There Is A 50% Loss Of Water In The World's Greatest Lakes And Basins

A recent research found that half of the world's greatest lakes had dried up due to irresponsible human usage.

 

There are now greater worries about the availability of water for farming, hydroelectricity, and human use after more than half of the world's biggest water bodies have declined since the early 1990s, mostly due to warming temperatures.

Water has been draining from the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia and South America's Lake Titicaca at a combined pace of around 22 gigatonnes per year for over three decades, a group of worldwide experts claimed. That's around 17 times the capacity of Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in the USA.

According to a research published in Science, human activity has depleted water from reserves like the Aral Sea and the Dead Sea, while increasing temperatures have also affected lakes in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Mongolia. Nevertheless, dam development is largely responsible for the increase in water levels in a fourth of the lakes.

Although they only take up around 3% of the Earth's surface, natural lakes and dams hold roughly 87% of the world's freshwater. Data from satellite images taken between 1992 and 2020 were used to compile the study.

The study's lead author, Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist at the University of Virginia, claimed that global warming and consumerism were both responsible for 56% of the loss in freshwater lakes, with warming accounting for "the higher portion of that."

Although it has been widely assumed by climate scientists that the world's dry regions would grow drier and the world's wet regions will become wetter as a result of global warming, this research discovered substantial water loss even in humid locations.

Using satellite data and climatic and hydrological models, scientists evaluated over 2,000 major lakes. They discovered that between 1992 to 2020, lake levels worldwide decreased in 53% of lakes due to excessive human usage, fluctuations in rainfall and run-off, the formation of sediments and increasing temperatures.

After months of drought, Spain announced that reservoirs in the area of Catalonia, located in the country's north-east, are only approximately 26 percent full. Similarly, in 2022, just 58% of capacity was used. Recent measurements show that Lake Garda in Italy has much less water than it had at the same time in 2022. In comparison to the previous year, the water level dropped by half.

To avoid the worst effects of climate change, scientists and activists have long warned that the world must keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The present pace of global warming is around 1.1C.

 

source: aljazeera.com