#groundwater

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been mass produced for decades in consumer products like frying pans, water-resistant clothing, food packaging and cosmetics. They have also been used in a range of industrial applications, including firefighting foam, metal coatings and mechanical lubricants. The ubiquity of these chemicals in groundwater, along with the strength of their unique covalent carbon-fluoride bond, has raised a critical question: how can we remediate the contaminated groundwater at hundreds of military, industrial, municipal and other sites across the country?

A group of environmental organizations and municipalities is worried that Quebec’s groundwater reserves are dwindling due to overconsumption and the effects of climate change. In an open letter sent to the environment minister, the 12 municipalities and nine environmental organizations say the province is consuming more groundwater than is being replenished. The municipalities, located along the Saint-Lawrence valley, say Quebec has taken its renewable freshwater for granted and are calling on the government to trigger a province-wide evaluation and increase regulation.

Read more.

"Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says. Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere. Just like rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift: Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

People aren’t just misusing groundwater, they are flooding their own coasts and cities in the process, Famiglietti warns. That means they are also imperiling some of the world’s most important food-producing lowlands in the Nile and Mekong deltas and cities from Shanghai to New York. Once in the oceans, of course, groundwater will never again be suitable for drinking and human use without expensive and energy-sucking treatment or through the natural cycle of evaporating and precipitating as rain. But even then, it may no longer fall where it is needed most. Groundwater 'is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all,' the study states, 'at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations.'

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Declines of underground water supplies that are vital to cities and farming in the Colorado River Basin are outpacing the losses of the river’s water, according to new research published last week based on NASA satellite data.

It’s the latest warning of the region’s rapidly declining water supplies as the seven basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming—engage in tense negotiations over the Colorado River’s future and cuts to water supplies, but with losses to groundwater left out of the debate. 

Across the basin, the rate of water storage decline increased by a factor of three between 2015 to 2024 compared to the previous decade because of climate change, said Jay Famiglietti, the study’s senior author and science director for Arizona State University’s Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. 

“That’s pretty scary,” he said. “When we drilled into figuring out what’s going on, of course, it’s groundwater and the disappearance of groundwater. That should grab people’s attention, and I’m not sure that they do.”

The Colorado River Basin has been in a drought for more than two decades, leading to what scientists have called an aridification of the region. The river supplies water to 40 million people across seven states, 30 tribes and Mexico, and generates billions of dollars worth of agricultural outputs, supplying the U.S. with fruits and vegetables in winter. But an overallocation of the river’s resources and climate change have thrown that system into disarray, with the states now racing a 2026 deadline to come to an agreement to cut back use of the river. 

Recent wet years provided a reprieve from the worst case scenarios in the basin, but a recent study looking at the next 24 months on the river from the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency tasked with managing it, predicts steep declines in the levels of lakes Mead and Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, which dictate the availability of water in much of the basin and factor heavily into the negotiations.

One acre foot of water is enough to supply two to three households for a year; the Colorado River supplies somewhere around 13 million acre feet annually. But the century-old compact between Colorado Basin states allocated more water than that—more than the river carries—leading in part to its overuse and decline. 

sinfully delicious WIP, 11/19 chapters, updates weekly. If you like fantasy au, earthy plant lore, slow burn & pining pls check it out!

Gorgeous cover artwork by @pyracantha14

You can grow tanks, rather than buy them, and they'll have a lot more water-harvesting capacity.