Groundwater Shock The Polluting of the World's Major Freshwater Stores.

• Author: Sampat, Payal

Scientists have shown that the world deep beneath our fret is essential to the life above. Ancient myths depicted the Underworld as a place of damnation and death. Now, the spreading contamination of major aquifers threatens to turn the myth into a tragic reality.

The Mississippi River occupies a mythic place in the American imagination, in part because it is so huge. At any given moment, on average, about 2,100 billion liters of water are flowing across the Big Muddy's broad bottom. If you were to dive about 35 feet down and lie on that bottom, you might feel a sense of awe that the whole river was on top of you. But in one very important sense, you'd be completely wrong. At any point in time, only 1 percent of the water in the Mississippi River system is in the part of the river that flows downstream to the Gulf of Mexico. The other 99 percent lies beneath the bottom, locked in massive strata of rock and sand.

This is a distinction of enormous consequence. The availability of clean water has come to be recognized as perhaps the most critical of all human security issues facing the world in the next quarter-century--and what is happening to water buried under the bottoms of rivers, or under our feet, is vastly different from what happens to the "surface" water of rivers, lakes, and streams. New research finds that contrary to popular belief, it is groundwater that is most dangerously threatened. Moreover, the Mississippi is not unique in its ratio of surface to underground water; worldwide, 97 percent of the planet's liquid freshwater is stored in aquifers.

In the early centuries of civilization, surface water was the only source we needed to know about. Human population was less than a tenth of one percent the size it is now; settlements were on river banks; and the water was relatively clean. We still think of surface water as being the main resource. So it's easy to think that the problem of contamination is mainly one of surface water: it is polluted rivers and streams that threaten health in times of flood, and that have made waterborne diseases a major killer of humankind. But in the past century, as population has almost quadrupled and rivers have become more depleted and polluted, our dependence on pumping groundwater has soared--and as it has, we've made a terrible discovery. Contrary to the popular impression that at least the waters from our springs and wells are pure, we're uncovering a pattern of pervasive pollution there too. And in these sources, unlike rivers, the pollution is generally irreversible.

This is largely the work of another hidden factor: the rate of groundwater renewal is very slow in comparison with that of surface water. It's true that some aquifers recharge fairly quickly, but the average recycling time for groundwater is 1,400 years, as opposed to only 20 days for river water. So when we pump out groundwater, we're effectively removing it from aquifers for generations to come. It may evaporate and return to the atmosphere quickly enough, but the resulting rainfall (most of which falls back into the oceans) may take centuries to recharge the aquifers once they've been depleted. And because water in aquifers moves through the Earth with glacial slowness, its pollutants continue to accumulate. Unlike rivers, which flush themselves into the oceans, aquifers become sinks for pollutants, decade after decade--thus further diminishing the amount of clean water they can yield for human use.

Perhaps the largest misconception being exploded by the spreading water crisis is the assumption that the ground we stand on--and what lies beneath it--is solid, unchanging, and inert. Just as the advent of climate change has awakened us to the fact that the air over our heads is an arena of enormous forces in the midst of titanic shifts, the water crisis has revealed that, slow-moving though it may be, groundwater is part of a system of powerful hydrological interactions--between earth, surface water, sky, and sea--that we ignore at our peril. A few years ago, reflecting on how human activity is beginning to affect climate, Columbia University scientist Wallace Broecker warned, "The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks." A similar statement might now be made about the system under our feet. If we continue to drill holes into it--expecting it to swallow our waste and yield freshwater in return--we may be toying with an outcome no one could wish.

Valuing Groundwater

For most of human history, groundwater was tapped mainly in arid regions where surface water was in short supply. From Egypt to Iran, ancient Middle Eastern civilizations used periscope-like conduits to funnel spring water from mountain slopes to nearby towns--a technology that allowed settlement to spread out from the major rivers. Over the centuries, as populations and cropland expanded, innovative well-digging techniques evolved in China, India, and Europe. Water became such a valuable resource that some cultures developed elaborate mythologies imbuing underground water and its seekers with special powers. In medieval Europe, people called water witches or dowsers were believed to be able to detect groundwater using a forked stick and mystical insight.

