Between 1993 and 2010, humans removed a total of 2,150 gigatons of groundwater — enough to fill 860 million Olympic swimming pools
Humans pump most of our drinking water from natural underground reservoirs called aquifers. Researchers calculate that between 1993 and 2010, we removed a total of 2,150 gigatons of groundwater — enough to fill 860 million Olympic swimming pools.Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Calgary Herald, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.
Many people might imagine Earth’s shape as a perfect sphere, but it’s not; it’s an oblate spheroid, with high mountains and deep ocean trenches that distribute mass unevenly and make the planet resemble a lumpy potato. The whole thing is also spinning like a top, and if you move enough mass from one place to another, the planet will wobble as it spins.
“I kind of liken it to a waterlogged softball,” said James Famiglietti, a hydrologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. “When a softball or baseball gets soaked, it gets waterlogged, and when you throw it, it wobbles funny. That’s what’s happening here.” The spin axis, or the imaginary line around which the planet rotates, is known as Earth’s rotational pole. The pole is tilted about 23.5 degrees relative to our plane of orbit around the sun, which is why we have seasons. The exact position of this pole changes a lot as the planet wobbles around, a phenomenon called polar motion, said Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University and the lead author of the study.
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