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Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage
- seventytwo 3y agoIf weather patterns shift, the infrastructure built to store water will have to shift as well. Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas. It’s all climate change stuff.
- eimrine 3y ago> Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas. Of course, Earth is a closed system, but I am not sure it is that closed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smeej 3y agoI don't mean this to sound snarky. I'm genuinely curious where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth.
- xwdv 3y agoWe lose atmosphere to space everyday.
- neom 3y agoThe mesosphere has very little water in it. http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2 http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mesosphere https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
- chmod775 3y agoAnd we also gain water from space through meteorites every day.
- seventytwo 3y agoI’m sorry my model didn’t account for your 8th order effects. You’re technically correct.
- eimrine 3y ago> where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth I afraid that a lot of fresh water is going to become an ocean water. Flooding theory creates the impression of transferring fresh water from one place to another where it will remain just as fresh. It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one.
- helge9210 3y ago> It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one. Fresh water is created from the salty water by evaporation all the time.
- fpesce 3y agoIndeed, and it's interesting to note that this natural desalination process also incorporates long-term storage mechanisms. Historically, vast quantities of freshwater have been stored in the form of snow packs and glaciers. However, in our changing climate, this storage is not occurring at the same scale as it used to. This could potentially exacerbate future water scarcity issues, making man-made desalination techniques even more crucial. As challenging as creating freshwater from saltwater may be, it's a puzzle we need to solve with urgency.
- flavius29663 3y agoon the other hand, global warming will pump much more water in the atmosphere, and we will have more precipitation. In fact, global warming would not be a problem at all if what I said above was not true. CO2 alone could only raise the temperature by 1C no matter how much we would put in the air (by year 2100). The water vapor creates a positive feedback loop that warms it far beyond what CO2 can do alone.
- mrguyorama 3y agoBut that's not actually helpful. Occasional massive rains don't refill aquifers very well. There needs to be a buffer to allow water to slowly make it's way into the system in a manageable way. Currently that is mountain snow melting over the warm season.
- XorNot 3y agoInto the ocean. The ocean covers the majority of the Earth's surface. The ocean is full of salt. Water which rains out over the oceans is unusable as drinking or irrigation water without expensive processing (desalination). If historic rainfall patterns change, there is absolutely no requirement that the rain land anywhere useful for our existing infrastructure or human habitation. Yes, the water won't disappear, but if the effect is rainfall hits the ocean, or say, flood-prone regions even harder then it normally does, it's still going to be coming down somewhere not useful to us. The problem is not that we can't solve these problems, it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so.
- phpisthebest 3y ago>>it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost... Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop.. If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick
- excalibur 3y ago> If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Make it so.
- nathan_compton 3y agoI think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. But many processes (including desalinization, as far as I understand it) are energy bound. It is really hard to make exponential progress when a process is bound by how much energy you can muster up to put into it. That is why rockets haven't had an exponential increase in the amount of weight they can get into orbit in the last 100 years. With gravity you must pay the piper. I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoIt's easy to overlook the effects of transpiration, which is a result of photosynthesis, which is impacted by biodiversity loss. It short circuits water's path back to the ocean and puts it back into the air above land where it can precipitate into lakes a second time. Without it, snowmelt-fed rivers dry out earlier. As more ice melts there might be more liquid water available, but the ecosystems that would process that water into vapor are struggling. So you end up with a situation where the only source of water vapor in the air is the oceans. As temperatures increase that'll again be a net increase in ocean-driven evaporation, but it'll be less evenly distributed than evaporation+transpiration was. So the concern is that the only available water will be too salty to drink, or too destructive to capture.
- vermilingua 3y agoHigher global average temperatures means higher global average specific humidity. As the air warms it can hold more water vapour, which means less condensation. I don’t know how much difference this makes, but I expect it’s not insignificant.
- ericd 3y agoIt also means a higher rate of evaporation from the oceans.
- vermilingua 3y agoTrue, but oceans only evaporate from the surface while the air retains moisture by volume. There is considerably more low, warm air than there is ocean surface.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoThe earth as a whole is roughly a closed system, but "usable water" is not. Most resource problems are not about the quantity of some thing changing as a percentage of earth's matter. Most resources are about density and composition. If all of the (non-ice) freshwater on earth was suddenly dumped into the ocean, we'd have the same amount of overall water - but little to no drinkable water. Likewise, we're not really creating new carbon by burning fossil fuels. We're moving and re-distributing it. Compared to being deep underground, the form we create by burning captures much more heat, causing many problems.
