American groundwater has been severely depleted in recent decades, with 40 percent of more than 85,000 wells hitting all-time lows in the past decade and rainwater failing to replace the losses, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
The deficits are found across the country, including in Utah, California and Texas, where the depletion is leading to fissures in the ground and buckling roadways. Arizona officials announced in June that some new construction in the Phoenix area would be restricted due to inability to guarantee groundwater supply.
Although the crisis has intensified in recent years, the Times analysis found that every year since 1940, more wells have seen their levels fall than increase. In California and Arizona, major aquifers have either hit or matched all-time lows since NASA started keeping records, according to The Times.
Human-caused climate change is a major driver of the depletion, reducing the snowpack that flows into rivers and leaving groundwater to make up the deficit for watering lawns and crops — which already requires additional water as temperatures spike. Making matters worse, the use of the groundwater for those purposes could leave communities without access to it in future scenarios where it is needed to make up for lack of rainfall.
The crisis is already reality in Kansas, which has no stopgap to address groundwater depletion and several counties have seen the lowest corn yields since the 1960s. For example, Wichita County saw yields of only 70.6 bushels per acre last year, compared to up to 175 in the late 1990s.
Groundwater depletion has led many Kansas farmers to switch to the practice of dryland farming, or farming that relies entirely on rainfall. However, the average rainfall in the area is not nearly enough to make up the difference—Wichita County, for example, gets fewer than 20 inches a year on average.
Arkansas, another major groundwater consumer, is pumping more than twice the amount of water from its main aquifer than is replaced, according to the Times. Earlier this year the state, which produces about half of domestically-grown rice, warned that the aquifer was down to less than one-tenth of its capacity in some regions.
In California, one of the biggest sources of produce in the country, more than 76 of the aquifer basins are pumping water out faster than it can refill. The record rainfall this winter has done little to remedy the crisis, as much of it was carried into the ocean by the state’s rivers.
“There is no way to get [depleted groundwater] back,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, told the Times. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is.”