{"id":42642,"date":"2019-01-12T12:54:13","date_gmt":"2019-01-12T17:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42642"},"modified":"2019-01-12T12:54:13","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T17:54:13","slug":"warning-a-shrinking-window-of-usable-groundwater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42642","title":{"rendered":"Warning: A \u2018Shrinking Window\u2019 of Usable Groundwater"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

Warning: A \u2018Shrinking Window\u2019 of Usable Groundwater<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought \u2014 and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

We\u2019re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That\u2019s probably not news to everyone, but new research suggests that, deep underground in a number of key aquifers in some parts of the United States, we may have much less water than previously thought.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

\u201cWe found that the average depth of water resources across the country was about half of what people had previously estimated,\u201d says Jennifer McIntosh<\/a>, a distinguished scholar and professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.<\/p>\n

McIntosh and her colleagues \u2014 who published a new study<\/a> about these aquifers in November in Environmental Research Letters<\/em> \u2014 took a different approach to assessing groundwater than other research, which has used satellites<\/a> to measure changes in groundwater storage. For example, a 2015 study<\/a> looked at 37 major aquifers across the world and found some were being depleted faster than they were being replenished, including in California\u2019s agriculturally intensive Central Valley.<\/p>\n

McIntosh says those previous studies revealed a lot about how we\u2019re depleting water resources from the top down through extraction, such as pumping for agriculture and water supplies, especially in places like California.<\/p>\n

But McIntosh and three other researchers wanted to look at groundwater from a different perspective: They examined how we\u2019re using water resources from the bottom up.<\/p>\n

The study may help close the gap about what we know and don\u2019t know regarding how much water is available deep underground, as well as its quality.<\/p>\n

It also rings some alarm bells.<\/p>\n

A Different Approach<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warning: A \u2018Shrinking Window\u2019 of Usable Groundwater New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought \u2014 and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk. We\u2019re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That\u2019s probably not news to everyone, but new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,5492,5835,23902,4208,23527,1729,19783,18491,866],"class_list":["post-42642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-aquifers","tag-clean-water","tag-environmental-research-letters","tag-groundwater","tag-jennifer-mcintosh","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-tara-lohan","tag-the-revelator","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42643,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42642\/revisions\/42643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}