water availability.”
The results “should be of great importance for the general public, resource manager and decision -makers around the world”, the researchers wrote in the study and added that the identified trends “send the most factual message to the effects of previous climate change”.
“The continents dry, the availability of fresh water shrinks and accelerates the increase in sea level,” they wrote.
The study published in the journal Science Advances on Friday evaluated changes in terrestrial water sources such as lakes, underground groundwater ladders and moisture in the soil in the past two decades. The researchers found that several factors, including climate change, disrupt the natural water cycle of the earth and how moisture circulates between the ground, oceans and atmosphere.
The researchers used data from a number of four NASA satellites to analyze changes in terrestrial water storage in the past 22 years. The satellites were developed to track the movement of the water of the earth, including changes in the ice sheets, glaciers and underground reservoirs of the planet.
The researchers, for example, found that dry parts of the world have quickly dried since 2014. These regions guided by drought rose through an area that is twice as large every year as in California, said Famiglietti.
In several cases, Hotspots expanded, according to the study, to create huge, interconnected “mega drug regions”. Such an area includes parts from Central America, Mexico, California, the southwest of the United States, the Lower Colorado River Basin and the South Plains.
“The main message here is that water is really an important driver for the changes that we see both on land and in the sea,” said Benjamin Hamlington, a research scientist in the field of earth sciences in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who worked in the science team for the NASA missions, which manufactured the decades used in the new study.
The study showed that since 2002 every large land mass with the exception of Greenland and Antarctica has experienced unprecedented drying.
The widespread continental drying is expected to have important consequences for humans. According to the researchers, three quarters of the world’s population live in countries in which freshwater resources are exhausted.
In the meantime, the rising seas threaten to sneak around the globe in coastal regions, to make them less habitable, and contribute the assembly pressure caused on extreme storms and flood. In the USA, storm has contributed to triggering an insurance crisis in coastal cities that are susceptible to extreme weather events.
The connection between the increase in sea level and the water loss locked in the ground is a result that the water cycle of the planet is thrown into chaos. Many of these changes, such as pumping the groundwater, are considered permanent – or at least for thousands or tens of thousands of years irreversible, said Alexander Simms, professor at the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which was not involved in the study.
“When they pull water from the continents, the only place where it has to be in the sea is,” he said. “Water goes into the atmosphere, then 88% of this water rains onto the earth and land in the ocean.”
Simms said the study was fascinating in its ability to estimate the global expansion of these water losses, but he was skeptical of the claim that the continent’s water loss has exceeded the ice shield as the greatest contribution to the increase in sea level.
Nevertheless, Hamlington said that the study shows how the water movement on the planet has enormous wave effects. It also indicates that the consequences could increase in the future if the groundwater is further exhausted, freshwater resources shrink and the drought conditions deteriorate.
“This type of tracking the storage of terrestrial water is a critical piece of the puzzle,” he said. “If we can follow this water, we can improve our understanding of future drought, floods and water resource availability over land.”
This article was originally published on nbcnews.com
