Drought: General

     Earth’s landmasses are drying.

     As the climate warms, new data show huge swaths of land across the globe are quickly drying, threatening humanity’s supply of fresh water.  3/4 of humanity lives in nations where net groundwater is declining.

     In most places, there is less precipitation, even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster.  Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent.

     In the far north, the detected loss is due largely to glaciers melting and sub-Arctic lakes drying.  But farther south — where most people live — it is largely the race to suck groundwater from aquifers that is removing the water from the continents.

     Many of the aquifers underlying almost half of Earth’s continents, took millions of years to form and might take 1,000s of years to refill.

The groundwater loss is even a bigger factor in sea level rise than melting glaciers.

     Uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in lower latitudes.

     Dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water between 2014 and 2024 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.  One stretches from Central America through most of Mexico, up the US Great Plains to south central Canada.  Another covers almost all of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, into Pakistan and northern India.

     28 major cities in the US are sinking.  So are Jakarta, Venice, Shanghai, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Lagos, Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Alexandria Egypt.  Some of the world’s most productive farmland is sinking with them.  So is California’s Central Valley, which grows the bulk of US fruit and vegetables.

     This drying underlies a future later this century when most people have very little fresh water.

Section Map: Droughts, Deserts & Fires