I don't think this was in the article itself, but the description of the article on the NYT morning newsletter email had this interesting note: > Several of my

I don't think this was in the article itself, but the description of the article on the NYT morning newsletter email had this interesting note: > Several of my colleagues — led by Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle — have spent months compiling data on groundwater levels across the U.S., based on more than 80,000 monitoring stations. Chris and Mira did so after discovering that no comprehensive database existed. The statistics tended to be local and fragmented, making it difficult to understand national patterns. That reminds me of the situation that came to light a couple years ago during the controversies over police killings of unarmed black people. There were no national records kept of police killings, and often no state records. The first decent national level data had to be put together by going through local news sites, individual police department records, filing tons of requests under state public record laws, and many I'm forgetting. This makes me wonder how many other things there are where we might have a national problem but don't know it because we mostly only have local records? Also, I wonder how many things there are were we only have local records but we think we have a national problem because people assume what is happening where they are is happening all over? For those who have not read the article, the newsletter has a good TLDR: > The trends in this new database are alarming. Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record. > The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, told The Times.