The great plains have lost groundwater at an alarming rate. And extra snowfall doesn’t seem to be replacing them. The problem will continue to get worse as the super hot summers more water is needed for crops.
Gee I wonder what could possibly help?
Satellites find that snow didn’t offset southwestern US groundwater loss
Record snowfall in recent years has not been enough to offset long-term drying conditions and increasing groundwater demands in the U.S. Southwest, according to a new analysis of NASA satellite data.
Declining water levels in the Great Salt Lake and Lake Mead have been testaments to a megadrought afflicting western North America since 2000. But surface water only accounts for a fraction of the Great Basin watershed that covers most of Nevada and large portions of California, Utah, and Oregon. Far more of the region’s water is underground. That has historically made it difficult to track the impact of droughts on the overall water content of the Great Basin.
Gosh if only there were some way of storing little pockets of land all over that could press that water down back into the aquifer. Too bad.
While new maps show a seasonal rise in water each spring due to melting snow from higher elevations, University of Maryland Earth scientist Dorothy Hall said occasional snowy winters are unlikely to stop the dramatic water level decline that’s been underway in the U.S. Southwest.
The finding came about as Hall and colleagues studied the contribution of annual snowmelt to Great Basin water levels. “In years like the 2022-23 winter, I expected that the record amount of snowfall would really help to replenish the groundwater supply,” Hall said. “But overall, the decline continued.”
The research was published in March 2024 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
This was the sentence that blew my mind. I knew beavers were superheroes but I had zero idea that they could effect GRAVITY.
The original GRACE satellites, which flew from March 2002 to October 2017, and the successor GRACE–Follow On (GRACE–FO) satellites, which launched in May 2018 and are still active, track changes in Earth’s gravity due primarily to shifting water mass.
