A team of scientists led by Tom Gleeson from the University of Victoria (Canada) together with other researchers from the University of Texas (USA), the University of Calgary (Canada) and the University of Göttingen (Germany), have drawn up a map of the Earth’s total reserves of water or groundwater aquifers. The study has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience .
Based on the data of the total groundwater reserves of our planet, with more than 40,000 groundwater models and data from about a million basins, experts have found that less than 6% of the groundwater in the two kilometers higher than the Earth’s mass, our most modern water history, is renewable within a human lifetime.
“This has not been known before. We already know that the water levels in portions of the aquifers are falling . We are using our groundwater resources very fast, faster than they are being renewed, ”explains Gleeson, leader of the work.
This low percentage is due to the increasing and continuous global demand for water , which is causing an overexploitation of these natural resources so necessary and precious for humans.
Finally, the global estimate of groundwater in the world is almost 23 million cubic kilometers , of which 0.35 million cubic kilometers are less than 50 years old. The largest aquifers are found mainly in the Amazon basin, the Congo, Indonesia, North America and Central America.
This water is a more renewable resource than those found deeper and older, but because of its location it is also more vulnerable to both climate change and man-made pollution. Thanks to this work, we will be able to know how much water is running out and how much there is, which will lead us to deduce how much time is left on the planet until this water runs out .
