By Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi and Eli Murray Aug. 28, 2023
Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times data investigation revealed.
GLOBAL WARMING HAS FOCUSED concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view.
Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.
The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.
States and communities are already paying the price.
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.
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.
“There is no way to get that back,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, said of disappearing groundwater. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is.”
But despite the importance, the view of the predicament has often been fragmented. Until now.
This analysis is based on tens of thousands of groundwater monitoring wells that dot the nation. The Times collected data for these wells, which are widely scattered and often poorly tracked, from dozens of federal, state and local jurisdictions.
That database reveals the scope of the crisis in many ways. Every year since 1940, for example, more wells have had falling water levels than rising levels.
Groundwater level trends.
One of the biggest obstacles is that the depletion of this unseen yet essential natural resource is barely regulated. The federal government plays almost no role, and individual states have implemented a dizzying array of often weak rules.
The problem is also relatively unexamined at the national scale. Hydrologists and other researchers typically focus on single aquifers or regional changes.
All of this helps enable and reinforce practices that have drained aquifers, such as growing water-intensive crops like alfalfa or cotton in dry areas and overreliance on groundwater in fast-growing urban areas.
Several states including Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado have rules that allow groundwater to be pumped from some regions until it’s gone. Some areas have even set official timelines for how quickly they plan to use up groundwater over the next few decades.
Oklahoma is working to determine how much water remains in its aquifers, information that state lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. But Christopher Neel, the head of water rights for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, said people might not necessarily welcome the government telling them that their land is running out of groundwater. Visit The New York Times for the full article.
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