In the early morning of January 25, Beijing time, the internationally renowned academic journal "Nature" recently published an analysis of approximately 170,000 monitoring wells around the world, showing that groundwater stored in 12% of the world's aquifers may decline by more than 0.5 meters per year in the 21st century. However, these aquifers can recover through actions such as changing policies and improving aquifer management.
The paper's first author and corresponding author, Scott Jasechko of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his collaborators, analyzed approximately 170,000 groundwater monitoring wells in more than 40 countries to predict aquifer trends in the next 21st century. : When defining 1,693 aquifer systems around the world, researchers found that 36% were declining at a rate of 0.1 meters per year, while 12% were declining at a rate of more than 0.5 meters per year. When they compared these findings with groundwater depletion data from 1980 to 2000, they found that 30% of the aquifers studied faced accelerated depletion in the 21st century, especially in arid regions.
The authors of the paper pointed out that the research data also found that 6% of the aquifers rose by 0.1 meters per year, while 1% of the aquifers rose by 0.5 meters per year. They believe this growing trend may come from reduced consumption of groundwater, implementation of groundwater depletion policies, surface water diversion, land cover changes and supervised recharge projects.
The authors also provide a short video produced by the UC Santa Barbara Bren School of Environmental Science and Management that provides an overview of the analysis of global aquifer groundwater level trends. (Video of Xu Miaoqiao produced by reporter Sun Zifa from Springer Nature)
Editor in charge: [Lu Yan]