The Swamp Stomp

Volume 15, Issue 30

The top three stressed groundwater basins in the world are located in the Middle East, the region between India and Pakistan, and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa respectively. Due to continued political unrest and several other human caused obstructions in these areas, a third of the world’s largest groundwater aquifers are depleting rapidly.

A pair of new studies conducted by the University of California at Irvine state that not only are water levels diminishing, but there is no way of knowing how much water actually remains in these mammoth aquifers. The studies on these aquifers—often referred to by water resources scientists as ‘Earth’s water savings accounts’—began due to California’s worst drought on record, whereby farmers in California’s Central Valley have consumed so much ground water that the state has actually sunk by a foot in some places.

The studies are the first to employ data obtained from NASA’s two Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, otherwise known as GRACE. GRACE enables James Famiglietti, an author of both studies, to claim that men are using water that the Earth has stored for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and not replenishing it fast enough.

Famiglietti, professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine and senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, asserts that the majority of the world’s groundwater accounts “are past sustainability tipping points.”

Both studies, published in the journal Water Resources Research, report on the necessity of discovering how much water is actually left in the world’s most valuable aquifers.

“The message we want to get out there is this is really unacceptable. We really better get on some kind of major exploration program,” Famiglietti said.  He also spoke of his fear over how people may react to the uncertainty of his findings. He said, “What I am afraid of is people will say, ‘oh, we don’t know how much water there is, and maybe we have a ton—but maybe we don’t. The signs of stress are all there.”

It is expected that both climate change and population growth will exacerbate the problem of groundwater depletion. National security experts have repeatedly warned that global warming may act as a threat multiplier and worsen any existing tensions.

Alexandra Richey, a graduate student at UC-Irvine who worked with Famiglietti on the studies, asked, “What happens when a highly stressed aquifer is located in a region with socioeconomic or political tensions that cant supplement declining water fast enough? We’re trying to raise red flags now to pinpoint where active management today could protect future lives and livelihoods.”

Richey then reiterated Famiglietti’s desire to discover exactly how much water remains in the worl’s largest groundwater aquifers. She said, “We don’t actually know how much is stored in each of these aquifers. Estimates of remaining storage might vary from decades to millennia. In a water-scarce society, we can no longer tolerate this level of uncertainty, especially since groundwater is disappearing so rapidly.”

Famiglietti, Richey, and the rest of their team are campaigning for a global expedition to directly measure the amount of water stored in the world’s groundwater aquifers, which would require drilling to reach bedrock in many cases.

“I believe we need to explore the world’s aquifers as if they had the same value as oil reserves,” Famiglietti said.