The Mystery of California's Vanishing Groundwater

You may have already heard about it.  California, the Golden State, is reeling from three years of continuous, severe drought.

Of course you've heard about it.  The California drought is in the news almost daily.  The problem with an event like this is putting it in perspective.

Here's a new way of looking at it.  The drought is now estimated to have claimed 63-trillion gallons of groundwater across the Western United States.  That water loss is said to have caused the surface levels in the region to rise 0.16 of an inch over the past 18-months.

The estimates come via the Scrips Institute of Oceanography and the U.S. Geological Survey.

In California's Sierra mountains, the loss of annual snowpack has caused a surface rise of 0.6 of an inch.

But something doesn't add up.

The report doesn't appear to mention where, exactly, that missing groundwater is to be found.  Some of it has been added to the warming atmosphere but evaporation and transpiration are components of the hydrological cycle that carries water vapour into the atmosphere where it is transformed into clouds and returns to the surface as rain.

So, yes, it's believable that the Western U.S. has suffered a massive loss of groundwater but that moisture has to be somewhere, in some form, adding its weight to someplace else.  That could be in the form of flash floods sweeping so many places east of California.

Another impact of the drought is power generation.  California's hydro-electric capacity has been hard hit causing the state to fall back on natural gas for generating electricity.  That could be a blow to California's carbon emissions reduction targets.

About That Other Shoe, The One That Just Dropped

There is an enormous amount of water stored underground in aquifers.   Or, at least, there used to be.  A lot of it is actually "fossil" water, H2O that's been trapped underground for, well, forever sort of.  But one of the things we became really good at during the 20th century was pumping that ancient water out of the depths, bringing it to the surface and using it for a lot of things but primarily crop irrigation.   With all that water we grew all sorts of food and with that food we grew all sorts of people and even tripled our numbers in less than one human lifetime.   Neat trick, eh?

Not so much.  We paid far too much attention on getting that groundwater to the surface and not nearly enough to just how it got into the ground in the first place.   Easy come, easy go... easy gone. 

Now, guess who's running out of groundwater?   The United States, check.   India, check.   China, check.  Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, check.

Canadian hydrologist Tom Gleeson put it bluntly. "Over a quarter of the world's population live in these regions where groundwater is being overused."

Many places are rapidly pumping out "fossil" water, or water that was laid down sometimes thousands of years ago and cannot be replaced on a human timescale.

Seeking a yardstick of sustainability, the study creates a measure called the groundwater footprint.

It calculates the area of land sustained by extracted water and compares this to the size of the aquifer beneath.

The global groundwater footprint is a whopping 3.5 times the size of the world's aquifers, the study found.

"Humans are over-exploiting groundwater in many large aquifers that are crucial to agriculture, especially in North America and Asia," said Gleeson.

"Irrigation for agriculture is largely causing the problem but it is already impacting in some regions the ability to use groundwater for irrigation, so it is almost like a self-reinforcing problem."

According to the UN report, extraction from aquifers has tripled in the past 50 years and now accounts for nearly half of all drinking water today.

Last month's issue of Harper's magazine  ran Wil Hylton's piece, "Broken Heartland, The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains."    It explored the looming collapse of America's once mighty Ogallala aquifer that lies beneath eight - count'em eight - of the states that comprise America's vaunted "bread basket."

"Ancient, epic, apparently endless, it is the largest subterranean water supply in the country, with an estimated capacity of a million-billion gallons, providing nearly a third of all American groundwater irrigation. If the aquifer were somehow raised to the surface, it would cover a larger area than any freshwater lake on Earth - by a factor of five."

"No one worried about the aquifer. To farmers it seemed a bottomless reserve, generating the same outlandish volume no matter how many straws went in. Soon there were hundreds of thousands of wells producing the same reliable flow, year after year, without any evident stress.

"Then, during the early 1990s, farmers throughout the Great Plains began to notice a decline in their wells. Irrigation systems from the Dakotas to Texas dipped, and, in some places, have been abandoned entirely."

About a third of the Ogallala is now down to less than 30-feet of water that's still being pumped out at about 5-feet a year.   By 2030, most of the rest of it will be in the same condition.  I think, I hope, you can see where this could be heading.

With the hydrological cycle we've enjoyed for millennia now broken, leaving most parts of the world to endure severe flooding or severe drought or both, that groundwater is needed now more than ever and yet, where it's needed most, it's nearing exhaustion.   

India, China, Pakistan all face surface water threats and groundwater exhaustion and they're all more reliant than ever on Himalayan headwaters and they're all armed with nuclear weapons.  And the United States is determined to get in on the South and East Asian tensions.

Shit, oh dear.

Water, Water Everywhere - Just Not Here, or Here, or There Either

One of the main themes on this site, other than Afghanistan, has been the environment and, especially, the looming freshwater/groundwater crisis that is spreading rapidly around the world. As Maude Barlow points out in the following excerpts from her interview in Alternet, it's a razor-sharp, double-edged sword that is both a result and a cause of global warming:

"By farming in deserts and taking up water from aquifers or watersheds. Or by urbanizing -- massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff -- vegetation and grass -- so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

"We are massively polluting surface water, so that the water may be there, but we can't use it. And we are also mining groundwater faster than it can be replenished by nature, which means we are not allowing the cycle to renew itself. The Ogallala aquifer is one example of massive overpumping. There are bore wells in the Lake Michigan shore that go as deep into the ground as Chicago skyscrapers go into the ground and they are sucking groundwater that should be feeding the lake so hard that they are pulling up lake water now, and they are reversing the flow of water in Lake Michigan for the first time.

"We are interrupting the natural cycle. And another thing we are doing is something called virtual water trade. That is where you send water out of the watershed in the form of products or agriculture. You've used the water to produce something and then you export it, and about 20 percent of water used in the world is exported out of watershed in this way, because so much of our economy is about export. In the U.S. you are sending about one-third of your water out of watersheds -- it is not sustainable.

"This is not a cyclical drought. We are actually creating hot stains, as I and some scientists call them, around the world. These are parts of the world that are running out of water and will be, or are, in crisis. Which means that millions more people will be without water. I argue that this is one of the causes of global warming. We usually hear water being a result of climate change, and it is, particularly with the melting of the glaciers. But our abuse, mismanagement and treatment of water is actually one of the causes, and we have not placed that analysis at the center of our thinking about climate change and environmental destruction, and until we do, we are only addressing half the question."

Barlow was being interviewed in connection with the release of her new book, "Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water." You can read the entire interview here:

http://www.alternet.org/water/76819/?page=2