Researchers have pioneered the use of a tool that can track the loss of groundwater in California’s Central Valley by measuring how much the Earth is sinking.
Home to one of the largest groundwater basins in the western United States, the Central Valley supplies about one-fifth of the nation’s groundwater demand, a large part of which is used to provide crop irrigation and aid agricultural production.
The same area also accounts for about 75% of the region’s subsidence – the scientific term for the gradual sinking of an area of land. The leading cause of subsidence is the removal or disturbance of groundwater, which is found underground in soil and between rocks and sand.
Combined with California’s large population, long history of drought and tendency to be battered by nearly every form of climate change, massive groundwater pumping is aggravating water scarcity, said Xuechen Yang, lead author of the case study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.
Read more at: Ohio State University