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India's Vanishing Groundwater
Two new studies suggest that India's aquifers are undergoing rapid depletion due, almost entirely, to water withdrawals for agricultural use. Satellite measurements indicate that the water table is sinking faster than anyone had previously estimated, with potentially dire implications for the 600 million people living regionally — nearly one-tenth of humanity — who rely on it.
One study appears in the journal Nature, the other in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
One study appears in the journal Nature, the other in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
From The Nature Study Press Release
Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade – and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame. More than 109 cubic kilometers (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared from the region's aquifers between 2002 and 2008 – double the capacity of India's largest surface-water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, and triple that of Lake Mead, the largest manmade reservoir in the U.S.
Surface water percolating down from rain, snow, lakes, and rivers recharges aquifers. Some aquifers contain water that's thousands to millions of years old. (According to New Scientist, the world's oldest aquifer lies beneath the Sahara — rain that fell perhaps 1 million years ago.)
How does this bode for India's agriculture? NASA's Matt Rodell, lead author on the Nature study, says: "If measures are not soon taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output, severe shortages of potable water, conflict, and suffering."
During the second half of the 20th century, water withdrawals increased dramatically. Beginning in the 1960s — the Green Revolution — the Indian government instituted policies meant to boost agricultural production. As a result, the amount of irrigated land in India nearly tripled between 1970 and 1999. In northern India, agriculture is responsible for up to 95 percent of groundwater use.
Science News says of the study reported in Geophysical Research Letters:
In the mid-1990s, India’s Central Ground Water Board estimated that farmers pulled more than 172 cubic kilometers of water each year from aquifers in the study region of northeastern India, southern Nepal and western Bangladesh.... That’s more than three times the volume of India’s largest surface reservoir. New data gleaned from gravity-measuring satellites suggest that the annual rate of extraction in that region has jumped more than 60 percent since then.
The pace of groundwater depletion in northern India is greater than anyone expected and mirrors trends seen in many other regions, including China and the western United States, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, based in Los Lunas, N.M. When groundwater disappears or becomes too difficult to pump, people who now support themselves on the land will become economic refugees, she contends. In many parts of the world, Postel adds, “water problems are becoming very serious, very fast.”
Bloomberg News gives some context to the issue of water groundwater withdrawals worldwide. Forecasts aren’t cheery:
Surface water percolating down from rain, snow, lakes, and rivers recharges aquifers. Some aquifers contain water that's thousands to millions of years old. (According to New Scientist, the world's oldest aquifer lies beneath the Sahara — rain that fell perhaps 1 million years ago.)
How does this bode for India's agriculture? NASA's Matt Rodell, lead author on the Nature study, says: "If measures are not soon taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output, severe shortages of potable water, conflict, and suffering."
During the second half of the 20th century, water withdrawals increased dramatically. Beginning in the 1960s — the Green Revolution — the Indian government instituted policies meant to boost agricultural production. As a result, the amount of irrigated land in India nearly tripled between 1970 and 1999. In northern India, agriculture is responsible for up to 95 percent of groundwater use.
Science News says of the study reported in Geophysical Research Letters:
In the mid-1990s, India’s Central Ground Water Board estimated that farmers pulled more than 172 cubic kilometers of water each year from aquifers in the study region of northeastern India, southern Nepal and western Bangladesh.... That’s more than three times the volume of India’s largest surface reservoir. New data gleaned from gravity-measuring satellites suggest that the annual rate of extraction in that region has jumped more than 60 percent since then.
The pace of groundwater depletion in northern India is greater than anyone expected and mirrors trends seen in many other regions, including China and the western United States, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, based in Los Lunas, N.M. When groundwater disappears or becomes too difficult to pump, people who now support themselves on the land will become economic refugees, she contends. In many parts of the world, Postel adds, “water problems are becoming very serious, very fast.”
Bloomberg News gives some context to the issue of water groundwater withdrawals worldwide. Forecasts aren’t cheery:
“A single person can save more water simply by not eating a pound of beef than they could by not showering for an entire year.”
About a fifth of water used globally comes from under the ground, the Stockholm International Water Institute has said. Withdrawals are predicted to increase 50 percent by 2025 in developing countries, and 18 percent in developed countries, according to the policy group based in the Swedish capital.
