"Groundwater Mapping Hits Times Square"

The Colorado River from Laughlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In honor of World Water Day, a U.N. conceit designed to focus attention on water issues, two digital signboards in Times Square that span 19,000 square feet have begun showing a 30-second animationdocumenting declines in the world’s groundwater.

Can such nuance compete with ads featuring David Beckham’s abs? Maybe not. But the fact that an artistic depiction of scientific data on groundwater – gathered from space by NASA and analyzed by the University of California Irvine – has hit prime media real estate is a sign that the urgency of world water issues is beginning to dawn on the masses. The animations, part of the HeadsUP! design visualization competition, will play several

times each hour for a month.

Such placement is not an execution of an overblown fantasy by overeager activists. A new report (PDF) on global risks from the World Economic Forum indicated that water supply crises were among the top five global risks in terms of impact, on par with systemic financial failure and fiscal imbalances. However, water supply crises were predicted to have a greater chance of actually happening than those other risks.

In some areas atop the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, farmers withdraw four to six feet of water a year, while natural systems replace only a half-inch.

Seventy-three percent of aquifers in Persian Gulf states have already been depleted, and those remaining are being consumed at nine times the renewal rate, said Tareq Al-Ansari, a graduate trainee at Imperial College in London, who presented a paper at the Second Annual Research Forum in Doha, Qatar in November.

In coastal areas, overdraft of aquifers can lead to saltwater intrusion or destroy wetlands, which require high water tables. Excessive withdrawals from the Colorado River have dried up wetlands, killing fish and destroying habitat for birds and other species. Seawater intrusion is also an issue in the Gulf, said Al-Ansari. Depleting reservoirs and groundwater can also harm environmental and human health because lower water levels concentrate natural or human pollutants.

But we don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left because measurement studies have been underfunded. Of course, not knowing how much we have makes it hard to budget our use.

The U.S. Geological Society is working on an ambitious research project to map all the groundwater in the United States. But at current funding levels, getting all the data will take many years.

Another block to understanding groundwater is that only recently have people begun to understand that surface water and groundwater are linked into a single hydrological system. For example, the overextraction of the Ogallala is causing some area streams to change from their historic pattern of gaining water as they cross the Ogallala to losing water.