NASA Finds Water Running Out, But Not How Fast

There are signs that the world is running out of water: shortages, strict conservation mandates, and violent water conflicts that are expected to get worse.

So, at this point, how much water left?

It’s hard to say, according to University of California Professor Jay Famiglietti, who serves as the senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We don’t have a clear idea how much water is left in natural reservoirs, which, in the U.S. alone, supply drinking water to about half of the population and are a key source of water for the agricultural irrigation systems that help put food on our tables. That means we may well be in danger of running out, and not even realize it,” he said in a statement.

Famiglietti investigated these questions in a study published in June in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The research reveals that “humans are rapidly draining water from about a third of the world’s biggest underground basins, or aquifers, more rapidly than they can naturally be replenished,” Discovery News reported.

Research of this type has never been successfully completed before. “The studies are the first to characterize groundwater losses via data from space, using readings generated by NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites that measure dips and bumps in Earth’s gravity, which is affected by the weight of water,” the American Geophysical Union said in a statement.

Policy action is needed to get a better understanding of how much water remains, according to Famiglietti.

“Available physical and chemical measurements are simply insufficient,” he said. “Given how quickly we are consuming the world’s groundwater reserves, we need a coordinated global effort to determine how much is left.”

Understanding how much water is left could have major implications for world peace, according to study author Alexandra Richey, who worked on the project.

“What happens when a highly stressed aquifer is located in a region with socioeconomic or political tensions that can’t supplement declining water supplies fast enough?” she asked. “We’re trying to raise red flags now to pinpoint where active management today could protect future lives and livelihoods.”

One thing is clear: More data is needed.

“We don’t actually know how much is stored in each of these aquifers. Estimates of remaining storage might vary from decades to millennia,” Richey said. “In a water-scarce society, we can no longer tolerate this level of uncertainty, especially since groundwater is disappearing so rapidly.”

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