This year’s historic drought was just one part of the story: most of Europe is losing far more groundwater each year than is being replaced by rainfall and other recharge
As drought dried up rivers and reservoirs across Europe this year, grim warnings from the past surfaced from the depths., read the inscription on a “Hunger Stone” exposed on a bank of the River Elbe in the Czech Republic: “If you see me, then weep.”
Famiglietti and collaborators analyzed two decades of data from the U.S./German satellite missions known as GRACE to find the rate of change in freshwater stored on the European continent. GRACE’s twin satellites track changes in gravity to measure large stores of water such as those held underground in aquifers;; and frozen in ice sheets and glaciers. The larger the water mass, the stronger the gravitational pull.
The researchers estimate average overall water loss in Europe at about 84 gigatons a year since the turn of the 21st century. It’s an alarming rate, Famiglietti says, roughly equal to all the water in Lake Ontario, or five times the average annual flow of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The scale—a gigaton represents a billion tons of water—is almost impossible to wrap your mind around. But that’s the scale at which climate change is happening.
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