But how do we know what’s happening to India’s underground water supply anyway? By definition, you can’t see it, and we have little to no on-the-ground data.
The answer: Gravity. Scientists infer groundwater levels from variations in Earth’s gravitational field measured by satellites.
Richard Kerr of Science Now explains how it works:
As the lead spacecraft passes over a patch of anomalously strong gravity, it accelerates ahead of the trailing spacecraft. Once past the anomaly, the lead satellite slows back down. Then the trailing spacecraft accelerates and again closes on the leader. By making repeated passes over the same spot, GRACE [the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission] measures changes in Earth’s gravity, which are mainly due to water moving on and under the surface. Most famously, GRACE has recorded the shrinking of ice sheets; it has also detected shifting ocean currents, the desiccation of droughts, and the draining of large lakes. Outside of wasting ice sheets, the world’s largest broad-scale decline in gravity during GRACE’s first 6 years came across a 2.7-million-square-kilometer, east-west swath centered on New Delhi.
Of the gravity-measuring method, Jay Famiglietti, associate professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author on the Nature study, tells Bloomberg:
“This is the first time that we have been able to go into the region with essentially no data on the ground and be able to come up with a pretty reasonable number for the rate of groundwater depletion.”
(By Moises Velasquez-Manoff / August 13, 2009, The Christian Science Monitor)
But how do we know what’s happening to India’s underground water supply anyway? By definition, you can’t see it, and we have little to no on-the-ground data.
The answer: Gravity. Scientists infer groundwater levels from variations in Earth’s gravitational field measured by satellites.
Richard Kerr of Science Now explains how it works:
As the lead spacecraft passes over a patch of anomalously strong gravity, it accelerates ahead of the trailing spacecraft. Once past the anomaly, the lead satellite slows back down. Then the trailing spacecraft accelerates and again closes on the leader. By making repeated passes over the same spot, GRACE [the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission] measures changes in Earth’s gravity, which are mainly due to water moving on and under the surface. Most famously, GRACE has recorded the shrinking of ice sheets; it has also detected shifting ocean currents, the desiccation of droughts, and the draining of large lakes. Outside of wasting ice sheets, the world’s largest broad-scale decline in gravity during GRACE’s first 6 years came across a 2.7-million-square-kilometer, east-west swath centered on New Delhi.
Of the gravity-measuring method, Jay Famiglietti, associate professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author on the Nature study, tells Bloomberg:
“This is the first time that we have been able to go into the region with essentially no data on the ground and be able to come up with a pretty reasonable number for the rate of groundwater depletion.”
(By Moises Velasquez-Manoff / August 13, 2009, The Christian Science Monitor)
The trouble with water—and there is trouble with water—is that they’re not making any more of it. They’re not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times. People, however, they’re making more of—many more, far more than is ecologically sensible—and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives (humans consist mostly of water), for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly, their industry. Humans can live for a month without food but will die in less than a week without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and restlessly change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences: too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.
- Marq de Villiers
Meat Production - Grave Threat To Water Supply
In the context of the global water supply, the impact of animal agriculture threatens utter catastrophe. Every kilo of beef requires 16,000 litres of water, according to the Institute for Water Education. This means a single person can save more water simply by not eating a pound of beef than they could by not showering for an entire year. Factory farming is responsible for 37 percent of pesticide contamination, 50 percent of antibiotic contamination and one-third of the nitrogen and phosphorus loads found in freshwater. Nearly half of all water consumed in the developed countries is used to raise animals for food.
Poisoning water is bad enough, but depleting the supply is suicidal. The majority of the earth’s water is now used to support animal agriculture, and much of it cannot be reclaimed.
About 50% of the water pollution is linked to livestock. Pesticides and fertilizers used in helping grow feed grains run off into lakes and rivers. They also pollute ground water. In the feedlots and stockyard holding pens, there is also a tremendous amount of pesticide runoff. Organic contaminants from huge concentrations of animal excrement and urine at feedlots and stockyards also pollute water. This waste is anywhere from ten to hundreds of times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. According to a German documentary film (Fleisch Frisst Menschen [Flesh Devours Man] by Wolfgang Kharuna), nitrates evaporating from open tanks of concentrated livestock waste in the Netherlands have resulted in extremely high levels of forest-killing acid rain.
