What To Do About the Disappearing Land & Ocean Water Problem?





Susanne.Posel-Headline.News.Official- water.nasa.china.india.ice.sheets.sea.rising.lakes.disappearing.crisis_occupycorporatismSusanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Co-Founder, Legacy Bio-Naturals

 

According to a new study published by the University of Twente (UT) in the Netherlands, when it comes to access to fresh water, 2 out of every 3 people on earth are not able to meet their basic needs.

That means somewhere between 1.7 and 3 billion people worldwide, especially the populations of China and India, are being affected by this water scarcity. In total the areas on the planet with the widest spread problems are:

• Mexico
• North Africa
• South Africa
• Middle East
• American West

The researchers blame population growth, consumption and agricultural demands as the 3 leading causes of “groundwater decline and lakes disappearing.”

Arjen Hoesktra, professor of water management for UT, explained: “You have less water flowing in the rivers. This threatens ecosystems and biodiversity, and harms local downstream communities where water will not flow.”

Hoesktra asserts this new research gives scientists “a much more accurate picture” of how “scarcity occurs and for what reason.”

The lead author would also like this data to be used by “governments to set a water cap for every month so they don’t allow more water use than water available, and people must become more aware of how much water is being used for everything they consume.”

In addition, the researchers would like to see governments “put a price on water resources and allocate those resources more wisely.”

This is because “consumers make choices based on the amount of water used for making their products.”

And while nearly half of the world’s population is dealing with drought as the new normal, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the University of California at Irvine (UCI) have teamed up to release new data showing “how climate-driven increases of liquid water storage on land have affected the rate of sea level rise.”

Using data taken from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, the researchers were able to “detect changes in Earth’s gravitational pull that result from regional changes in the amount of water across Earth’s surface.”

The researchers deciphered levels and changes in liquid water storage on the continents, ice sheets and glaciers.

This report show that “while ice sheets and glaciers continue to melt, changes in weather and climate over the past decade have caused Earth’s continents to soak up and store an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, temporarily slowing the rate of sea level rise by nearly 20%.”

Due to the global hydrologic cycle’s subtle changes in regional precipitation, alterations in the soil moisture and lake levels can have a profound effect of water storage on land.

In conclusion, the researchers pointed out that “these results will lead to a refinement of global sea level budgets” because this study is a first of its kind wherein observations of changes in land water storage shows clearly that wet regions are increasingly seeing more precipitation and dry regions are becoming drier.

J.T. Reager, graduate student at UCI and co-author of this study revealed: “We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean.”

Reager continued: “What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily. These new data are vital for understanding decadal variations in sea level change. The information will be a critical complement to future long-term projections of sea level rise, which depend on melting ice and warming oceans.”


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