It's So Dry in California, the Ground Is Literally Rising

The second year of severe drought in the Western United States has had some familiar consequences—fires, people buying up more hay for livestock that has no grass to eat, California restaurants will only bring you water if you request it, water bandits—and also some surprises. I'd say that Earth being so dry that it's literally rising up fits into the latter category.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego, researchers analyzed daily vertical positions collected by over 770 GPS stations over the last 11 years up to March 31 of this year, and found that the " water shortage is causing an "uplift" effect up to 15 millimeters (more than half an inch) in California's mountains and on average four millimeters (0.15 of an inch) across the west. "

It's so dry, the researchers estimate, that the normal, water stored on the surface and just below is gone and isn't being replaced. That an astounding 62 trillion gallons of water—enough to cover the whole Western United States with six inches of water—that's missing from the region. Without the weight keeping the ground in place, it's creeping upward toward a sky that won't rain, "like an uncoiled spring."

"The best analogy is putting a load on something, in this case made from water," Adrian Borsa, the study's lead author, told me over the phone. "It's the same from taking a rubber block and pushing on it, and when you lift the pressure it rebounds to its original position. One doesn't think of rock as being elastic, but over tens and hundreds of kilometers, the Earth is behaving elastically."

Borsa agreed that it's another unsettling—apocalyptic-sounding, even—effect of what may be the worst drought of the last half a millennium. For whatever its worth, it's also a new way to quantify what you're missing, which is great, because officials in California are trying really hard to fool themselves and their constituents into thinking that there is enough water to go around. There isn't.

But what the researchers' method allows is a way of knowing, if not where water is going, at least where it is missing from, Borsa said. Given that the networked GPSs are continuously collecting data, updates can be made with a lag of only a day, and as water resources get more and more limited, officials will be able to make more educated, if still undesirable, allocations.

"These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years," Dan Cayan, one of the study's co-authors, said via press release. "It also represents a powerful new way to track water resources over a very large landscape. We can home in on the Sierra Nevada mountains and critical California snowpack. These results demonstrate that this technique can be used to study changes in fresh water stocks in other regions around the world, if they have a network of GPS sensors."

So there's your silver lining in a cloudless sky, I guess. The other is that the lack of weight on the tectonic plate probably won't have any impact on earthquakes. Count your blessings, along with your remaining number of toilet flushes, California.