Rivers, especially in the arid regions of the USA, are losing water because of intensive irrigation with pumped groundwater. (Photograph: eol.jsc.nasa.gov )
Rivers, especially in the arid regions of the USA, are losing water because of intensive irrigation with pumped groundwater. (Photograph: eol.jsc.nasa.gov ) - ETH Zurich and University of California Santa Barbara researchers reveal the extent to which rivers across the USA are losing flow to aquifers. Water is an ephemeral thing. It can emerge from an isolated spring, as if by magic, giving birth to a babbling brook. It can also course through a mighty river, seeping into the soil until all that remains downstream is a dry streambed, the nearby trees offering the only hint as to where the water has disappeared. Those who use this vital resource due to the difficulty of studying it often overlook the interplay between surface water and groundwater. Scott Jasechko of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and his colleague Hansjoerg Seybold from ETH Zurich leveraged, together with their research teams, an enormous database of groundwater measurements to investigate the interaction between these related resources.
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