[www.nature.com]
"Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion, published this week in Nature1."


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Not a surprise to anyone who lives in a high water demand, low water supply area.

What's your area doing about this ?

(Yes, I live closed to a ginormous fresh water supply, so I'm good.)

[environment.nationalgeographic.com]

This is kind of fun and interesting if you want to calculate your water footprint and find ways to reduce it.
We Americans use an insane amount of fresh water, we could do better.

I think at some point in the future there won't be much population in places like Vegas and Phoenix - just wasn't meant to be.

We're hardly alone mismanaging water supplies.
What Jordan is doing to the Disi Resevoir and the Jordan River is somewhat insane considering 60% of the water is applied to agriculture that only yields 3 to 4% of GDP. They could easily import the food they grow from sources that use much less water and keep the Disi for emergencies, rather than using it. ( the Disi is pretty much ancient water that stopped being replenished thousands of years ago and when it is gone it is gone)

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Kooper's Flute Thing cover

[www.freethegrapes.org]

norwegian wood reality TV

[www.youtube.com]

FWIW... water in non aquifer sources is typically recycled, not 'used up'. I find it a bit frustrating when people talk about surface source water as 'being used up'. Beep ! Please attend 4th grade science class again.

Acquifer sources ? Oh yeah. Deep wells ? Yep. Even shallow wells have issues. Back in the 1970's my grandfather commissioned and personally paid for a geological study of well and brine infiltration in Suffolk County, Long Island (NY). He was trying to get development stopped or slowed down on Long Island. Thanks to his work, there was a flurry of water use and development requirementsadded on. Of course they went after the upstream Hudson as usual.

Reinjection of surface and recycled water is a possibility, but rarely done. In the US it's the damn insistence that the desert should support people and animals and farming. When you bring the water to the surface, it's pulled into the water cycle and precipitates.. elsewhere. Never to return.

I am pumping my water from the Teays River, one of the largest fresh water aquifers known.

[en.wikipedia.org]

[www.dnr.state.oh.us]

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From the article cited in the OP:

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Yet in most of the world’s major agricultural regions, including the Central Valley in California, the Nile delta region of Egypt, and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan, demand exceeds these reservoirs' capacity for renewal.

To get my degree in agronomy from Cal Poly there was a senior thesis requirement. I did mine on the importance of beginning to move toward sustainable agriculture. One of the primary things I pointed to was the "draining" of the aquifer under the Central Valley. We had to give an oral presentation to the whole thesis class as part of our grade. I was a long-haired hippy-dippy in a school full of "red neck" farm boys and when I gave my oral presentation they scoffed, jeered and basically let me know that sustainable agriculture was a stupid counter-culture idea. I'm pretty sure the professor was of like mind about sustainable agriculture (the school was pretty completely oriented toward teaching large scale commercial agriculture using then accepted farming methods - including wholesale use of pesticides and herbicides if the application paid for itself in that year's crop yields and long term planning was mostly thinking maybe three years out) but I'll give him credit, he gave me an A- for the class anyway.

One more thing to feel guilty about; drinking water. You guys are in constant state of self-flagelleation.

We need a good worldwide plague to reduce the current population by 40%. I'd prefer it be targeted at people I don't know or don't like.

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To get my degree in agronomy from Cal Poly there was a senior thesis requirement.

A great requirement, and evident in your posts.

We get our water from a reservoir that's fed with rainfall from a relatively small watershed. Due to the small overall population (500K?), it doesn't seem to be taxed. Yet I'm mindful of our bounty compared to many parts of the world. The main thing I'm conscious about I guess is the (minimal?) energy required to process and distribute it.

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Pops
We need a good worldwide plague to reduce the current population by 40%. I'd prefer it be targeted at people I don't know or don't like.

There goes AppleSwitcher.

Good old Cow Poly. Parts of California are showing tiny signs of improving, but not without heavy regulation. The level in Mono Lake had been going up but I have not heard about this year.

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in tha 510.

This is news? I was made aware of this issue twenty years ago, and I'm certain I was not the first to hear of it. The denial about the finiteness of natural resources in this nation (and world) leaves me dumbfounded.

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Acer
This is news? I was made aware of this issue twenty years ago, and I'm certain I was not the first to hear of it. The denial about the finiteness of natural resources in this nation (and world) leaves me dumbfounded.

I did my senior thesis 30 years ago, and I didn't talk about this in my thesis because I was clairvoyant - it was common knowledge then and probably well before that. But it doesn't hurt to get the information out there again and again, though it seems this is one of those issues for which nothing of real significance is going to be done until it reaches a crisis point.