Progressive Friends

Here’s Where Farms Are Sucking The Planet Dry

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This map is disturbing, once you understand it. It’s a new attempt to visualize an old problem — the shrinking of underground water reserves, in most cases because farmers are pumping out water to irrigate their crops.

The map itself isn’t hard to grasp. The colored areas show the world’s largest aquifers — areas which hold deposits of groundwater. The blue ones are doing fine; more rainfall is flowing into them than is being pumped out of them for homes or irrigating fields. As a result, these aquifers can continue to play a vital role in the environment. (Water in most aquifers doesn’t just sit there. It flows slowly, underground, and ends up sustaining rivers and lakes and all the creatures who live there.)

The aquifers that are painted red, orange, or yellow, meanwhile, are being drained rapidly.”