More than half of the world’s largest lakes and reservoirs have lost significant amounts of water over the last three decades, according to a new study, which pins the blame largely on climate change and excessive water use.
More than half of the world’s largest lakes and reservoirs have lost significant amounts of water over the last three decades, according to a new study, which pins the blame largely onRoughly one-quarter of the world’s population lives in the basin of a drying lake, according to the study by a team of international scientists, published Thursday in the journal Science.
The shrinking of many lakes has been well documented, but the extent of change – and the reasons behind it – have been less thoroughly examined, said Fangfang Yao, the study’s lead author and a visiting scholar at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The report found losses in lake water storage everywhere, including in the humid tropics and the cold Arctic. This suggests “drying trends worldwide are more extensive than previously thought,” Yao said.Unsustainable water consumption is the predominant reason behind the shriveling of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and California’s Salton Sea, while changes in rainfall and runoff have driven the decline of the Great Salt Lake, the report found.
As lakes shrink, this can also contribute to an “aridification” of the surrounding watershed, the study found, which in turn increases evaporation and accelerates their decline. For reservoirs, the report found that the biggest factor in their decline is sedimentation, where sediment flows into the water, clogging it up and reducing space. It’s a “creeping disaster,” Yao said, happening over the course of years and decades.
Not all lakes are declining; around a third of lake declines were offset by increases elsewhere, the report found.
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