Groundwater has weighed heavily in the balance of policies regarding drought, tribal rights and land development.
Now a paper in Geophysical Research Letters suggests groundwater pumping is knocking the Earth itself slightly off-balance.
Over tens of thousands of years, Earth wobbles like a lop-sided top, partly because of its weight being redistributed by its molten core, melting ice sheets, swirling ocean currents and, apparently, groundwater pumping: Between 1993 and 2010, the shift caused by such activities far outstripped the effects of water melting from ice sheets.
That’s according to a model validated by millimeter-scale satellite measurements of polar shift.
The effect was likely amplified by an unbalancing bias in where pumping occurs: Mainly in the Northern Hemisphere’s midlatitudes, in places like India and Arizona.
