The researchers found that freshwater making its way into the Pacific Ocean has fallen by 6 percent, about the same volume as the annual freshwater discharge from the Mississippi every year.
Many rivers around the world are losing water due to global climate change, according to a new study from the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate. Large populations depend on some of the rivers for everything from agriculture to clean drinking resources, including the Yellow River, the Ganges, the Niger, and the Colorado, which have all shown significant declines.
"The distribution of the world's fresh water, already an important topic will occupy front and center stage for years to come in developing adaptation strategies to a changing climate," says Cliff Jacobs of National Science Foundation, which funded the research.
Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, examined stream flows from 925 of the world’s largest rivers for over fifty years, 1948 to 2004. Using measurements from the field supplemented by computer models, the scientists found that one third of the rivers showed large changes in stream flows with these, either gaining water or losing it. A decrease in water flow was more common, outnumbering an increase by a ratio of 2.5 to 1. In addition, rivers that were experiencing larger stream flows were usually in little-populated areas, such as the Arctic where melting ice is inundating river systems.
Photo Caption:The Colorado River as seen from the inside of the Grand Canyon. The river has dropped 14 percent in less than sixty years
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Zoey L. says:
I have heard that the drought in the United States is a hoax being carried out by those profiting from it -- that there is, in fact, plenty of water to go around. This is what my old neighbor -- who just blanketed his rental unit's front and backyard with grass -- says. Is there any truth to this at all? I'm not even sure who he's referring to when he says the hoax is being carried out by "people who are making money off of it" ... ???
Ken O. says:
It's hard to blame your senile neighbor and other Americans who now believe that everything is a hoax perpetrated on them when we have all these scams in our economy. Big corporate bank bailouts, car bailouts, subprime mortgages with no income verification and no money down.....
No, no hoax.