Save our drying Planet. Desalination works. All Israeli agriculture uses slightly saline water and the taste of their fruits and vegetables is enhanced.

In today’s Dispatches: Abrahm Lustgarten breaks down what you need to know about a new study on our rapidly drying planet

You may not feel it, but the ground beneath you may be sinking. In fact, the surface of California’s Central Valley is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was a century ago. Why is this happening? Because our planet is rapidly drying. 

As the climate warms, reservoirs are shrinking and glaciers are melting. 

Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica editor

As water gets more scarce, people are increasingly drilling into a largely ungoverned cache of fresh water underground. Our sinking ground is actually a foolproof sign of this supply disappearing. Think of a drying sponge: As groundwater is pumped out, the earth above collapses as the ground compresses. From Spain to China to here in the U.S., places around the world are seeing the effects.

Globally, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts become more extreme. But only a small amount of that water makes its way back into aquifers.

Instead, most of the water runs off the land into streams, eventually flowing from rivers into the ocean. Fresh water becomes salt water — and for that water to become usable again, it has to be treated or return to the land as rain.

It’s a vicious cycle: Pumping for groundwater is dehydrating our world at the very moment global temperatures are soaring past records. And yet, people take more water from underground due to need, when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst.

It’s not just about losing usable water, either. According to a new study published in the journal Science Advances based on 20+ years of NASA data, runoff from pumped groundwater, combined with moisture lost to evaporation and drought, is now one of the largest contributors of sea level rise.