The earth's fresh water loss

Jay Famiglietti, co-author, NASA Aquifer study, on PBS Newshour -  We found that in the 37 world’s largest aquifers that we looked at, that over 21 of them are past sustainability tipping points, meaning that the rate of withdrawal exceeds the rate of replenishment. And of those, we found that 13 are in a pretty bad way and threatened to exceed a point at which they may not come back.

.... Around the world, we use about — about two billion people rely on groundwater as the primary water source. And it provides about half of the water that we need to irrigate agriculture. So we rely on it heavily. But we don’t manage it very well. And that’s true in the United States as well as around the world.

... Probably the worst in the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, and even the region above the Arabian Peninsula. Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran are regions that we have studied before.Northwestern India, really across Northern India, into Bangladesh is in pretty rough shape.

This study and other studies that we have done on the aquifer show that we have been losing about 5.5. trillion gallons of groundwater per year for the last four years during this drought. And that’s because in California right now, there’s no snow in the mountains, there’s no rainfall happening, there is very little water in our reservoirs. So, we have to rely on this groundwater, and it’s disappearing pretty rapidly.