Report On Sea Level Rise And Ground Water Extraction
There is a news article from the University of Utrecht [thanks to Erik for alerting us to this!] titled
Rising sea levels attributed to global groundwater extraction
The article starts with the text
“Large-scale groundwater extraction for irrigation, drinking water or industry results in an annual rise in sea levels of approximately 0.8 mm, accounting for about one-quarter of total annual sea-level rise (3.1 mm). According to hydrologists from Utrecht University and the research institute Deltares, the rise in sea levels can be attributed to the fact that most of the groundwater extracted ultimately winds up in the sea. The hydrologists explain their findings in an article to be published in the near future in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.”
The article is based on the paper
Y. Wada, L.P.H. van Beek, C.M. van Kempen, J.W.T.M. Reckman, S. Vasak, and M.F.P. Bierkens (2010), Global depletion of groundwater resources, Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2010GL044571, in press.
This is yet another paper that shows the interconnection among the components of the climate system. The attribution of a climate effect (in this case sea level rise) to just one cause (e.g. ocean warming and glacial melt due to positive radiative forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is too narrow of a perspective.
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What else causes this?
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OMG…..It is indeed worse than we thought. Add in the contributions from WWTPs and stormwater retention basins along with AGW and the sea will really be going up fast.
Cluelessness examplified.
As water is part of the Earth’s emission field they are just moving its charge from one place to another, spending, of course, energy to do it, then nothing changes…however if that water is to be used for drinking. be it by vegetables, by animals or men, i.e.by life on earth, and being “life” nature’s trick for overcoming entropy (a.k.a. death), it is a highly valuable activity. For more on general laws:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38418051/Unified-Field
Right on. Yours truly commented on the relationship between groundwater and sea level in a recent letter to Earth Magazine.
WaaaHaahaaa! .8mm? That’s .03inch for us old timers. Sorry, but I just can’t get worked up over that. That’s about the thickness of a shaving from my handplane. Somebody should give these guys a useful job – maybe flipping .8mm burgers.
So all the argument about the steric vs eustatic components of SLR, compounded by the uncertainty in the glacial isostatic adjustment (eg Wu et al. 2010) has ignored a potential 0.8mm element from ground water extraction??
ONE QUATER of annual SLR might NOT be steric and attributable to abyssal heating?
Or eustatic and attributable to continental ice-sheet melt?
And errors in the GIA calculation too?
What do we really know about:
a. Seal level rise
b. Ocean heat content as estimated by steric SLR
c. Ice melt as estimated by eustatic SLR
I mean, really KNOW?
Dominic
This is genuinely block-rocking stuff.
Dominic
What about the amount of rain that falls on the oceans every year? Right now we’re seeing many inches of unprecidented rain falling on the coastal waters of Florida from the global warming storm Nicole. That’s all going to wash up on the beach somewhere. A lot more rain falls on the ocean than on the land and ALL of the rainwater falling on land runs off into the sea so that’s got to have some effect.
How long do you have to run your garden hose to raise the level of the Gulf of Mexico an inch? Wouldn’t rain add to the water level faster than irrigation?
Is it just me or is all this stuff getting a whole lot stoopid-er.
Forgive my saying this, but is it not true that, save for artesian basins closed off from easy water escape, that this water will escape on its own to the sea eventually? It would seem likely that, when the rate of water escape exceeds the rate of water intake in such wells, that the water level would become self-regulating from lack of supply.
Aquifers are very rarely closed systems, they always have a source, and usually have an outlet. On the Snake River Aquifer, the refill rate, for instance, is about 300 years, to fully cycle the water. Land use changes have altered the flow rate over the refill rate, forcing water levels to drop, and many of the natural springs along the canyon to change.
In the case of the aquifers under limestone, in most cases, they’re a flowing aquifer, limited by outlet and uptake, and changing over time. The water comes from rainfall in the local area or other areas.
You may, however, see substantial changes in humidity due to the aerosol effect from sprinklers. A proportion of the water evaporates before it hits the ground.
Crop changes and land use changes contribute to this effect with changes in albedo. The real question is… is the effect this paper talks about sustainable, and is it something that is not self-correcting due to lack of refill?
