Uncharted Waters

Aug 02, 2023

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The threat to groundwater is a classic tragedy of the commons.

By David Leonhardt

The water that lies beneath the earth’s surface — known as groundwater — has been a vital resource for thousands of years. Communities that are far away from lakes and rivers use groundwater to irrigate crops and provide drinking water.

For most of human history, groundwater has existed in a convenient equilibrium. The pockets of water under the surface need years or decades to replenish as rainwater and other moisture seep into the earth. Fortunately, though, people have used groundwater slowly, allowing replenishment to happen.

Now that equilibrium is at risk.

Several of my colleagues — led by Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle — have spent months compiling data on groundwater levels across the U.S., based on more than 80,000 monitoring stations. Chris and Mira did so after discovering that no comprehensive database existed. The statistics tended to be local and fragmented, making it difficult to understand national patterns.

The trends in this new database are alarming. Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.

The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, told The Times.

Already, there are consequences. In parts of Kansas, the shortage of water has reduced the amount of corn that an average acre can produce.

In Norfolk, Va., officials have resorted to pumping treated wastewater into underground rock layers that store groundwater — known as aquifers — to replenish them. On Long Island, the depletion of aquifers has allowed saltwater to seep in and threatened the groundwater that remains.

“We’ve built whole parts of the country and whole parts of the economy on groundwater, which is fine so long as you have groundwater,” Chris told me. “I don’t think people realize quite how quickly we’re burning through it.”

Unlike many other environmental trends, this story is not primarily about climate change, although the warming planet plays an aggravating role. There are three main reasons for the groundwater declines:

Pumping technology has improved, allowing communities to draw water out of the earth much more quickly than in the past. Some wells can pump more than 100,000 gallons a day.

Economic growth and urban sprawl have increased the demand for water. Although the U.S. economy has not been growing rapidly in recent decades, American farms help feed other countries where the economy and population have been growing faster.

Climate change has reduced the amount of water that comes from alternative sources, like rivers: A warmer planet leads to more frequent droughts and faster evaporation of the rain that does fall. These declines have led communities to increase groundwater use.

These forces are not unique to the U.S. Other countries are coping with groundwater declines that are sometimes worse. This summer, my colleagues Vivian Yee and Leily Nikounazar reported on the dire shortages in parts of Iran, while Alissa Rubin and Bryan Denton did so in Iraq. The photographs and videos from Iraq are especially jarring.

Is there any solution?

Slowing climate change, by reducing carbon emissions, would help in the long term — and the long term is obviously important. More immediately, the answer may need to involve stricter rules on how much water towns, farms and companies can remove from the ground. “In many places,” Chris said, “the rules are weak or nonexistent.”

The federal government neither tracks the situation nor does much to regulate it. Some state and local governments — in parts of Arizona, for instance, and Texas — also have lax rules.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons. The ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized that term in a 1968 essay based on a 19th-century pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd, an English economist. In the pamphlet, Lloyd explained that any individual farmer had an incentive for his cattle to eat as much grass as possible in any field that the community shared. But if all the farmers did so, the field would be ruined. The solution is for the farmers to agree on a set of rules that benefit all of them in the long run.

You can read The Times’s groundwater investigation here.

Related: Children have a right to sue their countries over climate change, a U.N. panel determined.

Donald Trump’s federal trial on 2020 election interference is set to begin on March 4, a day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

If the trial goes as scheduled, most Republican delegates will be awarded after it starts but before a verdict. The outcome could transform the race, The Times’s Nate Cohn writes.

China’s real-estate crisis is leaving workers and small businesses unpaid.

Chinese officials continue to insist that economic failure is impossible.

Spanish prosecutors opened an inquiry into Luis Rubiales, the soccer official who kissed a player at the Women’s World Cup. Some are calling the scandal Spain’s #MeToo moment.

A cyberscam industry in Cambodia holds workers captive and forces them to hawk fraudulent investments online.

More sanctions on Russia could affect the global diamond market.

Florida counties ordered mandatory evacuations as Hurricane Idalia approaches. See its likely path.

How to prepare for hurricane season: Make a plan, store digital copies of documents and prepare an emergency kit.

Flash floods destroyed homes in West Virginia; dozens of residents needed rescue.

Americans misunderstand what individual actions can cut the most emissions, like flying less and reducing meat consumption, a poll from The Washington Post found.

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who became known during the 2008 presidential race as “Joe the Plumber,” the metaphorical middle-class Everyman, died at 49.

Tennessee Republicans voted to again silence Justin Jones, one of the Democratic state representatives whom they expelled in the spring.

The Defense Department plans to buy thousands of drones in response to China’s military buildup.

An assailant shot to death a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The campus went into lockdown for hours.

Two adults, a toddler and a baby were found dead in an Upper West Side apartment.

The president of the National Association of Realtors resigned after sexual harassment complaints.

The Transportation Department fined American Airlines $4.1 million for repeatedly stranding passengers on tarmacs.

Covid hospitalizations in the U.S. have risen in recent weeks but remain low.

A neurosurgeon found a live parasitic worm in an Australian woman’s brain, The Guardian reports.

Pundits believe Donald Trump would be a weak Republican nominee. Republican voters think he’s their best bet, Kristen Soltis Anderson writes.

Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg on Vivek Ramaswamy and Jamelle Bouie on the March on Washington.

A new Little Havana: Why Cuban migrants are moving to Kentucky.

Smoothies: If you blend fruits and veggies, do they keep their health benefits?

Coping strategies: A psychologist’s advice for dealing with adolescents’ emotions.

Lives Lived: Nicholas Hitchon’s life was chronicled in the “Seven Up!” series of British documentaries, beginning in 1964 when he was a boy in England and continuing for decades as he grew to become a professor at the University of Wisconsin. He died at 65.

U.S. Open: Frances Tiafoe got an easy first-round win yesterday. Read an interview with him about fame.

“It’s the rules”: Coco Gauff, who won her U.S. Open match yesterday, made sure her opponent didn’t take an illegal break. Watch the video from ESPN.

Mourning and a terrible truth: Football probably contributed to a diagnosis of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E. in the son of the Maryland coach Michael Locksley.

A tie: The five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen settled a defamation lawsuit stemming from his accusations that another player had cheated.

Outfield invaders: The M.L.B. superstar Ronald Acuña Jr. was knocked down last night as two fans rushed the field and attempted to hug him.

Hilma af Klint: She was a little-known Swedish artist and mystic until the art industry deemed her a pioneer of abstract painting a few years ago. Since then, her work from the early 1900s has become famous — shown in the Guggenheim, printed on posters and sold in museum shops.

Her fame has also attracted scrutiny, and research on the authorship of her paintings and a fight over her estate are threatening her legacy.

Millennial moms say they’re sick of trying to be Instagram-perfect parents, The Washington Post reports.

A whale swallowed her. “It was amazing,” she told Slate.

Make dinner in 20 minutes with linguine with lemon sauce.

Wear the best white T-shirts for women.

Try therapy to combat insomnia.

Pack a good thermos.

Read “The Breakaway,” Jennifer Weiner’s new novel about a woman who has no idea what she’s doing with her life.

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were backboard, backdoor and corkboard.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

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David Leonhardt writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter. He has previously been an Op-Ed columnist, Washington bureau chief, co-host of “The Argument” podcast, founding editor of The Upshot section and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. In 2011, he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. More about David Leonhardt

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