- neom 3y agohttps://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakistan-2022 https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods “in the recorded history [of the area] that we have since 1918, we have never had this much rain.”
- gonzo41 3y agoEarth isn't a closed system, we take in energy from the sun.
- jakswa 3y agoAlso we slowly lose upper atmosphere to the solar winds, when the magnetic fields fail to deflect it enough.
- _Microft 3y agoThat's not a problem. Closed systems can do that. If they additionally do not exchange energy with their environment they are called isolated systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system
- juujian 3y agoDamn, and that is with all the glaciers melting, which fills water reservoirs. Once they are completely gone, it is going to get so much worse.
- nathancahill 3y agoDam indeed.
- paiute 3y ago[flagged]
- lostmsu 3y agoCan somebody explain why is this downvoted? If 53% decline, what do the other 47% do? How about total storage?
- fahadkhan 3y agoProbably because it's ignoring the start of very next sentence in an attempt at sarcastic wit. > The net volume loss in natural lakes...
- paiute 3y ago... then they start talking about km^2 of lost surface area. Which if you read the paper they cite, it says "Between 1984 and 2015 permanent surface water has disappeared from an area of almost 90,000 square kilometres, roughly equivalent to that of Lake Superior, though new permanent bodies of surface water covering 184,000 square kilometres have formed elsewhere." On top of that, shallow lakes fluctuate wildly in surface area. The great Salt Lake for example. VS Lake Tahoe which can drop 10 ft and the surface area loss is tiny.
- dahart 3y agoYes of course the relationship between volume and area depends on the lake depth, are you suggesting the paper implied anything else? The Great Salt Lake has dropped rather dramatically in the last ten years, so much so that it has already changed pretty much all recreation and commercial activity on the lake - the primary boat dock closed because the marina was completely dry and by last year the shores had moved inward, by kilometers in some cases. Unusual precipitation this year has brought levels up a little, but this might only be a blip in the downward trend. The known reasons include drought conditions, unusually high temperatures, and greater upstream use. The Great Salt Lake’s recent history very much backs up the claims of this paper, no?
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- wombarly 3y agoHere in the Netherlands they decided to increase the water level of our lakes by 5cm to handle the drought season this year. Since the amount of snowfall in the Alps was lower than normal. https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/nieuws/archief/2023/04/hoger-peil-ijsselmeer-en-markermeer-als-voorbereiding-op-droogte https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/nieuws/archief/2023/04/hoger-...
- mywittyname 3y agoIt must be nice to live in a country that manages their natural resources with an eye towards long-term sustainability.
- peteradio 3y agoIsn't Netherlands bound to flood as ocean levels rise?
- sangnoir 3y agoThe Netherlands been claiming land from the sea for centuries and some areas are already well below sea level - I don't think they'll neglect their dykes any time soon.
- ethbr0 3y agoSince the 1400s; ref polder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_the_Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_the_Neth...
- avisser 3y agoThe Afsluitdijk just got heightened and reinforced. As someone who's biked across it, I'm psyched because now you can bike on the North Sea side - previously, there was only 1 bike path on the Zuiderzee side. https://theafsluitdijk.com/projects/dike-reinforcement/how/ https://theafsluitdijk.com/projects/dike-reinforcement/how/
- pier25 3y agoWe're going to need a lot of desalination plants powered by clean energy.
- linuxlizard 3y agoWhen water gets in short enough supply, we will burn coal, garbage, tires, anything to power desalination plants.
- RC_ITR 3y agoOr (at least in the US), we will simply stop doing things like growing alfalfa in the desert to feed cows being raised in Texas. Sure beef will be a little more expensive but… You’re actually right. We’ll probably burn garbage and radio hosts will call people against burning garbage effeminate names.
- bombcar 3y agoBurning garbage may be one of the best things you can do with garbage - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us... As you can set it up to burn very hot and have all sorts of scrubbers on the outcomes.
- RC_ITR 3y agoBurning anything is never the right answer in a world of climate change. We are scrambling to find ways to capture atmospheric carbon and store it underground and burning garbage is literally the opposite of that.