Poisoning water is bad enough, but depleting the supply is suicidal. The majority of the earth’s water is now used to support animal agriculture, and much of it cannot be reclaimed.
About 50% of the water pollution is linked to livestock. Pesticides and fertilizers used in helping grow feed grains run off into lakes and rivers. They also pollute ground water. In the feedlots and stockyard holding pens, there is also a tremendous amount of pesticide runoff. Organic contaminants from huge concentrations of animal excrement and urine at feedlots and stockyards also pollute water. This waste is anywhere from ten to hundreds of times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. According to a German documentary film (Fleisch Frisst Menschen [Flesh Devours Man] by Wolfgang Kharuna), nitrates evaporating from open tanks of concentrated livestock waste in the Netherlands have resulted in extremely high levels of forest-killing acid rain.
16 lakh litres of water is needed daily to keep ONE moderate sized slaughterhouse clean. That is drinking water for 10 lakh people. Can a water and energy starved country like India really afford to kill cattle anymore?
~Maneka Gandhi
Feeding the average meat-eater requires about 4,200 gallons of water per day, versus 1,200 gallons per day for a person following a lacto-vegetarian diet. While it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, it takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat.
The animals raised for food in the US alone produce 130 times the excrement of the entire human population on Earth, at a rate of 86,600 pounds per second. Only a sixth of this excrement is used as fertilizer; the rest is just dumped into lakes and rivers, untreated. Slaughterhouse runoff is killing millions of fish, and is the main reason why 35% of Earth’s rivers and streams are “impaired”. In countries with concentrated animal agriculture, the waterways have become rife with a bacteria called pfiesteria. In addition to killing fish, pfiesteria causes open sores, nausea, memory loss, fatigue and disorientation in humans. Even groundwater, which takes thousands of years to restore, is being contaminated. For example, the aquifer under the San Bernadino Dairy Preserve in southern California contains more nitrates and other pollutants than water coming from sewage treatment plants.
The animals raised for food in the US alone produce 130 times the excrement of the entire human population on Earth, at a rate of 86,600 pounds per second. Only a sixth of this excrement is used as fertilizer; the rest is just dumped into lakes and rivers, untreated. Slaughterhouse runoff is killing millions of fish, and is the main reason why 35% of Earth’s rivers and streams are “impaired”. In countries with concentrated animal agriculture, the waterways have become rife with a bacteria called pfiesteria. In addition to killing fish, pfiesteria causes open sores, nausea, memory loss, fatigue and disorientation in humans. Even groundwater, which takes thousands of years to restore, is being contaminated. For example, the aquifer under the San Bernadino Dairy Preserve in southern California contains more nitrates and other pollutants than water coming from sewage treatment plants.
Commenting on Srila Prabhupada’s mood in Mayapur, Bhavananda Goswami said if a water tap on the land was dripping only once every three hours, then Srila Prabhupada would come at exactly the time it dripped, see it, and say, “Just see, Krsna’s energy is being wasted.”
In Bhaktivedanta Manor one time, Srila Prabhupada complained of a dripping water faucet that disturbed him. The devotees searched and searched, but found nothing. Finally, they found the offending faucet. It was outside his room, down the hall, down a small block of stairs, down another small hall, and inside a closet in a place from which water was hardly ever taken. No one knew how he could possibly have heard it drip.
-From Srila Prabhupada Nectar (by Satsvarupa dasa Goswami)
But it’s not only fresh water sources that are at risk; ocean waters are also imperiled. Dead zones, vast stretches of coastal waters in which nothing can live, are created by untreated hormone, nitrate and antibiotic laden slaughterhouse waste seeping into the soil, groundwater and rivers before contaminating the ocean. According to the EPA, In USA, 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and groundwater in 17 states has been permanently contaminated by industrial farm waste.
One pig factory farm produces raw waste equivalent to that of a city of 120000 people -- except unlike a city, it doesn’t have a waste treatment facility. Its raw wastes are dumped straight into surrounding rivers and lakes.
One pig factory farm produces raw waste equivalent to that of a city of 120000 people -- except unlike a city, it doesn’t have a waste treatment facility. Its raw wastes are dumped straight into surrounding rivers and lakes.
