We’re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That’s probably not news to everyone, but new research suggests that, deep underground in a number of key aquifers in some parts of the U.S., we may have much less water than previously thought.
“We found that the average depth of water resources across the country was about half of what people had previously estimated,” said Jennifer McIntosh, a distinguished scholar and professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.
McIntosh and her colleagues—who published a new study about these aquifers in November in Environmental Research Letters—took a different approach to assessing groundwater than other research, which has used satellites to measure changes in groundwater storage. For example, a 2015 study looked at 37 major aquifers across the world and found some were being depleted faster than they were being replenished, including in California’s agriculturally intensive Central Valley.
McIntosh says those previous studies revealed a lot about how we’re depleting water resources from the top down through extraction, such as pumping for […]
It appears that those of us in Pa. are in trouble if we do not stop the “fracking” going on and planed for our part of the country. New York is smarter, and stopped “Fracking” but we still have not, even though many of us have petitioned the government to stop it. We must spread the word so we can save what good water we have left.