Folks are starting to wake up to the unexpected effects of climate change. Like a the effect a 1.5 celsius rise could have on evapotranspiration all across the United States. Not just in the west where we’re used to it.
As groundwater depletes, arid American West is moving east
“We asked what would the response look like if we included the entire complexity of subsurface water movement in a large-scale simulation, and we think this is the first time this has been done,” said Condon, lead author of the paper and assistant professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.
The results, published today in Nature Communications, show that as warming temperatures shift the balance between water supply and demand, shallow groundwater storage can buffer plant water stress—but only where shallow groundwater connections are present, and not indefinitely. As warming persists, that storage can be depleted—at the expense of vital connections between surface water, such as rivers, streams and water reservoirs underground.
The calculations revealed a direct response of shallow groundwater storage to warming that demonstrates the strong and early effect that even low to moderate warming may have on groundwater storage and evapotranspiration.
“Even with a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming case, we’re likely to lose a lot of groundwater,” said Reed Maxwell, professor of hydrology at the Colorado School of Mines, who co-authored the paper with Laura Condon of the University of Arizona and Adam Atchley of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “The East Coast could start looking like the West Coast from a water standpoint. That’s going to be a real challenge.”
Gosh if ONLY there were some kind of animal that was driven day and night to make and maintain little dams that would recharge the water table everywhere across the United States. But what are the odds of that happening? I ask you.
Well just because you have a graphic for it doesn’t mean its true. I’m sure there’s a whole division of the EPA devoted to making graphics to promote fake ideas. Like Climate change.
In the western U.S., changes in groundwater storage may remain masked for a long time, the study revealed, because the groundwater there is already deep, and dropping levels would not have as great an effect on surface waters. Additionally, the region’s vegetation is already largely water limited and adapted to being disconnected from deep groundwater sources.
However, the eastern U.S. will be much more sensitive to a lowering of the water table. Groundwater and surface water are more closely linked, and depleting the groundwater will be more disruptive to vegetation, streams and rivers. Many of the systems that have been put in place in the western U.S. for handling and managing water shortage are lacking in the eastern part of the country, as well.
The study revealed that regions in the eastern U.S. may reach a tipping point sooner rather than later, when vegetation starts to lose access to shallow groundwater as storage is depleted with warming.
“We are facing a crisis in global groundwater storage,” Condon said. “Huge groundwater reservoirs are drying up at an alarming rate, and that’s a problem because they nourish major growing regions around the world.”
You can’t just wake up every day and keep saying over and over the problems we are facing could be helped by letting more beavers do the jobs they want to do. It just can’t be that simple. You sound like a crackpot. No one is going to believe you.
