the Colorado A new study has found that the amount of water has lost 27.8 million acres of groundwater in the past twenty years, and the amount of water is almost the full ability of Lake Meed, the largest reservoir in the United States.
The search results, based on the satellite images in NASA from all over the southwest, are the size of the continuous water crisis in the region, where both groundwater and surface water are exhausted.
Jay Familyte, a hydrogen scientist in Arizona State University and study author.
He added: “Everyone in the United States should worry about it, because we grow a lot of food in the Colorado River basin, and this is food used throughout the country.” “These days, we also support a number of databases and computer chips, and this is necessary for our economy.”
The Colorado River Basin provides water for about 40 million people in seven American states, as well as millions of acres of agricultural lands. The study found that most of the groundwater losses since 2003 occurred in the lower Colorado River basin, including Arizona, Nevada and California.
It is easy to imagine the availability of surface water throughout the West. There are blatant pictures of the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Meed, and pictures of the Colorado River, whose flow decreased about 20 % in the last century.
But the groundwater is different, Famiglietti said: “It is invisible. It is mysterious.
With the lowest vision of less organized: California managed the state level only for groundwater in 2014, and before that, the use of groundwater was Unorganized. Vamillati said that Arizona, who has seen a significant decrease in groundwater, still does not organize the use of groundwater in the majority of the country, which means that most real estate owners can simply pump the groundwater as they want.
“Excessive beatings” is the main cause of groundwater losses over the past twenty years. “There is nothing illegal on this topic, it’s just an unbearable.”
Familyte said that most of the water across the West is used for agriculture, and with the expansion of “industrial agriculture on a large scale” in the southwest, especially in the state of Arizona, it has resources for farmers for drilling wells deeper and greater to extract groundwater. In Arizona, many new clover farms grow, which is used as a cow. Data centers, although it is a much less agricultural factor, is also an increased company that requires water.
The new study found that the exhaustion of water storage in the Colorado River basin had launched in the past decade. Since 2015, the pelvis has lost fresh water three times faster than it was in the previous decade, mostly driven by exhausting the groundwater in Arizona.
While researchers are defending a better management to provide groundwater in the future, Famiglietti also said that the effectiveness of groundwater regulations so far is still unclear.
The effects of the climate crisis, including high medium temperatures and drought, are expected to make water shortages in the region in the future.
