#groundwater-depletion

#groundwater-depletion

Vast swathes of Europe's water reserves are drying up, a new analysis using two decades of satellite data reveals, with freshwater storage shrinking across southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Poland and parts of the UK. Scientists at University College London (UCL), working with Watershed Investigations and the Guardian, analysed 200224 data from satellites, which track changes in Earth's gravitational field. Because water is heavy, shifts in groundwater, rivers, lakes, soil moisture and glaciers show up in the signal, allowing the satellites to effectively weigh how much water is stored.

Scientists are seeing "mega-drying" regions that are immense and expanding - one stretching from the western United States through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China. There are two primary causes of the desiccation: rising temperatures unleashed by using oil and gas, and widespread overpumping of water that took millennia to accumulate underground.