Agua Via White Paper: The Groundwater Crisis. Origin, First Pictures and Data of Imminent, Invisible Water Crises Emerging as the World’s Groundwater “Savings Account” is Drained
shared at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UzLtoxBlyzttpwhar3WmS_1bsqTfoMiJ/view
Abstract
(copied from the linked paper)
Over the last 70 years, the world expanded the source of
agricultural, manufacturing, and domestic water from a reliance on surface water (rainfall, rivers,
lakes) to routinely include groundwater from rechargeable aquifers (the “savings
account”) and fossil water aquifers (a “one time inheritance”) for the dominant
share of its grain production, a large percentage of total crop production and over
half of its drinking water. Tapping these supplies provided food security during
dry years, multiplied agricultural yields during normal or wet years, and provided
the foundation for supporting the rise of population from 2B to 7B. We are now
dependent on routine use of resources that date from decades to millions of
years back. Although there are exceptions, such as the United States Geological
Survey’s (USGS) tracking of groundwater depletion in the US, the world at large
has been using this resource without measuring consumption rates or how
much is left. Globally, we have been withdrawing from a bank account without
knowing how much we are pulling out or if the account is almost empty.
For the first time, we know. The picture is surprising and not good. Recently,
NASA has released images, analysis and multi-year comparison studies from the
GRACE satellites that give the first pictures of the state of groundwater usage
and groundwater reserves by measuring changes in gravity. The findings show
imminent and developing water crises across the world’s major agricultural areas
and population centers due to over withdrawal of groundwater. To put this in
perspective, outside of the shrinking of the polar ice caps and glaciers, the
biggest single point of contribution to rising ocean levels came from groundwater
pumping around New Delhi, India. To put it in the context of how big a surprise
the data delivers, the water loss from New Delhi turned out to be 70% larger than
the Indian estimates had predicted. The satellite data offers a global, quantified,
objective view of the invisible, irreversible overspending of a huge percentage
world’s storehouse of water.
News reports from Syria and Iraq about population flight from villages as
irrigation wells go dry cease to be isolated data points when placed in the big
picture context of the satellite data. The GRACE satellite system makes visible
the exhaustion of groundwater in one key region after another, beginning with
Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the rest of the Middle East within the next few
years. India, China and the US will follow later.
Analyses of the data ascribe the cause of the depletions to “decades of bad
management and overuse,” which continue unchanged. Even if global
conservation methods and plentiful rainfall patterns were to begin tomorrow,
crises would be marginally postponed; scarce rainfall or drought will accelerate
them. The numbers and trends have mass and momentum: they show that we
have been supporting a global population through living beyond our water bank
account. The published scientific papers use words such as “alarming.”
Update 2022: The groundwater depletion described above has continued and
increased. The prediction of imminent trouble deriving from groundwater
depletion promptly came true. The news reports of Syrian farmers abandoning
their farms and Yemen’s Houthi fleeing as their wells ran dry led first to civil wars
in their respective countries, and then to humanitarian disasters, refugee flight
and international wars involving ISIS versus the US in Syria, and Iran versus
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen.
During our 2014 meeting with Secretary Shultz and Secretary Mattis, we made
the comment that NASA publishes maps that show you where the next wars will
be. This has statement has been borne out. The US Department of State is
now interested in deploying water technologies into these water crisis points to
stop the next wars.
A range of other consequences of groundwater depletion also occurred. For
example, the flight of over 1 million refugees from Africa who crossed the
Mediterranean into Europe was also initiated by groundwater depletion.
In 2022, the United States is now also deep within the crisis, although most of the
populations appears unaware of the problem. Although people who have direct
contact with water issues, e.g., farmers forced to fallow half their acreage through
lack of water are well aware of the situation, the vast US population remains
either unaware or – as described in an article in The Atlantic - in denial. An Aug.
25, 2022 interview with James Famiglietti, who led the GRACE data analysis
summarized the situation: “The Colorado River crisis is urgent, Famiglietti said,
but the hidden, underground water crisis is even worse. We talked about what
U.S. leaders either won’t acknowledge or don’t understand and about how bad
things are about to get.”
© 2022 Agua Via Ltd, Contact: Gayle Pergamit [email protected]
Rick says:
This is not an existential risk in itself, but it is one more way our civilization is unsustainably consuming limited resources and heading for a crash.
Agua Via is a startup company developing a new atomic-scale low-energy fluid filtering technology. It could be used to purify contaminated water for human consumption and other uses, removing small-molecule and larger contaminants. It has a much smaller energy cost than reverse osmosis or distillation.
Agua Via could use blocks of funding (grants or venture capital) for further research and development. If you have influence on the movement of millions of dollars, consider funding this promising technology. Contact: Gayle Pergamit [email protected]
They are having a weird internet phenomenon, so get to their web site by a web search. If you just enter the URL aguavia.com into an address field, you get to some old prototype version of the site.
That was an interesting article. It's fascinating to see that we can measure groundwater depletion by changes in satellite velocity due to different gravity.
But I'm confused-the worst places seem to be losing around 4 cm per year of groundwater (like northern India). Even if that means 4 cm of "solid" water (is it?) and the porosity of the soil/rock is 10%, that would be 40 cm drop per year of the water table. If it's feasible to pump when the water level falls 100 m, that would be a 250 year supply. Of course people do pump from deeper, but that may tend to be subsidized. There were claims in the paper of much greater groundwater depletion, like 6.5 feet (2 m) per year in Yemen, but there was no citation for that.
"The Kansas peak use arrived in 2009. But during 2012 – one year after the last picture in this series – its harvests had dropped by nearly 30%."
I quickly tried to find Kansas food production as a function of time-do you know what it was?
Since irrigation produces about 40% of total calories (I think of just crops, not including grazing which is vast majority rain fed) and about 20% of that is using unsustainable "fossil" water, that means we would lose about 8% of production after all the fossil water is depleted (if we could not produce any crop on the land without irrigation, which is pessimistic). If this occurred over 30 years, that would be about 1/4% per year of food production loss.
Relative to business as usual of unlimited groundwater, food prices would be higher, and we would likely have to put more of the land that used to be used for crop growth back into production, but I would not characterize it as heading for a crash.
Sounds promising, not only for wastewater reclamation for irrigation/drinking, but could it also be used to recycle minerals?
I think the implication is that with increasing drought and loss of renewable groundwater supplies, fossil water will be drawn more intensely for use in irrigation. If drought conditions worsen globally, or groundwater suffers contamination (saltwater or pollutants) then we are headed for a crash.
The use of fossil water depends on where the water is being drawn and how renewable groundwater is replenished. Reuters has graphics on India's specific water issues. The included graphic there shows per capita water availability for India reaching close to 1000m3 (water scarcity) by 2050, with a changing slope reflecting water conservation, I presume. Since the population centers across the country face different conditions, these are averages, and some places in India will run out of water much sooner.
John Roome at World Bank Blogs has a post about India's programs to arrest water losses. He offers that if trends continue, at least 25% of India's agriculture will be at risk. He also suggests that Indian farmers rely on water intensive crops and growing practices, and that shifting those is part of the Indian government's approach to reducing water consumption.
I'm curious about water conservation here in my native California. Drought here, ground subsidence, water rationing, and legacy rights to water from outside the state, all point to ongoing problems going into the future.