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THE DRYING PLANET  
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Abrahm Lustgarten, Graphics by Lucas Waldron, Illustrations by
Olivier Kugler for ProPublica
July 25, 2025
ProPublica
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_ As the climate warms, new data shows huge swaths of land across the
globe are quickly drying, threatening humanity’s supply of fresh
water. _

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_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
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In the far north, the detected loss is due largely to glaciers melting
and subarctic lakes drying. 

But farther south — where most people live — it is largely the
race to suck groundwater from aquifers that is removing the water from
the continents. So much groundwater is now being pumped that it is
filling the oceans as it drains off land, becoming one of the largest
drivers of global sea level rise.

AS THE PLANET GETS HOTTER and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers
melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned,
invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep
underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh
water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers
together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly
disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a
critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet
are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as
moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is
being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater,
which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion
people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that
the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply —
portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening
risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,”
said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with
Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are
already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much
the account has.”

The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances,
confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more
extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also
found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas
are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica
and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic
of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the
uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations
around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh
water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.

Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth
vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major
groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers —
underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of
Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took
millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill.
Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground
flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans.

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the
continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the
largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation
and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the
melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or
Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

WATER FROM LAND HAS BECOME A LEADING DRIVER OF SEA LEVEL RISE

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which
measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to
estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two
decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was
then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it
to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others
have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has
always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of
all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a
professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the
land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see
what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water
loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of
drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now
growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s
like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents
in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six
other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the
world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what
the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across
the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the
whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

THE DRYING OF THE EARTH ACCELERATED IN RECENT YEARS

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the
melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid
places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole
continents.

In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a
familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also
spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the
southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for
agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and
into Central America. These regions are connected not because they
rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but
because their populations will face the same perils of water stress:
the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions
of people.

“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a
former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of
the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not
involved with the study.

Research has long established that people take more water from
underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst.
For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions
on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state
regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the
Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the
aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with
the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know
when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign
that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the
ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such
subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says.
Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are
large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent
study [[link removed]] by
researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that
28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston
and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from
building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface
is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the
20th century.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere. Just like
rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes
its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift:
Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies
and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the
oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

People aren’t just misusing groundwater, they are flooding their own
coasts and cities in the process, Famiglietti warns. That means they
are also imperiling some of the world’s most important
food-producing lowlands in the Nile and Mekong deltas and cities from
Shanghai to New York. Once in the oceans, of course, groundwater will
never again be suitable for drinking and human use without expensive
and energy-sucking treatment or through the natural cycle of
evaporating and precipitating as rain. But even then, it may no longer
fall where it is needed most. Groundwater “is an intergenerational
resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all,” the study
states, “at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future
generations.”

That such rapid and substantial overuse of groundwater is also causing
coastal flooding underscores the compounding threat of rising
temperatures and aridity. It means that water scarcity and some of the
most disruptive effects of climate change are now inextricably
intertwined. And here, the study’s authors implore leaders to find a
policy solution: Improve water management and reduce groundwater use
now, and the world has a tool to slow the rate of sea level rise. Fail
to adjust the governance and use of groundwater around the world, and
humanity risks surrendering parts of its coastal cities while pouring
out finite reserves it will sorely need as the other effects of
climate change take hold.

HOW GROUND WATER BECOMES OCEAN WATER

The process starts when deep underground aquifers are tapped to make
up for a lack of water from rainfall and rivers. Worldwide, 70% of
fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from
groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that
water seeps back into aquifers. Instead, most of the water runs off
the land into streams, eventually flowing into rivers. The rivers
ultimately drain into the ocean, where fresh water becomes salt water.
For that water to be usable again, it must either be industrially
treated or return to the land as rain. But with climate change, these
same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

IF THE DRYING CONTINUES — and the researchers warn that it is now
nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds
“potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The
majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that
the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North
America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle
East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is
becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places
that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a
shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the
past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood
of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking
a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical
disorder.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and a member of the National Academy
of Sciences, lauded the new report for confirming trends that were
once theoretical. The ramifications, he said, could be profoundly
destabilizing. “The massive overpumping of groundwater,” Gleick
said, “poses enormous risk to food production.” And food, he
pointed out, is the foundation for stability. The water science center
he co-founded, the Pacific Institute, has tracked more than 1,900
incidents in which water supplies were either the casualty of, a tool
for or the cause of violence. In Syria, beginning in 2011, drought and
groundwater depletion drove rural unrest that contributed to the civil
war, which displaced millions of people. In Ghana, in 2017, protesters
rioted as wells ran dry. And in Ukraine, whose wheat supports much of
the world, water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Russian
attacks.

