Crisis on tap? Pollution and burgeoning populations stress earth's water resources

Science News, July 20, 2002 by Sid Perkins

Earth gets one of its nicknames, the Blue Planet, from the way it looks from space. About 70 percent of the planet's surface is covered with water, a substance that known types of life can't do without. All told, the oceans, land, and atmosphere hold the equivalent of almost 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of liquid water. About 96.5 percent of that total is salty ocean, a little more than 2 percent of the total is locked up in ice, and a smidgen wafts as vapor in the atmosphere. That leaves just over 1 percent as water that's readily available for human use.

And that small fraction is getting smaller day-by-day. In many areas, the amount of fresh water that falls as rain or snow and eventually reaches lakes and rivers isn't sufficient to meet the current or projected demand for drinking water, irrigation, and industrial activity.

To supplement this precipitation, which often doesn't occur when or where it's needed, people are pumping vast amounts of water from aquifers, layers of sediment or soil that hold moisture in the spaces between their particles. In fact, people have pumped enough water from aquifers during the past century to measurably raise global sea levels. The removal of water from some types of sediments can cause them to compact, forever destroying some of their capacity to hold future rainfall.

Because aquifers aren't being recharged nearly as quickly as they're being depleted--and because people are becoming ever more dependent on aquifers to fulfill their various thirsts--scientists are striving to better understand how groundwater systems interact with the water that flows across Earth's surface. Indeed, the pressures of pollution and a growing world population threaten to transform the lonely lamentation of Samuel Coleridge's ancient mariner--"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink"--into a cry legitimately uttered by millions of future landlubbers.

ALL PUMPED UP Many cities and towns originally cropped up near rivers that could provide fresh water. Sooner or later, however, a large number of those grew into metropolitan areas where the demand for water began to outstrip the supply.

A region is considered to have a relative scarcity of water if more than 20 percent of the local river's flow is diverted for household use, agricultural irrigation, and industrial purposes. In 1995, more than one-third of the world's population of 5.7 billion lived in such areas, says Richard B. Lammers of the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Of those people, about 450 million lived in areas of severe water stress, where more than 40 percent of a river's flow was diverted for human use.

That growing overuse of surface water has been making aquifers a critical source of fresh water. Scientists estimate that these underground reservoirs, which can reside at depths just below the surface to more than 1 kilometer down, hold in excess of 1,000 times the amount of water that falls on land as precipitation each year, says William M. Alley of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Reston, Va. More than half of the U.S. population and more than one-quarter of people worldwide depend on groundwater as their primary source of drinking water, he notes.

Much of the water in these reservoirs has come from rain and snow. Shallow aquifers may contain water that fell locally in the previous few days, but moisture held in deep layers of sediment may have originally rained down in far-off regions hundreds of thousands of years ago. For example, isotopic analyses of dissolved elements in water deep underground in parts of the western United States suggest that it fell as rain about 15,000 years ago. That was at the height of the last ice age, when rainfall in the region was vastly more plentiful and aquifers absorbed water at about 20 times the rate they do today, says Alley. in the June 14 Science, he and several colleagues describe recent research recognizing and quantifying the interactions between water that flows on Earth's surface and that stored in aquifers.

Because deep aquifers are slow to recharge, the reservoirs are essentially a nonrenewable resource that's being mined. In the past 50 years, says Alley, groundwater depletion has become a problem in many areas of the world. In substantial portions of the High Plains aquifer, which underlies a 450,000-square-kilometer area that stretches from South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, more than half of the subterranean moisture has been pumped out. Water levels in that aquifer have dropped more than 45 meters in places. On the arid plains of northern China, the depletion of shallow reservoirs has forced people to sink wells into aquifers more than 1 km below the surface.

Problems can arise even if the rate of groundwater withdrawals doesn't exceed the rate at which precipitation recharges the aquifer, says Alley. Aquifers, especially shallow ones, aren't completely isolated from surface water such as lakes, streams, and rivers. In some regions, groundwater provides a major source of water for rivers as it flows from the ground into the depths of the streambed. A 30-year study by the USGS of 54 streams across the continental United States showed that, on average, more than half of the stream's annual flow came from groundwater. If significant amounts of shallow groundwater are diverted for agricultural or other uses, the flow patterns and the ecology of the rivers can suffer.