- bombcar 3y agoIf handling waste and burying it costs X carbon, and burning it creates Y carbon, and Y is less than X, then burning is better than burying. You'd have to do the math, it's not manifestly obvious that it's not the case (especially once you consider all the transportation involved in sending waste around the country and across the ocean).
- makz 3y agoDumb question: where did the water go?
- xen2xen1 3y agoWe're changing the weather with greenhouse gases and whatnot, and we regularly pump it out to go to our homes, or even use it to make electricity with dams.
- flavius29663 3y agoGlobal warming means generally more water in the air and more rain, not less. Think of Jurassic Park, not Mad Max
- ajmurmann 3y agoYes, more total rain. A steady steam from the mountains is a much better source of water though to keep lakes, rivers and our water supply going. The rain isn't evenly distributed through both space and time. We might get a drought for years and then torrential rainfalls. We are already seeing this. It's happened in California and Germany. Both places I'm most tide to. So maybe it's sampling bias. At my parent's in Germany, most fir trees are dead from the multi-year drought and then in June 2021 half the village was destroyed by a flood.
- edu 3y agoAll over Europe, for sure. https://apnews.com/article/italy-floods-drought-59db3225a5d4b170a1cb03c0ab40b000 https://apnews.com/article/italy-floods-drought-59db3225a5d4...
- aSockPuppeteer 3y agoDepends how close farmers are to water sources. They run high speed pumps at night or camouflage them in streams to get by water restrictions. There’s the famous California telephone pole picture too. https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/themarinpost/emimg/1249/Screen-Shot-2021-05-12-at-11-43-07-AM.png https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/themarinpost/emimg/1249/S...
- Mbioguy 3y agoHistory may not repeat but it does rhyme. Harappan civ thought to have declined due to less water. Petra once thrived due to a system of dams, cisterns, and water conduits, but never-repaired damage after an earthquake and increasing aridity meant it less and less supported urbanism and so declined. The Soviets overexploited the Aral Sea which has yet to (and will likely never) recover. It is now spoiling the surrounding region with dust storms carrying with them pollutants from industry that settled in the drying lakebed. Owens Lake in California once fed LA, but when it dried up it too caused polluting dust storms. Gov't has not learned from this history. The western US's water rights are outdated to the point of creating utterly backwards incentives. For example, Utah has use-it-or-lose-it water rights and the lion's share of water in the Great Salt Lake's watershed gets used to grow alfalfa. Alfalfa itself isn't necessarily a bad choice if you're going to grow stuff in an arid region, the issue is more how much of it is grown and in a wasteful way (little to no drip irrigation and no incentive to start using it, instead farmers are incentivized to flood areas during times of heavy rainfall or risk losing water rights). However even city and residential water use (a much smaller %) is still per capita wasteful compared to nearby Vegas which has done a much better job of becoming efficient in its water use. Utah got lucky this year in its snowpack, potentially buying some time to change, but is that gonna happen? No, they're praying for moisture and thinking their prayers got answered. Any guesses how long it'll be before the Great Salt Lake becomes the US/capitalism's Aral Sea? 5 years, 10, 15? Any techies wanting to move out here might think twice, homes without water and with seasonal arsenic-laden dust clouds probably won't have much resale value.
- hsuduebc2 3y agoIt fascinates me how things have obvious consequences but human race just ignore them till literally everything is burning. As it is with water shortages, climate change or Hitler.
- mrtesthah 3y agoA sizable majority (including in the US) recognize the danger of global warming, but are politically blocked from taking action by the actions of a small group of extremely wealthy individuals and corporations working to maintain the status quo to their benefit.
- intended 3y agoDon’t forget - major voting blocs. Very few people want to impact farmers negatively, because of the way farming is romanticized almost everywhere across the globe.
- ooz16 3y agoGenuine question here. What would be the expected change over the same period? The abstract says 53% of lakes saw declines...does that mean 47% saw no change or gains? If so, that seems pretty close to net stable to me globally. Or frankly what we would expect to see (some gains, some losses) Also, this is stated later in the doc: "Between 1984 and 2015, a loss of 90,000 km2 of permanent water area was observed by satellites—an area equivalent to the surface of Lake Superior, whereas 184,000 km2 of new water bodies, primarily reservoirs, were formed elsewhere (14)" My first impression was that this means there has been a growth in total permanent water area from 1984-2015. Am I just reading this wrong?
