The land is drying up—and that’s going to make farming a lot harder

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By Ki-Weon Seo et al, Science. 

Excerpt: When hydrologists Dongryeol Ryu and Ki-Weon Seo saw their results, they were stunned. “At first we thought, ‘That’s an error in the model,’” Ryu told The Associated Press. But their findings held up to scrutiny: The water stored on land has been disappearing . In the last two decades, more than 2600 Gt (billion metric tons) of water that used to be stored in soil, snow, and freshwaters has permanently moved into the ocean, they report in Science. ...“How climate warming affects Earth’s hydrological cycle—the continuous water movement between Earth and the atmosphere—is a key question for managing water resources and making weather predictions ,” writes hydrologist Luis Samaniego in an accompanying Perspective. To get a figure they could trust, Ryu, Seo, and their colleagues had to integrate three long-term, global datasets—ones that track water storage anomalies, sea level changes, and the movement of the Earth’s axis—with advanced climate and hydrological modeling. As Samaniego told AP, “It’s a fascinating puzzle of all disciplines that came at the right moment to verify something that was not possible before.” Based on these analyses, this massive and unappreciated loss of terrestrial water is likely due to climate change, and it may be irreversible. That means there will simply be less water for crops and thirsty animals—including us. 

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