America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow

[andhra_jp]

Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times data investigation revealed.

Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture.
Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower.

A warmer world also causes more surface water to evaporate, leaving less to seep through the ground to replenish overstressed aquifers.

Even in places experiencing more violent rainstorms because of climate change, the heavier rainfall only helps so much.
That’s because much of the water from extreme downpours races away quickly to the ocean, before it can sit and soak into the aquifer below.

Last year the United States produced 39 percent of global sorghum exports, 32 percent of soybean exports, and 23 percent of corn exports, federal data show.
America also exported more cotton than any other country.
That success has relied on pumping up more water than nature could put back.

A little more than one-third of America’s total volume of drinking water comes from groundwater, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

The federal government sets rules on groundwater, but not its overuse or depletion, although experts say Congress has the constitutional authority to do so. Overall, federal responsibility for water is scattered among a half-dozen different agencies.

America’s approach to regulating water is “a total mess,” said Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University.

Overpumping can have other risks beyond diminishing the supply of water. It can also contaminate aquifers in ways that make the remaining water unsafe or undrinkable.
For example, in coastal areas, overpumping can accelerate “saltwater intrusion,” the movement of ocean water into the freshwater aquifer, making it first unappetizing, then unhealthy.

Saltwater intrusion is happening in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, Florida, the Gulf Coast and California. “It’s pretty widespread,” said Dr. Cline of the U.S. Geological Survey.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html

[Assam_Bhayya]

Ooh climate change batch study ya, ok ok got it 

[andhra_jp]

Fifteen hundred miles to the east, in New York State, overpumping is threatening drinking-water wells on Long Island, birthplace of the modern American suburb and home to working class towns as well as the Hamptons and their beachfront mansions.

Around Phoenix, one of America’s fastest growing cities, the crisis is severe enough that the state has said there’s not enough groundwater in parts of the county to build new houses that rely on aquifers.

In other areas, including parts of Utah, California and Texas, so much water is being pumped up that it is causing roads to buckle, foundations to crack and fissures to open in the earth.
And around the country, rivers that relied on groundwater have become streams or trickles or memories.

In Arkansas, one of the country’s biggest users of groundwater, more than twice as much water is being pumped annually from the main agricultural aquifer as rainfall and other sources put back in, according to state data.
In some places, the aquifer has fallen to less than 10 percent of capacity, the Arkansas Department of State warned this year. Arkansas produces roughly half the nation’s rice, a water-intensive crop.

In California, an agricultural giant and, like Arkansas, a major groundwater user, the aquifers in at least 76 basins last year were being pumped out faster than they could be replenished by precipitation, a condition known as “overdraft,” according to state numbers.

In Colorado, like other western states, farming, residential development and reduced precipitation have increasingly strained the state’s groundwater.But Colorado has policies that allow its aquifers to run out.

In Maryland, almost three-quarters of monitoring wells have seen their water levels drop over the past 40 years, some by more than 100 feet.
Charles County, which contains fast-growing suburbs of Washington, has used most of its groundwater for homes and agriculture.
And it isn’t coming back anytime soon.
Charles County is looking at piping in water from elsewhere or building a treatment plant to remove salt from the Potomac River. But that would increase costs as much as tenfold.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, represents a state where groundwater depletion is particularly severe.
Almost two-thirds of monitoring wells in Oregon show a statistically significant decline in water levels since 1980.

Consider Long Island in New York. Saltwater is encroaching on parts of the aquifers that provide drinking water for the three million people who live east of Queens and Brooklyn.

In Norfolk, Va., and other cities around the country, the groundwater is so dangerously depleted that officials are now, at great cost, pumping treated wastewater into the aquifer to try to stop the water levels from falling.

Then, there’s arsenic.

A naturally occurring, cancer-causing heavy metal, arsenic is often trapped in clay, a common soil type. But it can be released into drinking water supplies when aquifers are overpumped, a phenomenon that scientists have documented in countries with less-developed water infrastructure, including Mexico and Vietnam.

In general, as people drill deeper wells, the likelihood of arsenic contamination increases, according to Dr. Smith, now a professor at Colorado State University. And as shallower groundwater supplies are depleted, he said, more people are drilling deeper wells.

In southwest Utah, at the edge of an otherwise fast-growing city named Enoch, are the outlines of a neighborhood that appears to have vanished. Streets and sidewalks meander past lots that were once meant for houses but now have only bits of trash and waist-high weeds.

In the Houston area, overpumping of groundwater, along with oil extraction, has caused some land to sink by more than 10 feet over the course of decades, according to local officials. In Florida, overpumping sometimes causes sinkholes.

[iTeachSAP]

ee HOA valla OCD ni 10goo.. Grass yellow gaa aithe ticket esthaadu ..

Grass green gaa undalanta... Tagadaniki nellu levu raa sami ante, gaddi pachaga undali annadanta okadu... 

 

[LungiLingaraju]

36 minutes ago, iTeachSAP said:

ee HOA valla OCD ni 10goo.. Grass yellow gaa aithe ticket esthaadu ..

Grass green gaa undalanta... Tagadaniki nellu levu raa sami ante, gaddi pachaga undali annadanta okadu... 

 

Water taagi ucha poi uncle .. ee daffa hoa gallaki tikka kudurtadi