The planet’s fresh water is disappearing and it is already clearly visible from space

Water is not only the key to life on Earth, it is also the compound that gives our planet its characteristic blue color, as oceans and seas cover around two-thirds of its surface. Our small rocky planet has a lot of water, but only a small fraction of it is freshwater. NASA satellites captured a phenomenon that we have been observing from the ground.

Fresh water is just a fraction and it is disappearing
One study by the American space agency NASAfrom the German Aerospace Center and the GFZ (Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum) detected a decrease in the amount of fresh water on our planet. A sharp drop that occurred around 2014 and whose effects still persist.
Our The planet has about 35 million cubic kilometers of fresh waterwhich represents 2.5% of the total amount of water on Earth. However, not all of this fresh water is usable: around 68.7% (more than 24 million km³) is in solid form at the poles, in glaciers and in areas permanently covered with snow.

From fresh and liquid water, just over 30% (10.5 million km³) is on landwith the remainder distributed across lakes, swamps and rivers.
Fresh water can also be found in the atmosphere (almost 13,000 km³ are in suspension or in a gaseous state) and in living beings (about 1120 km³).

This map shows the years in which land water storage reached minimums at each location, based on data from the GRACE and GRACE/FO satellites.

These numbers may now have to be adjusted slightly since, according to the German-American team's calculations, the Our planet's aquifers have lost around 1200 cubic kilometers of water in recent decades. The result is the result of comparing the averages of two periods: one between 2002 and 2014, and the other between 2015 and 2023.
The team detected this change by observing fluctuations in Earth's gravity. They used data collected by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites, a project of the American and German space agencies and the GFZ geological research center.
Satellites have made it possible to study fluctuations in Earth's gravity from month to month, associating these changes with the amount of water present underground in different regions of the planet. The work was published as an article in the journal Surveys in Geophysics.

How is it possible that we have lost 1,200 trillion liters of water?
The problem is droughts. Humans (as well as all other living beings) need water, but in our case it is not only our livelihoods that depend on it, but also our economy, including industry, agriculture and services. When surface water is not enough, we have to turn to aquifers, explains NASA.
That's what happened between 2014 and 2016, when a series of droughts in far-flung places like Brazil, Australasia, Europe, the Americas and Africa put increasing pressure on groundwater across most of the planet.
It is dry, which NASA associates it with a particularly severe El Niño phenomenon, which most affected groundwater all over the world. According to NASA, groundwater levels have not been restored since then.