An interesting concept; I have not read the article yet but my 1st thought is I wonder what the error bars on this estimate are – you have to know how much water is being pumped world-wide, know how much is re-absorbed into the soil, how much evaporates (and of that, how much is re-precipitated & flows into the ocean), how much of the absorbed water is taken up by plants & re-released by transpiration (and of course how much of that is re-precipitated) , how much is caught in other storage prior to getting to the ocean, etc, etc. This seems like a terribly complicated calculation which should have very large error bars given all the uncertainties of each of these components of the article. None the less, an interesting concept
Addendum to my recent comment: here in Ventura County CA, where the groundwater meets the sea, it’s especially obvious. The hydrologic cycle, which straddles the hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and lithosphere, demands an inter-disciplinary approach, which is often sadly lacking among over-specialized “experts”.
THEY don’t want anybody to pump water. THEY don’t want us to drink water….
Gil Dewart says:
September 29, 2010 at 11:30 am
I would suggest better a “reeducation” of all “post normal and stoned new age scientists” 🙂
Er, I meant: ‘One QUARTER’ above
I can spel, really.
Dominic
All these comments miss the basic, most important point. Humans are bad and destroy the planet. We use so much water and flood the earth.
The Fens in England are an example of thousands of sq miles of peat bogs drained to make the land better for agriculture. The water ends up in the ocean and the Fens have been sinking and are now well below sea level protected by dikes.
Pumps lift the water up to the rivers as much as 16feet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_Fen
Here may be another factor (Note- not a peer reviewed study):
In the spring of 1986, I published my explanation of the black spots in a scientific journal: The Earth’s atmosphere was being bombarded by house-sized, water-bearing objects traveling at 25,000 mph, one every three seconds or so. That’s 20 a minute, 1,200 an hour, 28,800 a day, 864,000 a month and more than 10 million a year.
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/wp.html
What about asteroids and comets? Aren’t they supposed to be adding water to the earth?
From the Press Release:
‘Researcher Marc Bierkens says, “We calculated it at eight-tenths of a millimetre per year. This is surprisingly large when compared to the current annual rise in sea levels, which the IPCC estimates at 3.1 mm.” About half of the current rise in sea levels can be attributed to thermal expansion, a little over one quarter to run off from glaciers and ice caps, and the remaining quarter to groundwater depletion. “Although the role of groundwater depletion in rising sea levels had already been acknowledged, it was not addressed in the most recent IPCC report due to a lack of reliable data to illustrate the severity of the situation. Our study confirms that groundwater depletion is, in fact, a significant factor.”’
So presumably AR4 estimates of the steric/eustatic components of recent SLR were both too high?
Given the hideously complex task of calculating ‘global average’ sea level rise, I have always wondered how much reliance can be placed on the estimates. The more I learn about satellite altimetry and GIA, the less confident I am in the widely accepted value for SLR.
The error bars alway seem so tiny: 3.2mm +/- 0.4mm/yr.
0.4mm either way… Really?
So does this negate the argument that the construction of dams and irrigation systems resulted in less water reaching the oceans (due to increased evaporation and storage), thereby reducing the rate of sea level rise. This was put forward around the time of IPCC AR4 to suggest that sea level rise should be much worse than measured.
As a hydrologist I have heard comments along this line before, though I have no idea whether or not it is right. I know that in some regions of the world they have ancient ground watersources, some a million years old which being depleted, and these are not being recharged. These would contribute to sea level, though you would have to know how many aquifers are like this and how much is extracted each year. Much of what would be extracted would be used for irrigation and evaporate. I also suspect much would evaporate back to the atmosphere and return as rain, as any rise in sea level should also result in an increase in sea extent, thus an increase in evaporation and rainfall. It would however, be ironic if this contribution of groundwater to the sea was the cause of the observed warming (somehow?), as man would still be responsible!
It means sea levels are dropping.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/l2a.png
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/l3a.png
Or the theory is wrong.
But did they subtract the sea water that’s pumped into oil wells to maintain well pressure? 😉
In addition to adding water from aquifers, has anyone considered the effect of sediments transported to the sea via rivers or dust?
Moderator: Clue me in on your decision please. Based on my screen shot I have included my name and email. What am I missing.
[Patience. It’s only been 2 minutes between posts. ~dbs, mod.]
Did they consider the amount of water in dams?
Ecotretas
What about all the water displaced by Ships & Boats including wrecks, pipe lines, Docks, Bridges, Harbours, Off shore wind farms! and land reclamation? It must add something to the sea level?