“Water is being used as a strategic and political tool,” said
Salzberg, who spent nearly two decades analyzing water security issues
as the special director for water resources at the State Department.
“We should expect to see that more often as the water supply crisis
is exacerbated.”

India, for example, recently weaponized water against Pakistan. In
April, following terrorist attacks in Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi suspended his country’s participation in the Indus Waters
Treaty, a river-sharing agreement between the two nuclear powers that
was negotiated in 1960. The Indus system flows northwest out of Tibet
into India, before turning southward into Pakistan. Pakistan has
severely depleted its groundwater reserves — the region is facing
one of the world’s most urgent water emergencies according to the
Science Advances paper. The Indus has only become more essential as a
supply of fresh water for its 252 million people. Allowing that water
to cross the border would be “prejudicial to India’s interests,”
Modi said. In this case, he wasn’t attempting to recoup water supply
for his country, Salzberg said, but was leveraging its scarcity to win
a strategic advantage over his country’s principal rival.

What’s needed most is governance of water that recognizes it as a
crucial resource that determines both sovereignty and progress,
Salzberg added. Yet there is no international framework for water
management, and only a handful of countries have national water
policies of their own.

The United States has taken stabs at regulating its groundwater use,
but in some cases those attempts appear to be failing. In 2014,
California passed what seemed to many a revolutionary groundwater
management act that required communities to assess their total water
supply and budget its long-term use. But the act doesn’t take full
effect until 2040, which has allowed many groundwater districts to
continue to draw heavily from aquifers even as they complete their
plans to conserve those resources. Chandanpurkar and Famiglietti’s
research underscores the consequences for such a slow approach.

Arizona pioneered groundwater regulations in 1980, creating what it
called active management areas where extraction would be limited and
surface waters would be used to replenish aquifers. But it only chose
to manage the water in metropolitan areas, leaving vast, unregulated
swaths of the state where investors, farmers and industry have all
pounced on the availability of free water for profit. In recent years,
Saudi investors have pumped rural water to grow feed for cattle
exported back to the Arabian Peninsula, and hedge funds are competing
to pump and sell water to towns near Phoenix. Meanwhile, four out of
the original five active management areas are failing to meet the
state’s own targets.

“They like to say, ‘Oh, the management’s doing well,’”
Famiglietti said, but looking out over the next century, the trends
suggest the aquifers will continue to empty out. “No one talks about
that. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s an
existential issue for cities like Phoenix.”

Both California and Arizona grow significant portions of America’s
fruits and vegetables. Something has to give. “If you want to grow
food in a place like California,” Famiglietti asked, “do you just
bring in water? If we deplete that groundwater, I don’t think
there’s enough water to really replace what we’re doing there.”
The United States might not have much choice, he added, but to move
California’s agriculture production somewhere far away and retire
the land.

Chandanpurkar, Famiglietti and the report’s other authors suggest
there are ready solutions to the problems they have identified,
because unlike so many aspects of the climate crisis, the human
decisions that lead to the overuse of water can be speedily corrected.
Agriculture, which uses the vast majority of the world’s fresh
water, can deploy well-tested technologies like drip irrigation, as
Israel has, that sharply cut use by as much as 50%. When California
farms reduced their take of Colorado River water in 2023 and 2024, the
water levels in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, jumped by
16 vertical feet as some 390 billion gallons were saved by 2025.
Individuals can reduce water waste by changing simple routines:
shortening showers or removing lawns. And cities can look to recycle
more of the water they use, as San Diego has.

A national policy that establishes rules around water practices but
also prioritizes the use of water resources for national security and
a collective interest could counterbalance the forces of habit and
special interests, Salzberg said. Every country needs such a policy,
and if the United States were to lead, it might offer an advantage.
But “the U.S. doesn’t have a national water strategy,” he said,
referring to a disjointed patchwork of state and court oversight.
“We don’t even have a national water institution. We haven’t
thought as a country about how we would even protect our own water
resources for our own national interests, and we’re a mess.”

Correction
JULY 25, 2025: This story originally included a quote from Jay
Famiglietti characterizing Arizona’s water supply as facing total
depletion by the end of the century. Famiglietti communicated a
correction to that assertion to ProPublica, which failed to
incorporate it before the story was published. The quote has been
adjusted to reflect Famiglietti’s view that Arizona’s water supply
will be diminished but may not disappear.

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti,
Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John
T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying,
Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions
to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances.
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Visual editing by Alex Bandoni
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and development by Anna Donlan
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