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NASA finds Punjab
groundwater levels falling fast
WSN Network
Mumbai: For
years now, environmentalists have been crying hoarse about the
depeleting groundwater in Punjab. Sanguine political analaysts have
been warning the Ssikh community that their natural resources in
Punjab in the form of a fertile soil, groundwater and pure, clean
air were being looted by a selfish government in the name of
input-intensive farming to ensure food security for the rest of
India even as teh Punjab farmers were in dire straits.
Now, using Nasa
satellite data, scientists have once again reiterated that
groundwater levels in northern India have been declining by as much
as 33cm (one foot) per year over the past decade.
Attributing the
loss almost entirely to human activity, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory said more than 108 cubic km of groundwater disappeared
from aquifers in Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Delhi between 2002
and 2008 — far more water than can be replenished by natural
processes.
‘‘This is enough
water to fill Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the
US,
three times,’’ it said.
The finding is
based on data from Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, a
pair of satellites that gauge, among other parameters, water stored
above or below the Earth’s surface.
A team of
hydrologists led by Matt Rodell of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight
Centre in Greenbelt, found that northern India’s underground water
supply is being pumped and consumed by human activities, such as
irrigating cropland, and is draining aquifers faster than natural
processes can replenish them. The results of this research were
published last Wednesday in ‘‘Nature.’’ The finding is based on data
from Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), a pair
of satellites that sense changes in Earth’s gravity field and
associated mass distribution, including water masses stored above or
below Earth’s surface.
‘‘Using Grace
satellite observations, we can observe and monitor water storage
changes in critical areas of the world without leaving our
desks,’’said study co-author Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the
University Of California, Irvine. The release says that data
provided by
India’s
ministry of water resources to the Nasafunded researchers suggested
that groundwater use across India was exceeding natural
replenishment.
19
August 2009
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