Recently, as part of a new study and with the help of NASA satellites, specialists made a worrying discovery: the total amount of fresh water on the planet has fallen to an alarming level. They say this could be a sign that climate change is pushing the world into a dangerous phase of global drying. Explanations.
Climate change is causing temperatures to rise, making water evaporate more easily from its surface and causing the atmosphere to acquire an ever greater absorption capacity. This means that when downpours do occur, they are more torrential. That is, they dump more rain in faster, more powerful storms, which is more likely to run off than infiltrate into drier, more compact surfaces.
Since 2015, our planet’s lakes, rivers and aquifers have lost 1,200 cubic kilometers of fresh water, the equivalent of two and a half times Lake Erie. While scientists expect freshwater levels to rise again after the climate oscillation ends, satellite measurements, taken through 2023, reveal that freshwater levels have not yet recovered, and may never return.
The researchers behind this new study published their results in the journal Surveys in Geophysics. “We don’t think this is a coincidence, and it could be a harbinger of what is to come.”Matthew Rodell, lead author of the study and hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. To study the extent of the drying of our planet, they used two pairs of satellites orbiting the North Pole. These satellites measured water levels by detecting the minute fluctuations that the mass of water produces in Earth’s gravitational field.
By measuring changes in Earth’s gravitational pull from 2015 to 2023, scientists found that the 1,200 cubic kilometers of fresh water that were lost from the planet’s surface during the last El Niño never returned , and that 13 of the 30 most intense droughts in the world observed by satellites have occurred since January 2015. “There is much debate and little consensus about how wetting and drying patterns will manifest in a warming world”specified the specialists. “It is therefore difficult to assess whether the observed patterns are consistent with predictions and likely to persist. »
To go further, know that according to scientists, because of climate change, earth systems will collapse.