- abracadaniel 3y agoThat sounds reasonable. The water would have to go somewhere, but that alone could be catastrophic regionally. Cities are built around water sources, so having them move on timescales of human lifespans is worth worrying about.
- goatlover 3y agoTrue, but we're rather capable of building long pipelines to ship liquids across large distances.
- MattGaiser 3y agoIt would require a lot of expansion for the required volume. A barrel of oil has about 159 litres in it. The Keystone Pipeline would have transported 1.1 million barrels if it were fully expanded. 174,900,000 million litres per day. The City of Phoenix by itself uses about 1 billion litres per day.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoI was going to say "but that probably double-counts recycled water" and then I looked it up and recycled water is only 8% of Phoenix's water usage, and it's 10% nationally in the US.
- jms703 3y agoAlmond farmers. Am I right? /s
- myshpa 3y agoThe vital role of vegetation is often overlooked - we've significantly reduced forest cover over the past centuries. Global forest cover loss between 1990 and 2020 was estimated to be around 178 million hectares, representing a reduction of approximately 10% in the total global forest area. To restore water resources we should prioritize aforestation. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#how-has-global-land-use-changed-over-the-long-term https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#how-has-global-land-use-... 1700 ... 1 billion ha for agriculture 1800 ... 1.35 billion ha 1900 ... 2.54 billion ha 2016 ... 4.93 billion ha (=cca 50% of all habitable lands) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use Animal agriculture taking 75% of that. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "Beef is the leading driver of deforestation" https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation As Ernst Gotsch says: water is planted (‘Água se planta!’) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump - Evapotranspiration: Vegetation influences the water cycle by releasing moisture into the atmosphere through transpiration, affecting cloud formation and regional rainfall patterns. - Surface runoff and infiltration: Vegetation intercepts rainfall, slowing down surface runoff and promoting better water infiltration into the soil, which helps mitigate drought conditions. - Shade and temperature regulation: Vegetation provides shade, lowers surface temperatures, and reduces evaporation rates, potentially alleviating drought intensity. - Feedback loops: Healthy vegetation enhances soil moisture levels, maintains humidity, and supports water resources, while stressed or absent vegetation can worsen drought conditions. - Forests and rainfall patterns: Forests contribute to local and regional rainfall by releasing moisture through transpiration, and their removal or degradation can disrupt precipitation, potentially contributing to drought.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoThis is very high on my list. It seems most hydrologists interested in climate change are talking a lot about afforestation for all of those reasons. It isn’t something I hear about often at all, though. For a while I pointed people to a study showing that geohydrological model of the Amazon rain forest indicates that it is well past a breaking point in which the hydrology there will never be recovered, and the landscape will likely transform dramatically. It’s very poorly received though. Not because it’s a bad study but I guess no one thinks what’s happening in the Amazon happens anywhere else. As though it’s fear-mongering to point to this phenomenon despite that deforestation occurs the entire world over. My understanding is that there’s no known feasible way to improve future hydrology as inexpensively or low-tech, too. Here in British Columbia, Canada we have a fairly aggressive forestry practice which generates a shockingly small portion of our GDP. I seriously wonder if our GDP could be maintained or increased overall by converting forestry efforts to afforestation efforts. Were we to succeed in recreating healthy forests here, the impact on other sectors through improved hydrology (healthier rivers and lakes, better water retention in forests, better forest fire outcomes, eventually strengthened tourism, etc) actually seems like it could be a net positive. This would be an extremely long term project though, and virtually impossible to enact given jobs would be lost on the short term. This is also important for us because so much of our energy is generated from rivers. We need stable, consistent flows to power almost every home in the province. We should be hyper focused on efforts to improve hydrology, and forestry works directly against that. It’s such a big part of our history and so broadly evident and present in our lives here. Most people assume it’s a major part of our economy and that we could never function without it. I sincerely wonder if it’s a net drain on the province though. Not only does it visibly and measurably harm the environment here (even with our “green” forestry practices), but a lot of our forestry products are immediately exported for absurdly low prices. I think I would support a ban on exports and reducing our forestry to supporting domestic needs, based on what I know of the situation. It’s scary stuff, anyway. And it seems like not many people are aware or listening.
- briantakita 3y agoWhere did the water go? The air? The biosphere? Lost to space? Underground oceans?