Sixty-three trillion gallons of groundwater has reportedly been lost because of the drought that is presently happening in the western part of the United States. In fact, it is because of this massive groundwater loss that, on average, lifted approximately 0.16 inches of water in just a span of 18 months.
As reported, it would seem that the drought is even more devastating in the snow-starved Californian mountains, which, sadly, has rose up to 0.6 inches.
Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the UC San Diego, as well as the US Geological Survey, have estimated that the groundwater loss that started from the beginning of 2013 can be amounted to 63 trillion gallons. This is actually the equivalent of flooding four inches of water across the west of the Rocky Mountains.
A study has just been recently published by the publication Science on the Internet last Thursday. This study offered a grim accounting of the present toll of the Californian drought.
Duncan Agney, the co-author of the study, who is also a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, stated, "We found that it's most severe in California, particularly in the Sierras. It's predominantly in the Coast Ranges and the Sierras showing the most uplift, and, hence, that's where we believe is the largest water loss."
This figure is actually pretty much the same amount of ice that has been lost in the ice caps of Greenland on a daily basis because of global warming. Scientists have reached this conclusion by analyzing the data that they have gathered from the hundreds of GPS sensors that they have placed across the western part of the United States. These sensors were actually originally placed in their locations to detect small changes in the ground that were caused by earthquakes.
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