Wednesday November 20, 2024
The Hill —
California’s San Joaquin Valley may be sinking nearly an inch per year due to the over-pumping of groundwater supplies, with resource extraction outpacing natural recharge, a new study has found.
This agriculture-rich region, located within the state’s Central Valley, has been sinking at record-breaking rates over the past two decades, according to the study, published on Tuesday in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment.
While researchers have known that subsidence — the technical term for sinking — has been affecting the region in recent years, the total amount of collapse had not been quantified.
“Our study is the first attempt to really quantify the full Valley-scale extent of subsidence over the last two decades,” senior study author Rosemary Knight, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, said in a statement.