{"id":1811,"date":"2025-01-09T14:12:26","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T11:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/?p=1811"},"modified":"2025-11-20T12:38:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T09:38:09","slug":"the-world-is-seeing-a-sharp-drop-in-fresh-water-levels-and-rising-sea-levels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/2025\/01\/09\/the-world-is-seeing-a-sharp-drop-in-fresh-water-levels-and-rising-sea-levels\/","title":{"rendered":"The world is seeing a sharp drop in fresh water levels and rising sea levels"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Earth\u2019s sea levels are rising, damaging the livelihoods and infrastructure of coastal communities around the world. Agencies and organizations are working to prepare people for the changing world around them. An international team of scientists, using observations from NASA-German satellites, has found evidence that the total amount of fresh water on Earth has dropped sharply since May 2014 and has remained low since then.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Earth’s sea levels are rising, damaging the livelihoods and infrastructure of coastal communities around the world.<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0Agencies and organizations are working to prepare people for the changing world around them, NASA’s press service reports.<\/span><\/p>\n

The agency’s global data is now available in the Earth Information Center’s sea level section. NASA developed the global sea level change website in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense, the World Bank, the U.S. State Department, and the United Nations Development Program.<\/span><\/p>\n

The site provides information on projected sea level rise through 2150 for coastlines around the world, as well as estimates of how much flooding a coastal community or region can expect over the next 30 years. The projections are based on data collected by NASA and its partners, as well as computer models of ice sheets and the ocean, and the latest sea level assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other sources.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nCoastal areas such as Drakes Bay on Northern California’s Point Reyes Peninsula are becoming increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels. NOAA\/NMFS\/WCR\/CCO<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

International organisations such as the World Bank will use data from the sea level change site to address issues such as creating climate risk profiles for countries particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.<\/span><\/p>\n

A NASA analysis of data found that 96% of countries with coastlines experienced sea level rise between 1970 and 2023. The rate of global rise has also accelerated, more than doubling from 0.08 inches (0.21 centimeters) per year in 1993 to about 0.18 inches (0.45 centimeters) per year in 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the rate of sea level rise accelerates, millions of people could experience impacts sooner than previously predicted, including stronger storm surges, greater saltwater intrusion into groundwater, and additional days of high tides, also known as unwanted floods or sunday floods.<\/span><\/p>\n

“This new platform shows the timing of future floods and the magnitude of sea level rise in every coastal country in the world, connecting science and physics to impacts on human livelihoods and safety,” said Nadia Vinogradova-Schiffer, director of the ocean physics program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.<\/span><\/p>\n

Data released earlier this year showed that sea levels in Pacific Ocean countries will rise by at least 6 inches (15 centimeters) over the next 30 years. By the 2050s, the number of days with high tides and flooding will increase by an order of magnitude for almost all Pacific countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe data speaks for itself: Sea levels are rising around the world, and they\u2019re rising faster and faster,\u201d said Ben Hamlington, a sea-level researcher at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the head of the agency\u2019s sea-level change science team. \u201cHaving the best information to make decisions about how to plan for sea-level rise is more important than ever.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites has found evidence that the total amount of fresh water on Earth has dropped sharply since May 2014 and has remained low since then.<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0In a report in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggest that this shift may indicate that Earth\u2019s continents have entered a persistently drier phase, James R. Riordon, NASA Earth Science News Team, reports.<\/span><\/p>\n

From 2015 to 2023, satellite measurements showed that the average volume of freshwater stored on land \u2014 including liquid surface water such as lakes and rivers, as well as water in underground aquifers \u2014 was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic kilometers) below the average from 2002 to 2014, said Matthew Rodell, one of the study\u2019s authors and a hydrologist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. \u201cThat\u2019s two and a half times the volume of Lake Erie that was lost.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

During droughts, along with the modern expansion of irrigated agriculture, farms and cities must rely more on groundwater, which can lead to a cycle of diminishing groundwater supplies: Freshwater supplies are depleted, rain and snow cannot replenish them, and more groundwater is pumped out. Reduced water availability puts stress on farmers and communities, which can lead to hunger, conflict, poverty, and increased risk of disease when people turn to contaminated water sources, according to a 2024 UN report on water stress.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nThis map shows the years when water storage on land reached a 22-year minimum (i.e., the land was at its driest) at each location, based on data from the GRACE and GRACE\/FO satellites. Much more of the world’s land surface reached this minimum in the nine years since 2015, which were the nine warmest years in modern temperature history. Image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory\/Wanmei Liang, using data provided by Mary Michael O’Neill<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

A team of researchers determined this dramatic global decline in freshwater using observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which are operated by the German Aerospace Agency, the German Research Institute for Geosciences, and NASA. The GRACE satellites measure variations in Earth\u2019s gravity on monthly scales, which reveal changes in the mass of water on and below the ground. The original GRACE satellites collected data from March 2002 to October 2017. The follow-on GRACE\u2013Follow On (GRACE\u2013FO) satellites were launched in May 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n

The decline in global freshwater supplies reported in the study began with a major drought in northern and central Brazil, and was soon followed by a series of major droughts in Australasia, South America, North America, Europe, and Africa. Warmer ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific from late 2014 to 2016, culminating in one of the most significant El Ni\u00f1o events since 1950, led to shifts in the atmospheric jet stream that changed weather and rainfall patterns around the world. However, even after El Ni\u00f1o subsided, the world\u2019s freshwater supplies did not recover. In fact, Rodell and his team report that 13 of the 30 most intense droughts worldwide observed by GRACE have occurred since January 2015. Rodell and his colleagues suspect that global warming may be contributing to the persistent depletion of freshwater supplies.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nThe GRACE satellites measure gravity as they orbit the planet to detect changes in Earth’s water levels (artist’s concept). NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Global warming causes the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, leading to more extreme precipitation events, said NASA Goddard meteorologist Michael Bosilovich. While total annual rainfall and snowfall may not change dramatically, long periods between intense precipitation events allow the soil to dry out and become more compact. This reduces the amount of water the ground can absorb when it rains.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem when you have extreme precipitation,\u201d Bosilovic said, \u201cis that the water ends up running off,\u201d instead of soaking in and replenishing groundwater supplies. Globally, freshwater levels have remained stably low since the 2014-2016 El Ni\u00f1o, while more water remains in the atmosphere as water vapor. \u201cWarming temperatures increase both the evaporation of water from the surface into the atmosphere and the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, increasing the frequency and severity of droughts,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

While there are reasons to suspect that the sharp drop in freshwater levels is largely due to global warming, it can be difficult to definitively link the two, said Suzanne Werth, a hydrologist and remote sensing specialist at Virginia Tech who was not involved with the study. \u201cThere are uncertainties in climate projections,\u201d Werth said. \u201cThere are always errors in measurements and models.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Earth\u2019s sea levels are rising, damaging the livelihoods and infrastructure of coastal communities around the world. Agencies and organizations are working to prepare people for the changing world around them. An international team of scientists, using observations from NASA-German satellites, has found evidence that the total amount of fresh water on Earth has dropped sharply since May 2014 and has remained low since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1812,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,23,777,539],"tags":[576,335,575,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-1811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-klimat","9":"category-climatechange","10":"category-hydrosphere","11":"tag-drought","12":"tag-flood","13":"tag-groundwater","14":"tag-pacific-ocean"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1813,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions\/1813"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}