Is Northwestern India’s Breadbasket Running Out of Water?
(Scientific American) – A new study using satellite data suggests the region is using more groundwater than is being replenished by rainfall. The fields of barley, rice and wheat that feed much of India are running out of water, according to a new study based on satellite data and published online in Nature today. The heartland of last century’s Green Revolution lost 109 cubic kilometers of water from its Indus River plain aquifer between August 2002 and October 2008. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) “By our estimates, the water table is declining at a rate of one foot per year averaged over the Indian states of Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, including the national capital territory of Delhi,” an area in northwestern India that covers more than 438,000 square kilometers, says NASA hydrologist Matthew Rodell, lead author of the paper. “We are not able to estimate the total amount of groundwater in storage [in the aquifer], so we can’t say when it will be gon
