Groundwater in the News
Today, the New York Times (NYT) conducted an investigation into the groundwater crisis in America. Here’s a link to “Five Takeaways From Our Investigation Into America’s Groundwater Crisis”. This article is based on a NYT investigation (link here). The figure below is from the investigation article.
The five takeaways are:
Aquifer water levels are falling across the USA. 45 percent of the groundwater wells surveyed byt the NY Times have shown statistically significant declines in water levels since 1980.
The NYT has built a database of over 80,000 wells across the USA. They have reached out to government agencies to collect data, which has been used to conduct a thorough evaluation of the groundwater crisis in the country.
Overpumping groundwater is a threat to America’s status as a food superpower. The use of groundwater has allowed agricultural growth in the midwest, which is the location of America’s “breadbasket”.
It’s not just a problem in the West or for farmers - it’s a tap-water crisis. They give the example that the state of Arkansas pumps groundwater for rice crops twice as fast as the groundwater is being replenished.
Weak regulations have allowed the overuse of groundwater. Climate change is leading to even higher pumping rates. “Weak state regulations, combined with a lack of federal oversight and no comprehensive national data, has made it possible for farms, cities and companies to draw down aquifers”, according to the NYT1.
The investigation is summarized here, but since it is likely behind a paywall for most people, I’ll summarize some details (all figures are from the NYT article):
The NYT analyzed groundwater levels at 85,544 monitoring wells and looked for trends over time since 1920.
Nearly half of the wells have groundwater levels that have been decreasing in the past 40 years.
In the past decade 40% of all sites has reached an all-time low groundwater level.
Corn yields in states like Kansas have dropped because the underlying aquifer can no longer support agriculture.
On Long Island, drinking water is being threatened by overpumping.
Near Phoenix, the state of Arizona has reported that there’s not enough groundwater to supply water to new neighbourhoods.
In some areas, land is subsiding (sinking) due to over pumping (Click here for an article about land subsidence?).
Here are some intriguing quotes from the article:
One of the biggest obstacles is that the depletion of this unseen yet essential natural resource is barely regulated. The federal government plays almost no role, and individual states have implemented a dizzying array of often weak rules.
Several states including Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado have rules that allow groundwater to be pumped from some regions until it’s gone.
Colorado has policies that allow its aquifers to run out.
“Most of the water we’re pulling out of the ground is thousands of years old,” said Jason Groth, the county’s deputy director of planning and growth management. “It’s not like it rains on Monday, and by Saturday it’s in the aquifer.”
Of the nation’s 143,070 water systems, 128,362 rely primarily on groundwater, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Before humans relied on groundwater, we got our water from streams and ponds. If we took too much, we’d move on to the next stream or pond. It’s simple to see the effects of taking water from streams and ponds.
With groundwater, however, we don’t see the effects of our actions for a long time (if at all), so it’s a lot easier to just keep pumping. After years of continuously pumping, we’re seeing the effects of our actions. And it’s taken a journalism outlet to point this out to us (although I would argue that many scientists have known about this for a long time, but the science has fallen upon deaf ears).
The article includes a figure (shown below) that describes how aquifers fail:
Our most basic needs include food, water and shelter. Groundwater plays a key role in the first two of those three basic needs. We need to think about groundwater. We need to do something about groundwater. We need groundwater education and awareness. We know better; we need to do better!
A first draft of this Water Droplet article was reviewed by a friend who asked “Where is the hope?”. After some thought and conversation with my professional colleagues, there is hope. And I will write about initiatives that give me hope in my next article.
Thanks for reading The Water Droplet and keep watching for more stories about water!
The fact that the New York Times assembled 80,000 wells into their own database speaks volumes about the lack of a cohesive groundater strategy in the USA. Canada, of course, is not immune from this regulatory apathy. While organizations like the Oak Ridges Moraine Groundwater Program are succeeding at compiling and applying huge data sets, all levels of government in Canada do not take groundwater seriously.