In the second half of the 20th century, the soaring demand for water turned the dowsers' modern-day counterparts into a major industry. Today, major aquifers are tapped on every continent, and groundwater is the primary source of drinking water for more than 1.5 billion people worldwide (see table, page 12). The aquifer that lies beneath the Huang-Huai-Hai plain in eastern China alone supplies drinking water to nearly 160 million people. Asia as a whole relies on its groundwater for nearly one-third of its drinking water supply. Some of the largest cities in the developing world--Jakarta, Dhaka, Lima, and Mexico City, among them--depend on aquifers for almost all their water. And in rural areas, where centralized water supply systems are undeveloped, groundwater is typically the sole source of water. More than 95 percent of the rural U.S. population depends on groundwater for drinking.

A principal reason for the explosive rise in groundwater use since 1950 has been a dramatic expansion in irrigated agriculture. In India, the leading country in total irrigated area and the world's third largest grain producer, the number of shallow tubewells used to draw groundwater surged from 3,000 in 1960 to 6 million in 1990. While India doubled the amount of its land irrigated by surface water between 1950 and 1985; it increased the area watered by aquifers 113-fold. Today, aquifers supply water to more than half of India's irrigated land. The United States, with the third highest irrigated area in the world, uses groundwater for 43 percent of its irrigated farmland. Worldwide, irrigation is by far the biggest drain on freshwater: it accounts for about 70 percent of the water we draw from rivers and wells each year.

Other industries have been expanding their water use even faster than agriculture--and generating much higher profits in the process. On average, a ton of water used in industry generates roughly $14,000 worth of output--about 70 times as much profit as the same amount of water used to grow grain. Thus, as the world has industrialized, substantial amounts of water have been shifted from farms to more lucrative factories. Industry's share of total consumption has reached 19 percent and is likely to continue rising rapidly. The amount of water available for drinking is thus constrained not only by a limited resource base, but by competition with other, more powerful users.

And as rivers and lakes are stretched to their limits--many of them dammed, dried up, or polluted--we're growing more and more dependent on groundwater for all these uses. In Taiwan, for example, the share of water supplied by groundwater almost doubled from 21 percent in 1983 to over 40 percent in 1991. And Bangladesh, which was once almost entirely river- and stream-dependent, dug over a million wells in the 1970s to substitute for its badly polluted surface-water supply. Today, almost 90 percent of its people use only groundwater for drinking.

Even as our dependence on groundwater increases, the availability of the resource is becoming more limited. On almost every continent, many major aquifers are being drained faster than their natural rate of recharge. Groundwater depletion is most severe in parts of India, China, the United States, North Africa, and the Middle East. Under certain geological conditions, groundwater overdraft can cause aquifer sediments to compact, permanently shrinking the aquifer's storage capacity. This loss can be quite considerable, and irreversible. The amount of water storage capacity lost because of aquifer compaction in California's Central Valley, for example, is equal to more than 40 percent of the combined storage capacity of all human-made reservoirs across the state.

As the competition among factories, farms, and households intensifies, it's easy to overlook the extent to which freshwater is also required for essential ecological services. It is not just rainfall, but groundwater welling up from beneath, that replenishes rivers, lakes, and streams. In a study of 54 streams in different parts of the country, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that groundwater is the source for more than half the flow, on average. The 492 billion gallons (1.86 cubic kilometers) of water aquifers add to U.S. surface water bodies each day is nearly equal to the daily flow of the Mississippi. Groundwater provides the base contribution for the Mississippi, the Niger, the Yangtze, and many more of the world's great rivers--some of which would otherwise not be flowing year-round. Wetlands, important habitat for birds, fish, and other wildlife, are often largely groundwater-fed, created in places where the water table overflows to the surface on a constant...