On top of intensifying algal blooms and depleting oxygen, a new study reveals Earth's bodies of freshwater are also evaporating at a greater rate than we realized.
due to changes in cloud cover have made the sky thirstier than ever. Larger areas of exposed water due to a decrease in ice cover have also given the sky greater access to slurp up those water molecules. These factors all contribute to an increasingly rapid cycling of water from its pooling on land to its dispersal into the atmosphere.
Previous estimates of this water transfer relied on evaporation rates, but these alone fall short of representing the sheer volume of lake water being lost, due to other dynamics like freeze and thaw cycles. Because of this dependence on localized environmental conditions, a reliable measure of evaporation has to be calculated independently for each lake.
So Zhao and colleagues did just that for a staggering 1.42 million lakes worldwide. They used monthly water loss information from satellites between 1985 to 2018 and factored in the evaporation rate, surface area, ice duration and heat storage changes for each of these lakes."We found that the long-term lake evaporation is 1,500 plus or minus 150 cubic kilometers per year, which is 15.
"From a global perspective, the total reservoir evaporation can be larger than the combined use of domestic and industrial water,"
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