California Drought: NASA Says Land Sinking Faster In San Joaquin Valley

A new report reveals that California’s increased reliance on groundwater pumping is causing Central California to sink much faster than officials estimated.

Written by water and watershed experts working at the policy center, at UC Davis and elsewhere, the report urges California to do more now to deal with what researchers project to be the biggest drought crises of 2016 and 2017 – crashing wildlife populations, raging wildfires and more and more poor rural communities running out of water entirely.

The subsidence have already “destroyed thousands of public and private groundwater well casings in the San Joaquin Valley”.

“You tell the farmer he can’t drill anymore wells… he can’t farm as many acres”.

And the damage to the earth may not be reversible: Even when rains resume, the water cannot expand the underground deep layers of clay, sand and gravel that store the state’s great freshwater aquifers.

In some places the ground is dropping almost 2 inches a month, according to measurements taken by the state and NASA.

“As long as this continues, we risk further damage to roads, levees and buildings”, he said. The issue largely abated with the advent of California’s massive man-made plumbing system, which showered the Valley with an abundance of surface water from Northern California. The state’s farmers and ranchers now receive more than $46 billion annually in gross revenues, a small fraction of California’s $1.9 trillion-a-year economy. The research was provided to the California Department of Water Resources, which released the findings.

Subsidence is most noticeable in Central Valley, with some regions such as the one along the California Aqueduct sinking by 3 to 7 inches. In the meantime, farms have been capable of flip to pumping nicely water to make up for having half as a lot floor water for irrigation as regular.

The report says that ongoing drought will increase the need for emergency actions to get drinking water to rural communities and prevent extinction of fish and large-scale death of waterfowl.

Although aquifers typically recharge during wet times as rainwater percolates into the ground, subsidence can permanently reduce storage capacity, meaning there’s less water to pump in the future. It spoke to the intractable difficulties facing Gov. Jerry Brown, D, who signed groundwater monitoring legislation past year, has in managing a water crisis largely created by his father, one-time governor Pat Brown. This funding comes from the statewide Water Bond passed previous year, and applications for funding will be posted in the coming days.

The survey, which used NASA satellite and aircraft radar imaging to measure ground levels, dramatically documents the rising toll the prolonged drought is taking on the Central Valley. Then again, the state needs to continue pumping groundwater to cope with the drought.